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It's absolutely a very active investment from when I started it, to now. But very soon I will be stepping away, and letting it run for potentially a year, if n
by rubicon33 8y ago
It's absolutely a very active investment from when I started it, to now. But very soon I will be stepping away, and letting it run for potentially a year, if not longer, generating income and clients without any (minimal, 3h/week) effort.
I have worked on this business for the last 2.5 years, as a side project. In that time I have switched jobs (9-5) and learned 2 new programming languages, in completely different domains. It's meant a lot of evenings, and weekends, that I would have otherwise been doing something else, I ended up working on this business. So no, it didn't just magically create itself and start generating income. There was a very real time investment that has had to happen.
All in all, it's hard to put a total hourly estimate on it. I think the easiest way to think about it is like this:
If I could work on this full time, I would estimate it would take me 8 months of solid, full time work (50 hour weeks) to get where I am now (to a point where it's generating a healthy income, and I can step away from it because it's feature rich enough to support the client base). Possibly faster since, all the context switching I've been doing with my day job really does slow me down.
I am NOT saying that the income is enough to survive on. I'm saying after roughly 8 months of solid 50 hour weeks is how long it would take to create a product that has enough value that it can generate an income that matches it's recurring costs (hosting costs mostly). That's the "break even" point past which everything else is just profit.
I'm sure there are people on HN who have built something much faster, and made much more. This is just my experience.
By no means does it mean I will be making enough this year to quit my day job. My hope is that by the end of the year, I should be generating about $300-500 a month in pure, after expense, profit. I'll take that, and put it in an index fund.