Even if you were to scope it just to software/SaaS product companies, there's minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts. Most don't post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say "This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect."
I run a small software company (two, technically). Products include Bingo Card Creator (http://www.bingocardcreator.com), Appointment Reminder (https://www.appointmentreminder.org), and occasional offerings for training for other software companies. I used to do consulting, too, but quit to focus on products.
I'd describe it as "modestly successful." It's the sole financial support for my wife and I. I'm the only full-time employee of the business (for a very quirky understanding of the words "full-time").
To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here.
That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There were a few hundred of these businesses represented there just among the regular users.
Most of them fly under the radar since, having products that provide a comfortable living with relatively low workload and no need to follow the latest hot technology trends, there's little reason your average Dot-Com-Thousandaire would ever stumble across a place like Hacker News.
I have two daughters, a niece and a nephew who might be moving from Spanish Immersion this fall to classes that are more rigorous in math, science, etc. Maybe I'm your target audience., maybe not. When I look at your website, the last blog post and tweet are from 2010. It makes things look dead. We're not homeschooling but http://homeschoolspanishacademy.com/ looks a lot more active. Also, "fair trade" often seems to translate as "expensive". Education seems more valuable than coffee (now that I'm on my second cup) but not having any sense of what pricing or structure is like is off-putting.
I think you're getting at one of the major dilemmas of running a one-man lifestyle business, the need for self-self discipline and motivation. Once things are automated and profitable, it's hard to find the motivation to keep innovating and eventually even just updating the product. In my case, I started a niche website in 2008 that soon became profitable. I thereafter started working on other projects that we more successful and I abandoned new developments on my original site, which is still profitable and producing about the same revenue as 2008. It's just not a large enough revenue source to continue working on it over my other projects.
Thanks for that. Hey, your email's not in your profile so I can't contact you directly, but if you'd like some free lessons, I'd love to have you, the kids, and the nieces as beta testers when we relaunch this spring.
Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested!
Pato11's stories are always inspiring and interesting to read. They were a huge motivator to start my own business, which I eventually did.
My first attempt in online business was GetSSL.me (https://getssl.me), which has been one-man shop most of the time. It was pretty simple to set up and run, but the biggest pain point was payments, because of my geographic location. Also marketing was a big issue, because I am not a marketer and had to learn everything on the go. To be honest it was more like trial and error approach.
As someone who has no idea about the SSL certificate business, how does your business work? Are you a reseller or do you make money on affiliate commissions? Just genuinely curious.
I am a reseller. GetSSL.me processes customer's order, requests a certificate from certificate authority (e.g. Comodo) and then they send the certificates to the customer.
The point of GetSSL.me is simplicity, price and support. If you were buying directly from Comodo, you would overpay a great amount, because reseller prices are much cheaper.
A lot of clutter has been removed from ordering process and you can get certificate in just a few minutes. Our support is friendly and helps with basically anything. Also a lot of people want to buy stuff from small, approachable businesses not from large corporations (e.g. GoDaddy).
Thanks patio11 and everyone else who has shared their story. I have been consulting for a few years and I plan on moving to a product based income. Built products in the past that have not been successful but hearing stories of others who have done it is motivation to keep trying.
It really requires a different mindset. For instance, while BCC makes sense, I can't imagine someone willing to pay for something like Appointment Reminder.
Suppose you run a professional services business where you have appointments. If people don't come to an appointment, you don't get money. You might pay an office manager to call people the morning of their appointment to remind them, so that they come into their appointment, so you get paid, right? Appointment Reminder is like an office manager who costs $200 a month, not $4,000 a month, is vastly more likely to successfully reach a customer, (virtually) never forgets to call, and does not consider boring, repetitive work to be an insult to her intelligence. For many of my customers, $200 is substantially less than they earn for a single appointment. (Think less "hair salon" and more "HVAC repair firm.")
I didn't mean appointment reminding in general - which is a good thing obviously. But I thought it was a long time solved problem by other means (and not necessary by office manager), be it some "enterprise" calendar or todo software which are integrated in most of the "enterprise"/business software products, etc...
Substantially all problems were solved by someone else first. That doesn't meaningfully inhibit you from solving them, too. Reasons why this could redound to your advantage include superior marketing, positioning, ability to attack different niches, lower cost structure, or the ability to survive off the crumbs the big guys don't care about.
It's totally worth it for me to have the CEO and head of product development talk to your office manager for 30 minutes then custom code an import script, to get you onboarded at $200 to $500 a month. The 800 LB Gorilla basically doesn't care about you below $1k a month.
The crucial detail is that some small HVAC company may not even be using an "enterprise/business software product"... In fact they're probably still keeping appointments on a sheet of paper.
I'm used to my dentist's office manager calling me every six months to remind me about my cleaning appointment. This last time, the call was automated and I instantly thought "hey, Appointment Reminder."
No, it turns out it was SmileReminder that the dentist uses. When I went in for the appointment I spoke to the office manager and the light in her eyes was obvious: "Now I don't have to spend hours calling everyone to remind them. I love it" No idea how much they pay for the service, but it's obviously worth it to them.
The medical field is one of the few where you feasibly can charge somebody who doesn't show up. Joanne the hairdresser down the street can't do that because she doesn't have all of your info down to your SSN and in fact she doesn't even have a collections department. Joanne's only recourse is to sit there twiddling her thumbs.
(And, BTW, I know several hairdressers who can go well over $200 for a single appointment.)
This is a pretty good comment in that it highlights the thought processes a lot of us go through. "I can't believe ..." or "I can't imagine ...". Believe it - there are tons of people out there willing to pay for various niche things that make their lives/businesses better. I've heard the same thing about one of my own projects, LiberWriter. There's open source software that kinda/sorta does what we do, but a lot of people just want to pay someone and make the problem go away. They don't want to know HTML or how NCX files work.
One of my colleagues commented earlier this week how impressed he was that his doctor's surgery sent him an SMS the day before the appointment, presumably driven by similar software.
A little bit off-topic, but I find it really interesting how some American webpages have a look and feel that is recognizable in a fraction of second. The website https://www.appointmentreminder.org/ is one of these, the second you enter, the second you know it is a US American page.
I run a small software company (two, technically). Products include Bingo Card Creator (http://www.bingocardcreator.com), Appointment Reminder (https://www.appointmentreminder.org), and occasional offerings for training for other software companies. I used to do consulting, too, but quit to focus on products.
I'd describe it as "modestly successful." It's the sole financial support for my wife and I. I'm the only full-time employee of the business (for a very quirky understanding of the words "full-time").