4 ms·

Ask HN: How would you spend $3000 a month for a year to create income?

32 points by petervandijck 16y ago

I you had 3000 US$ a month to spend, for a year, how would you plan that money if you wanted to create a few (2, 3) online apps or something to generate a reliable income stream, generating, say, 5000$/m? Assume I can do some programming myself, but not all. Same with other tasks. Another way to ask this: which parts of creating apps is it most efficient to spend money on. For example: a great visual design can be expensive, but you only have to (mostly) pay for it once. A few hours of a great (expensive) programmer can be better than a full time mediocre one. Marketing expenses should be x% of the budget. What types of apps would you focus on? And so on. All advice welcome!

dangrossman 16y ago
These "What would you do with $x to make $y" questions come up all the time -- I'm sure you could find them if you search. You'll find lots of ways to spend money getting a design at some site or hiring a freelancer at some other site, throwing some at AdWords to test ideas, etc. More important than any of that is whether you can self-motivate yourself to identify and test good ideas, build them into products, and follow through on them long enough to see if they'll gain any traction. It's extremely unlikely you'll create 2-3 web applications that generate $5000/month in the span of a single year if you're leading them yourself. You might be able to hire people to build out 2-3 things, but you won't be devoted enough to any of them to aggressively find your initial customers and develop the application until it's something they love enough to start spreading the word.
- petervandijck 16y ago
  Fair enough :) But my question is more about: if you have some money to spend, and assuming that is at least somewhat helpful, which areas should you spend it on? For example, you could just spend everything on Google ads to get traffic to your site. Or you could spend it on a great copywriter. Or you could spend it on quitting your day job.
  - dangrossman 16y ago
    I am having a hard time seeing how that type of generic advice would be helpful. You spend it on the things that would help you most on your specific project at a specific point in time. If you're a great copy writer, having me tell you to hire a copy writer isn't useful.
    - petervandijck 16y ago
      You're most likely right and it's a useless question. I was struggling with that question today though, that's why I posted it here, the HN community often does come up with good answers to useless questions. Edit: saw you added some advice to your original comment. Actually good advice :)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
invalidOrTaken 16y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html
alain94040 16y ago
Think outside the box: invest $5K in 7 startups. How you pick the 7 is of course the tricky part, but much less work than actually being the one coding, designing and selling stuff.
- petervandijck 16y ago
  Good one. It's definitely less work, but you also have less say in the possible success rate, right?
  - csouth 16y ago
    Less say but if you think about it, are the chances higher that 1 of say 7 startups will succeed (when you have the choice of being highly selective when choosing them) or that 1 of your 2 - 3 starts with succeed to the point of bringing in 5000 a month? I think at this point it makes more sense.
    - petervandijck 16y ago
      Let's say one in three succeeds. Then 1 of mine will succeed, and 2 of the 6 investments. But mine are owned by me, the investments are only owned in a small part by me. Still sounds like a better idea to create my own.
      - wccrawford 16y ago
        I think the assumption is that your startup is controlled by you, but other startups are potentially controlled by people prone to failure. The odds for your own startup -should- be better than others. Of course, if you're prone to failure, the reverse is true... But if you know you're prone to failure, why would you try something as risky as a startup in the first place?
- webwright 16y ago
  The other tricky part is that any startup with more than a few brain cells won't take investment from someone who isn't an accredited investor. If the original poster isn't a millionaire (outside of real estate), then it becomes pretty awkward to invest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor
TomOfTTB 16y ago
As someone who controls the resources for a non-profit I'm often finding ways to stretch money. As such I'd offer this advice... 1. College contests are a gold mine. Rather than pay a designer $1,000 to design your app post up flyers in the design department of your local college and offer a $300 prize for the best design. It's a great way to save money and you can often tap into $5,000 worth of talent from the students. 2. Don't use sites like scriptlance unless you're prepared to spec the project out very specifically. NEVER, EVER use them to do something you can't do yourself. In my experience sites for cheap labor will blow up in your face about 90% of the time so buyer beware (and if you do happen to find a quality person keep in contact with them outside the site) 3. Advertising really doesn't work that well when you're trying to get off the ground. There's just too much out there at this point. It's better to spend your time and effort contacting influential people. In my experience most people won't pay attention to advertising unless they've at least heard the name of the product through other means. 