6 ms·

How I built a profitable bootstrapped side project

134 points by squiggy22 10y ago

shadeless 10y ago
Nice post. Can you clarify what you mean by proftiable, I'm assuming you're covering all costs and also paying yourself a decent salary? If so, congrats!
dempseye 10y ago
I hope he hosted the blog on its own server.
- yawgmoth 10y ago
  Unfortunately: https://getdeckchair.com/ https://getdeckchair.com/
bringking 10y ago
We hugged it to death
- nkg 10y ago
  HN's smothering love.
- wwwdonohue 10y ago
  I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say if you are relying on Product Hunt and Hacker News to send you all your traffic, you are still screwed. Heh.
venins 10y ago
503 error :(
seibelj 10y ago
I made my side project profitable quickly with a relentless focus on costs. The only fees I have are to Apple (dev license) and Delaware (for the LLC). Any service I wanted, I found an open source project and figured it out. I use the free tier at red hat open shift for hosting. If you let yourself get nickel and dimed by layering on SaaS products, you won't get anywhere. Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.
- quaffapint 10y ago
  But what about marketing? I assume you built an ios app - how did you market it among the herd of other apps?
  - seibelj 10y ago
    This is where business sense comes in. If you want to make money, your number one goal isn't to have fun and learn something. If you want to work on something fun, then build what you want to build but don't expect to make any money. If you want to make money, you need to build what the market needs. If your enjoyment and the market intersects, that's amazing, congratulations. However, this is unlikely. Once you accept that you are building a business, not a fun side project, you can start to think about how one lonely developer can make money. Preferably with spending as little money as possible to reduce risk. So to answer your question specifically - you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available. You will then immediately rank #1 or close to it, users will find you, and you will dominate without spending anything on marketing. How do you find a niche like this? I could keep writing, but really this needs to be in a long blog post to summarize all of the different pieces of the "successful one-man side software business" puzzle. It isn't impossible but it's much harder than you wish it would be. No one pays money for something that is easy.
    - zodiac 10y ago
      > you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available) How did you go about finding such markets?
      - seibelj 10y ago
        You want to build something that people find and continuously use. So even if you only get 5 new users a day, after a few years you have many thousands of users. What do people continuously use over years? Think tools, things that improve their productivity, things that help them. Monetization is pretty easy, as mobile ads pay well, and you can charge an SaaS subscription to remove ads, or consumables to get extra features. A free install is critical or no one will use it, charge on upsells within a free app. This is an inexact science. This is inherently a risky endeavor, with a high probability of failure. You need to be mentally prepared to fail. Good luck
JokoX 10y ago
Site down, read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getdeckchair.com/blog/how-i-built-a-profitable-bootstrapped-side-project/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getde...
- mohsinr 10y ago
  I hit F5 to refresh and it came back.
tuna-piano 10y ago
As of writing this, the main site is down, and the blog has missing image links. Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive. Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  Because not everything needs to be on amazon. Also, the blog at least is wordpress, not "static".
amelius 10y ago
I always wonder why it is so difficult to find good markets. Sometimes, it seems that coming up with a good product-idea is harder than building the actual product. Why does it work that way? Is this a flaw in how the free market works? Or is this just me - a developer - not knowing what other people need from me.
- extrapickles 10y ago
  The market itself doesn't know what it actually wants. Generally its a case of throwing ideas out there and watching what people nibble on, or stumbling across something that everyone has trouble with that you can easily solve.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
> If a soldier deployed in Iraq has the time to code... LOL. True. I was running night raids in 2004 and coding during the day on an app for a commercial real estate company. If anything it was a way to cope, but hey I found the time.
gwintrob 10y ago
Congrats on the cool SaaS business! Quick suggestion. The logo at the top of the blog should link back to your homepage, instead of the blog index.
javiercr 10y ago
Wow! We built an open source app for holiday management [1] (with a very close UI to this one) and I always thought it would make sense to sell it as a SaaS. I'm glad to see someone actually did it! [1] https://github.com/diacode/holidays https://github.com/diacode/holidays
andrei_says_ 10y ago
I'm trying to see how this particular service improves on having a shared outlook calendar where everyone reflects their vacation. Can someone point out the benefits? (This is not a criticism, I am trying to understand the service)
kentt 10y ago
Congratulation on shipping. I'd love to hear about what you mean by 'profitable'. I don't want to be too nosey, but people mean all sorts of things from covering your hosting with a bit of beer money, to quitting your job and working an hour per week.
yitchelle 10y ago
I noticed that he put the following at the bottom of his landing page. There is on link to see the actual reviews. "Rated 4.2/5 based on 144 reviews" Anyone has any metric that something like this helps?

