Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

[jonasft]

This question was asked 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072) by gajus, and I wonder what has happened since!

> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?

> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.

[smcn]

I run feetr.io. It's an algorithm which tracks momentum for stocks and uses that to find which stocks have the best chance of increasing in price that day, then sends those out to people on a daily basis. I'm in the process of adding/refining more features though, such as graphs (example here: https://twitter.com/0xsmcn/status/1632459921546420225).

Originally the algorithm was just for myself as I felt like I could've got involved in GME earlier if I was paying attention. I didn't want to actually pay attention though, I'd much rather just outsource that to a computer. It ended up doing well enough that I could quit my job and invest full time but then the selfishness of that hit me and I realised that I could let others use it for a small fee, as I wouldn't be able to use it anymore for ethical/legal reasons.

The best thing about the whole situation is that I get to use the tools that I want to use without having to justify it to a committee. Every single line of it is in Common Lisp. I was worried that I'd grow bored of Lisp when switching to it full time but that hasn't been the case at all. In fact, I love it more now than I did as a hobbiest. The coolest thing (to me) is that I maintain a slynk connection to it all day and query the current state then use that for Twitter content[0].

0: https://twitter.com/0xsmcn/status/1633042849330520066