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Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:06PM (#25615978)
Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :)

It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance.

The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

[0] https://divjoy.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by paledot on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:32AM (#25619765)
I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the decision to have the first steps of the project customization process not require registration let alone payment. It makes for a better sales pitch than a hundred landing pages.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:38AM (#25619781)
Thanks, that's great to hear! I'm not a fan of having to signup/pay to see how an app works either. Figured a tech audience would appreciate that.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by sawirricardo on Sunday January 03, 2021 @04:48AM (#25620772)
Hi, I wonder what payment stack did you use? Is it only PayPal or do you use other, too? I'm thinking of integrating with PayPal API, too, but really didn't know the steps needed (not really friendly compared with Stripe)
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:21PM (#25623145)
For Divjoy I'm using Stripe and PayPal (one-time payments). In terms of the code I give customers, I'm just doing Stripe subscription billing via the hosted Stripe Checkout page.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by oceanghost on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:51PM (#25616399)
I've been looking for something like this for ages. I have a small project I need to do and I'm not really a web developer. Muddling through setting all this stuff up for the first time would be far more work than the actual website.

How hard would it be for me to integrate with Authorize.net?

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @04:13PM (#25616591)
I'd say that if you're interesting in learning to code then Divjoy may work for you. I try not to over sell it to non-devs, but I do have a fair amount of customers who are hacking at Divjoy projects while learning to code and are very happy with that.

Since all the boilerplate works out of the box you can skip over a bunch of stuff (like understanding how auth works under the hood), but generally there's some custom logic you need to write and you'll want to pickup some JS/React to do that.

Any integration with Authorize.net would be totally done by you. You could export a codebase with Stripe payments so that you can at least see how payments logic ties in with UI.. but you'd need to then strip that out and replace with your own custom Authorize integration.

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by oceanghost on Saturday January 02, 2021 @04:17PM (#25616625)
Oh, I'm a SW engineer. I just mostly worked in process control and consumer electronics. I've done a few websites.

Thank you for the reply. :-)

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @04:22PM (#25616661)
Gotcha! Then it shouldn't be too hard to integrate Authorize. UI is mostly decoupled from payment logic. Always happy to hop on a call if you need some help understanding anything in the codebase.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by oceanghost on Monday January 04, 2021 @01:30AM (#25628399)
As an addendum... Purchased a copy of your thing, looking forward to exploring it. I'm reasonably clever and I don't expect I'd need any help, but I super appreciate the offer.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Monday January 04, 2021 @09:28AM (#25631716)
Thanks for buying! Once you give it a try I’d love to hear any feedback you have or requests for new components/integrations.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by hamza__nouali on Saturday January 02, 2021 @05:29PM (#25617203)
I also suggest using frontendor.com, it'll help you build a beautiful HTML interface for your website by copy-paste.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by oceanghost on Sunday January 03, 2021 @03:10AM (#25620396)
Thank you kindly.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by ryan-allen on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:55AM (#25619847)
> There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

This is absolutely true, but companies also, or even devs working in companies will buy out of their own pocket to improve their productivity without having to ask the Accounts department, I know I have!

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:33PM (#25623252)
That's a really good point! I may have a good number of those customers and not be aware of it. I need to do a better job of asking people what they're using Divjoy for.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by codesternews on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:38PM (#25616277)
Its amazing! thanks for sharing. Can you please tell from where you are getting the users? How you got your first users and what you are doing for marketing?

Thanks a lot.

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @03:56PM (#25616441)
My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you.

That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.

Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback.

A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.

I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there.

Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me.

[0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4

[3] https://usehooks.com

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by daemon001 on Saturday January 02, 2021 @05:07PM (#25617007)
How do you get visitors to the React Hook blog when you're not investing in SEO. Really curious.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @05:35PM (#25617253)
The blog ranks really well without any special effort, but for Divjoy I haven't put in the work of setting up extra landing pages to rank for different topics. For example, I'd like to have a page like divjoy.com/nextjs+stripe that emphasizes that stack combination.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by jonplackett on Saturday January 02, 2021 @04:02PM (#25616492)
Would be cool if you could add Plausible Analytics!
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Saturday January 02, 2021 @04:07PM (#25616538)
I've been meaning to look into that. At the moment I'm using this library as the analytics abstraction: https://getanalytics.io. I'll see if the Plausible team wants to create a plugin or do that myself when I have time.
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by jonplackett on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:49PM (#25623384)
I’ve been chatting to Marko via email and they seem very approachable!
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:58PM (#25623478)
Looks like they don't have time, but there's an open issue here: https://github.com/DavidWells/analytics/issues/96. I probably won't have time for awhile.. but on the off-chance you're interested in tackling it, I'd happily hook you up with a free Divjoy account in return ;)
Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by hurflmurfl on Sunday January 03, 2021 @05:17AM (#25620875)
Hi, wanted to let you know that when I click on "see pricing" on the banner in the top of the page, nothing happens. There's no way to find pricing at all, since there's no link at the bottom of the page either.

I'm using Firefox 68.11 for Android.

Re:Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? by makeee on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:27PM (#25623201)
Thanks for letting me know! If you scroll down below the "Choose your template" section do you see a pricing section with purple background? I'm wondering if the scroll to logic is broken or if that section is just not being displayed. If you wouldn't mind shooting an email to [email protected] I'd love to follow-up about this.