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Ask HN: Anyone on HN running a web startup with 50K+ a year net profit?
- code 16y agoWas previously but sold the last startup. Currently working on another startup but haven't launched yet.
- wyday 16y agoYes, quite a bit more than 50K/year, but we're only a web startup in the sense that we sell all our products via the web. Our 2 main products are an updater suite for Windows apps (http://wyday.com/wybuild/ http://wyday.com/wybuild/ ) and licensing & online activation for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X apps (http://wyday.com/limelm/ http://wyday.com/limelm/ ). In short, we make development tools.
- foobarbazetc 16y agoWoo, wyBuild! :)
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- robflynn 16y agoCompletely unrelated to the thread, but this is exactly what I've been looking for.
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- rt10k 16y agoNope. I'm broke. Thanks for the reminder.
- jarin 16y agoPlease post this thread again in a few months. Fingers crossed!
- dtby 16y agoThe answer is obviously and indisputely, "Yes." So it would be better to frame your question in a way which got the results in which you are actually interested. Do you want to know which niches are being served by HN users? Ask. Do you want to know how to use SEO to turn your 10k net profit business into a 50k net profit business? Ask. Do you want to know if the majority of HN is starving wanna-bes? Ask. This question in an exceptionally poor proxy for your real question.
- riskish 16y agoI'd like to edit my Q now, but I can't. :)
- buro9 16y agoWell how about you ask it again in a reply and we all upvote it so that everyone sees it?
- riskish 16y agoThe reason I asked is I asked a similar question a while ago, regarding "HN founders taking the leap from full-time to startup" and a lot of great responses about projects were posted, so I was hoping for a little inspiration for the most part and to see what new projects people are working on / succeeding with.
- buro9 16y agoWell I'm currently full-time and I have had a hobby horse company slowly building up for the past year. It currently makes about £36k GBP in profit per annum, which means it's close to the point that with a tight belt I could jump. The hardest thing for me isn't spotting or monetising the opportunity, but in balancing everything for a reasonable quality of life without burning myself out. That and discovering and handling the minefield that is running your own company and figuring our the finances, taxing, invoicing and asset management. My company does community websites, forums and the like. I chose to start with areas I'm most interested in, but have avoided areas where there isn't an after-sales market. I aim making the lions-share of the revenue from affiliate schemes such as the eBay Partner Network, Amazon, and then Affiliate Window has a lot of companies running schemes specific to the communities I'm running. I don't push the affiliates... I just aim to build the communities up to the point that enough conversation produces the links to used or new items that then produces revenue. Once a community is successful, I look for another. What I've discovered is that revenue earnings relate to purchase price of items, and that you can make significant money in high-value items sold through eBay. I would now recommend people look at cars, motor-homes, boats, etc sold through eBay, and then build affiliate based communities around those. Which means building communities who love and use those things, and affiliate earnings is a natural by-product of letting those people communicate. There is a lot of money in affiliates with a low entry barrier so long as you can attract the people who will click on the links, and if you happen to have also attracted people who would post the links (you can auto-rewrite server-side to include the affiliate element) then you have a winner. So that's what I do in my spare time (30 minutes per day), and it's wildly successful given the effort invested (I'm using off-the-shelf forum software). I could even make this my job full-time, except I personally need more stimulus than just running a farm of community forums. Also... beware the politics. If you can stick to a same-sex topic where people are unlikely to sleep with each other, you'll get a lot less politics.
- tjic 16y agoMy two startups, SmartFlix.com and HeavyInk.com, both clear this hurdle.
- chopsueyar 16y agoWhat kind of physical infrastructure to you have to handle all those physical goods (comic books and DVDs)? PS, I really like SmartFlix.com. What a great concept!
- ActVen 16y agoSmartFlix is great. We subscribe and I'm happy to run into one of the creators here. Congrats.
- madaxe 16y agoYes, although we're now almost five, so not so much of a startup any more - although we are entirely self-funded (not through a lack of investment offers, just that we don't want/need it). Profits each year were $60k, 100, 30 (heavy re-investment), 180, and this year's on track to be our first million dollar year.
- rubeng 16y agoDefinitely more than 50k/year net and growing at a nice pace. I'm a single founder, worked on my SaaS product nights and weekends, and been live almost a year and a half. Also, just quit my day job a couple of weeks ago so I can do what I love full time. My product: http://www.bidsketch.com http://www.bidsketch.com
- sghael 16y agowow, extremely slick. Are you using any specific UI/design framework to tools to create such a polished look/feel? Or totally coded from scratch?
- rubeng 16y agoThanks! Everything from scratch; no UI/design framework used.
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- blacksmythe 16y agoThat is a nice product that fits in the category of something I had no idea I needed until I saw it.
- rubeng 16y agoThanks; this is one of the challenges I run into with marketing and trying to find traffic sources. I've had good success with word of mouth, integrations and giving away free templates for users feeling the type of pain my product solves.