134 points by squiggy22 10y ago

Nice post. Can you clarify what you mean by proftiable, I'm assuming you're covering all costs and also paying yourself a decent salary? If so, congrats!

dempseye 10y ago

I hope he hosted the blog on its own server.

yawgmoth 10y ago
Unfortunately: https://getdeckchair.com/ https://getdeckchair.com/

bringking 10y ago

We hugged it to death

nkg 10y ago
HN's smothering love.
wwwdonohue 10y ago
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say if you are relying on Product Hunt and Hacker News to send you all your traffic, you are still screwed. Heh.

venins 10y ago

503 error :(

seibelj 10y ago

I made my side project profitable quickly with a relentless focus on costs. The only fees I have are to Apple (dev license) and Delaware (for the LLC). Any service I wanted, I found an open source project and figured it out. I use the free tier at red hat open shift for hosting. If you let yourself get nickel and dimed by layering on SaaS products, you won't get anywhere. Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.

quaffapint 10y ago
But what about marketing? I assume you built an ios app - how did you market it among the herd of other apps?
- seibelj 10y ago
  This is where business sense comes in. If you want to make money, your number one goal isn't to have fun and learn something. If you want to work on something fun, then build what you want to build but don't expect to make any money. If you want to make money, you need to build what the market needs. If your enjoyment and the market intersects, that's amazing, congratulations. However, this is unlikely. Once you accept that you are building a business, not a fun side project, you can start to think about how one lonely developer can make money. Preferably with spending as little money as possible to reduce risk. So to answer your question specifically - you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available. You will then immediately rank #1 or close to it, users will find you, and you will dominate without spending anything on marketing. How do you find a niche like this? I could keep writing, but really this needs to be in a long blog post to summarize all of the different pieces of the "successful one-man side software business" puzzle. It isn't impossible but it's much harder than you wish it would be. No one pays money for something that is easy.
  - zodiac 10y ago
    > you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available) How did you go about finding such markets?
    - seibelj 10y ago
      You want to build something that people find and continuously use. So even if you only get 5 new users a day, after a few years you have many thousands of users. What do people continuously use over years? Think tools, things that improve their productivity, things that help them. Monetization is pretty easy, as mobile ads pay well, and you can charge an SaaS subscription to remove ads, or consumables to get extra features. A free install is critical or no one will use it, charge on upsells within a free app. This is an inexact science. This is inherently a risky endeavor, with a high probability of failure. You need to be mentally prepared to fail. Good luck

JokoX 10y ago

Site down, read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getdeckchair.com/blog/how-i-built-a-profitable-bootstrapped-side-project/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getde...

mohsinr 10y ago
I hit F5 to refresh and it came back.

tuna-piano 10y ago

As of writing this, the main site is down, and the blog has missing image links. Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive. Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.

yoo1I 10y ago
Because not everything needs to be on amazon. Also, the blog at least is wordpress, not "static".

amelius 10y ago

I always wonder why it is so difficult to find good markets. Sometimes, it seems that coming up with a good product-idea is harder than building the actual product. Why does it work that way? Is this a flaw in how the free market works? Or is this just me - a developer - not knowing what other people need from me.

extrapickles 10y ago
The market itself doesn't know what it actually wants. Generally its a case of throwing ideas out there and watching what people nibble on, or stumbling across something that everyone has trouble with that you can easily solve.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

> If a soldier deployed in Iraq has the time to code... LOL. True. I was running night raids in 2004 and coding during the day on an app for a commercial real estate company. If anything it was a way to cope, but hey I found the time.

gwintrob 10y ago

Congrats on the cool SaaS business! Quick suggestion. The logo at the top of the blog should link back to your homepage, instead of the blog index.

javiercr 10y ago

Wow! We built an open source app for holiday management [1] (with a very close UI to this one) and I always thought it would make sense to sell it as a SaaS. I'm glad to see someone actually did it! [1] https://github.com/diacode/holidays https://github.com/diacode/holidays

andrei_says_ 10y ago

I'm trying to see how this particular service improves on having a shared outlook calendar where everyone reflects their vacation. Can someone point out the benefits? (This is not a criticism, I am trying to understand the service)

kentt 10y ago

Congratulation on shipping. I'd love to hear about what you mean by 'profitable'. I don't want to be too nosey, but people mean all sorts of things from covering your hosting with a bit of beer money, to quitting your job and working an hour per week.

yitchelle 10y ago

I noticed that he put the following at the bottom of his landing page. There is on link to see the actual reviews. "Rated 4.2/5 based on 144 reviews" Anyone has any metric that something like this helps?