4. I can't say enough good things about Amazon's Web Services. If you have a lot of money there might be better options but for someone starting out with very little EC2 and S3 are great. As for the programming itself the only advice I can offer is to do as much as you can by yourself. $3,000 a month really isn't all that much in the long term so time is the only resource you have in abundance. Most apps are relatively simple programming tasks that only get complicated when they have to scale. So even with rudimentary skills you should be able to do 80% of the work yourself. Don't assume you have the skills now but the few hundred you spend on javascript and usability books could save you thousands if you put the effort into it.
- petercooper 16y ago
  If you have a lot of money there might be better options but for someone starting out with very little EC2 and S3 are great. I'm a fan of AWS but I'd argue it's only viable if you have more money or very specific requirements. You can get a reliable VPS or even dedicated server for less than Amazon would charge and get significantly more performance and included bandwidth. Even a 1GB VPS at $40 or so a month (from, say, a Linode or Webbynode) can reliably cope with a significant amount of traffic to a non-crazy webapp. AWS has serious pros for certain use cases but with the learning curve, the necessity to tie together so many pieces to get something reliable, and the lackluster performance on the cheaper instances, I couldn't recommend EC2 to anyone starting out or on a budget (assuming they want to run something 24/7 - EC2 is great on a budget just for short term testing).
Someone 16y ago
Let's assume your 'some time' costs $5,000 a month. That would make that one year cost around $100,000. Interest on that sum would be say $5000 a year. So, your 'reliable input stream, say $5000/m' would recover that $100,000 in two years. From that, I conclude that you do not really need that $3000 a month to do this. The 'only' thing you need is this bright idea. If I had that idea, I wouldn't tell you about it; I would try and implement it myself.
grandalf 16y ago
1) create the concept in your mind first. This costs $0. Try to think through it deeply enough that you really understand what challenges the designer will be up against. 2) Figure out what the simplest thing you can launch that is still cool is. $0 3) Have a designer do the design and iterate a few times if necessary. This will cost a bit. 4) Build it. 5) Advertise it. I like stumbleupon a lot for this b/c you can get a lot of people to at least see the first page of the app and maybe use it a bit. If you get a lot of "thumbs up" ratings, your cost per display goes way down b/c they serve it free some of the time. Focus on apps that solve a specific problem that you or someone you know has.
- petercooper 16y ago
  That's one common approach (and a good step-by-step for it) but I'd argue in favor of the opposite: Find a need or something that a market is ready to pay for and build that. This approach gives you a more certain market to sell to as well as people (potential customers) ready to give you feature and design ideas.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    I don't disagree. I think that people generally pay to have a problem solved for them.
joeld42 16y ago
I would try to generate many small, focused apps, try to make them better than average but not obsess about perfection. I would aim for one app every 2 months. You can't predict which ideas are going to take off, so if you generate a lot you have better chances, but be honest and self-critical and don't make shovelware. You really can "feel it" when the market responds to a good idea, if/when that happens then shift gears and put most of your energy behind that one (for a while). That's my iOS game/app strategy anyways. I'm a little new to this myself, and it hasn't "taken off" yet, and I've got a lot of work ahead of me, but that seems like what has worked best from watching successful peers.
- petervandijck 16y ago
  That's roughly what I'm thinking as well..
gallerytungsten 16y ago
As others have kind of hinted, you seem to have the cart before the horse. What are you passionate about? What problem is constantly bothering you? Once you find the "better mousetrap" (at least, conceptually) then the question is, how can you build it for $3k/month and make $5k/month.
petervandijck 16y ago
Thanks everyone for the feedback!
ryanteo 16y ago
Hey Peter, You could take a look at FreeTheApps.com. http://mixergy.com/free-apps-interview/ http://mixergy.com/free-apps-interview/ There's an in-depth mixergy interview on how 2 guys outsourced iPhone app development on Elance, often under $3k and they're doing about $80k in monthly revenue. Pretty interesting for your budget =) Maybe you could email them direct, they seem pretty friendly. They also have an e-book called "How to Make Profitable iPhone apps with No programming experience".
JustinD 16y ago
Guess it depends what your skill set is. I mean, any major city and given your average bloke, the answer is dead simple. Drugs. First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women. And income.