(Un)successfull one-person business is https://botproxy.net (rotating proxy) Started couple of months ago as I needed such a service for my other project and I thought why not to make it as Saas. Now I have a dozen of active subscriptions and balancing around 0 in monthly profit while having to do a lot of work to keep things going. If I knew in advance all the stuff I know now would never start anything like this but now I feel sorry for the effort spent to just quit. literally everything went not as expected. So I warned you.
Care to elaborate on what exactly you didn't anticipate? Unsustainable unit economics? I guess bootstrapping anything alone is a stressful to get the wheels rolling. What keeps you from a) shutting down or b) experimenting with prices etc.?
Every part of the project went not as planned. Most bright example is billing. I was initially implemented everything using PayPal preauthorized payments API and only going live it appeared that this API only available to merchants with personal account manager, and to get one you need to already accepting more than 2500$/mo in paypal. So I have to re-implement it. And not only billing as subscription management also depends on billing. Then getting many IP addresses for outgoing proxies appeared to be much more problematic than I was expecting.
Answering the second part of the question. I use it for my other project where I need to pull data from many websites on a daily basis. And I use it in my browser to change IP location and avoid country level blocks. I hope that eventually I can convert it into more or less profitable project, but the main lesson I learned from this is that when something looks simple it doesn't mean it simple in reality.
I'm a web developer and I love python because it provides me with the fastest and shortest way from an idea to its implementation. In most cases prototype works forever in production.
Rich standard library and clear version support lifecycle are also very important.
I developed with many other languages including java, с++ and Haskell and python is my choice among all.
I agree (Django is life), but I find myself wanting the new optional typing and type checker to mature so I can add them to my set of linters. I'm tired of 1) not knowing whether I made a mistake and passed something of the wrong type and 2) not being able to see at a glance what types each function is supposed to accept and return.
I'm not sure, I haven't managed to write an app that large yet. I'm also not sure how you can outgrow Django, since you can always split off parts of your codebase, or not use the parts of Django you don't need.
I've recently written a flask application too, and I found myself having to reinvent the wheel at every step, and I cursed a lot. Django's ecosystem, both in libraries and in sheer community documentation, is hard to replicate.
Crawl the whole website. Check SEO issues, spelling, server errors including broken links and missing resourses and so on
https://seocharger.com
I'm one of the founders. Welcome :)
We (two python developers) have started a SaaS SEO checker service [1] in February 2017 (took 4 month to develop from 0) and already have paying customers on our business plan. I completely agree with the definition of successful business when you have ability to do what you want when you want. I already have a couple of other websites generating revenue from advertising and all this allowed me to quit daily job 2 years ago. So definitely there are a lot of examples of successful single- (two-) person businesses out there.
Thank you :) Actually the only source of traffic to our website is organic search and our first clients came from google. We do not consider cold messaging as this is the same as spam. Frankly speaking we expected more traffic and clients but it turned out that SEO niche is very crowded though our solution is quite different from all others. We are developers and are not very good at marketing. Tried adwords but with no luck. So the website is now left on autopilot and with the hope to organic growth.
