This question was asked 3 years ago (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535) by mdoliwa, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays.
> 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.
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...