- DHuang 16y agoGreat looking site. Very clean design and user friendly.
- iconfinder 16y agoI am.
- cheae 16y agoStarted two years ago 19K first year. Still have few more months in the second year,already passed the 50K+ mark.
- kariatx 16y agoYes, since 2002 :-)
- savoy11 16y agoYes, we make development tools for .NET and PHP. Two of us, started an year ago and are on track to make $300K in revenue for this year (but we have almost no expenses, other than small hosting plan). We had a fairly popular open source product before that, though, and we created commercial tools on top if it.
- mdink 16y agoI would also like to add - how many of you started with 0 profit when you went full time doing it?
- dangrossman 16y agoI was 19 and in my first year of college when I finished my last contract programming job and started working for myself. I launched my first product with a $10 domain name and $17 web template for the site design. It made well over 50K in net profit its first year. I paid my way through college without debt, and run several profitable web apps now. There are others on HN with similar stories. I recommend checking out the profiles of commentors. A lot of people have their sites in their bios so you can see what they've built.
- cullenking 16y agoBy sometime next month we will break $50k for this year alone. We have some more work to do on two B2B license contracts to get our next couple of installment payments. We should be launching our B2C pay product by next month as well. So far, customers have donated $15k in the last year, so we expect to clear minimum 4x that much this year in recurring subscriptions. The site in question (http://ridewithgps.com http://ridewithgps.com) is a niche site for cyclists, or anyone who wants a way to track their workouts using GPS. Garmin has a large line of fitness related GPS computers with wireless heartrate, pedal speed and instantaneous power output sensors, so the log files are fun to play with :) It took three years of work, but I now have a real (small!) regular salary...
- saucerful 16y agoHow do you compete with MapMyRun? Everyone I know uses that...
- cullenking 16y agoWe don't suck as much. Have you ever used their sites? It's like someone loaded up every bad fad diet ad into a shotgun and pointed it at your face. We get several messages a day from people along these lines - here is an example from yesterday I just pulled from our suggestions/comment submission system: "I love your site. After spending frustrating hours with Map My Ride, your site is so easy. And, even better is the Cue Sheet. Thank you."
- podman 16y agoFor those of you who have reached this milestone: 1) What type of business model did you use? (SaaS, ecommerce, etc.) 2) How long did it take to get there after launching? 3) What was the biggest hurdle you faced in getting there? 4) How many people were working with you?
- podman 16y agoAlthough I'm not quite at that point yet (very close)... 1) SaaS w/ monthly subscription 2) I'm about 8 months in and monthly revenue has finally ramped up to a point where, if I were to make this much each month, profits would be well over $50k 3) The biggest hurdle has been customer acquisition. The first chunk of customers I got through a deal when starting the company. The rest have been a struggle. Managing marketing efforts while still hacking all day is a lot of work. I also have no real internet marketing experience. One other hurdle has been dealing with a deadbeat co-founder. 4) I started with one co-founder but he has since gotten a job and I have quit mine. I'm working 100% full time on the startup and he hasn't contributed more than an hour in the past 4 or 5 months, so it's pretty much just me.
- tereno 16y agoHow did you figure out your pricing scheme and did you suspect people might need and pay for this before actually building it?
- podman 16y agoI got kind of lucky here because my company grew out of the failure of my old employer. They basically ran out of money and sold themselves to a very large company. That company didn't want a subset of the users, so we offered to purchase them. I just used the same pricing scheme as my old employer did to make the transition for the old users as palatable as possible to increase the amount of people that stayed on through the migration from my old company to my new company. It worked fairly well as close to 80% stayed on.
- callmeed 16y agoIt depends on when a startup stops being a startup.
- justinchen 16y agoYes, including after pay + benefits for 2 FT founders (+ ~4 contractors). Started FT without profit or product 5 years ago. Bootstrapped. 1st hit profitability ~2 years after starting. Advertising biz model. Biggest hurdle was cold-starting growth with limited marketing budget. I think that hits most of the questions I've seen in the thread.
- cheald 16y agoYup. Single man hobby project turned profitable product. Niche SaaS, took about 10 months to clear the 50k hurdle, but I've done almost no marketing for it either.
- bigohms 16y agoNiche SaaS & service hybrid product for a finance niche cleared that in 45 days. Have done slight pivots to retain a sustainable and healthy growth clip.
- Retailslave 16y agoNo, I wish someone would help me learn how to do all this stuff. I'm not sure where I could begin with even doing a "web startup" I'd need a lot of programming knowledge and I was not blessed with a computer when I grew up like a lot of you.
- haploid 16y agoWell, the answer is obviously "yes". I'm not sure what kind of elaboration you're looking for, here. To be fair, though, we're a few too many years in to really be called a startup any longer.