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Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?
- DrJ 15y agoit's so simpo' why not everyone does it? and I mean it in the most sarcastic way.
- aristidb 15y agoBecause $1000 a month is less than a developer's salary?
- jodrellblank 15y agoNeed I point out that (your salary + $1000/month) > your salary?
- 3dFlatLander 15y agoQuestions like this, "what should I build", and "which language should I use", and etc make me cringe when I read them. Asking questions is awesome, but these just don't seem to be productive. His question isn't related to building a web app at all, he just wants to know if he built that app, could it make $1k+ per month. Plus, any answer(s) given will likely just fuel his planning, and not execution.
- neoveller 15y agoAgree whole-heartedly. Entreporn at its most annoying levels.
- tseabrooks 15y agoIn his defense I know lots of developers doing small webapps they intend to keep on life support and not actively work at growing in an attempt to hit their magic mark for what their monthly budget / expenses are. This may not be the attitude of the majority of HNers but lots of people would be happy with a way to make 2500$ a month for themselves... Just enough to maintain a modest quality of life in the midwest.
- MichaelApproved 15y agoIt can't be that easy otherwise everyone would build 10 or 20 of them and retire.
- iconfinder 15y agoGood point. Although I think there a big difference between building 1 and building 20. A service that earns $1000 will probably not run by it self.
- csomar 15y agoIf it takes you one year to get that product to $1K/month, then you'll need 20 years... But you have to consider that in 20 years, some of your apps will die and also managing 20 apps and customers is a headache.
- FrojoS 15y agoSorry, but that is nonsense. Most people don't even try to think about it. Others, like the poster don't dare to make the step yet and ask. And of course not everyone can retire at the same time as longs as we don't have a more advanced economy ;-)
- leon_ 15y agothe building not so. the marketing and pr needed to reach that goal on the other hand is a little more work :)
- jmitcheson 15y agoYes, yes; it's very easy! Now, just step this way and let me show you my excellent range of pick axes and mining equipment ;)
- nicpottier 15y agoI have an eBook for sale for $39.00 that will show you how in ten easy steps, it includes: 1) how to market yourself and use the power of social networking to do the marketing for you 2) how to unlock the power of referrals 3) how you can grow from making $1000 a month, to over $10,000 a month in three more months of work. "I never thought I could own my own business, but it is just so easy" - happy customer </satire>
- kahawe 15y agoFunnily enough, those ads would be MUCH closer to the truth if they would just state: "1. <insert some catchy phrase> " 2. ??? 3. profit!"
- gersh 15y agoHow much do those ebooks make? How hard is it to make $1000/month selling ebooks?
- petercooper 15y ago$37 would be more common for that sort of book, BTW ;-) (Coincidentally just yesterday I noted there are 10x the results for "$37 ebook" than for "$39 ebook" on Google.)
- SeoxyS 15y agoBoth the question and the answer are all kinds of silly. You can't start a project with the end goal of making $1000 a month, or you will surely fail. Instead, you've gotta motivated to solve a problem you've identified and then you need to execute on it. Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't… Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when $1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the experience. And try again. Iterate.
- dotBen 15y agoApplying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily. Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind. Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly. Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space
- nametoremember 15y agoWhere does the money actually come from? Other adult businesses advertising on your site?
- dotBen 15y agoAffiliate deals with content sites - which are more than just advertising because they tend to have insane revenue sharing deals for the lifetime of the lead - often 50% split of membership fees for the life of the subscription. So from just a single user signing up for a $30/month subscription, you would make over $180/year. My partner enjoys a healthy secondary income (way way above the monthly figure mentioned in the original question) from such activity. If you do big-data analysis and/or curation of content you can probably sell this to other sites too as many in this space are cash rich and tech-ability poor.
- pdelgallego 15y agoHey Ben, I would like to read more on this topic. Have you written something about it? What are the needs and the problems that they are facing. How to identify the possible customers. Common affilate scheme in the industry, etc ...
- dotBen 15y agoI've not because I don't actually have any projects in this space - my partner (Violet Blue) does and I help her with the technical side of her sites and as someone with a media/tech background I find a lot of it quite interesting.
- braindead_in 15y ago"The first 3 years of any startup is very hard. After 3 years you just get used to it".
- maxklein 15y agoI have many products that make more than $1000 a month. Tip - use the app stores to cut away the pain of having to market to users through vague means. App stores are a godsend if you are a good developer but bad marketer.
- mcdaid 15y agoWould you care to elaborate on which app stores. I can see how people can make money developing mobile apps, but is it possible to get a decent revenue from say Chrome Webstore.
- yeahsure 15y agoBut that wouldn't be a web app. How about a web app? Anything else other than AppSumo?
- maxklein 15y agoWhy must it be a web app? To me web apps are only useful for a specific sort of software, not for all types of software. People who want everything to be web apps are just mentally inflexible. The app store for web apps is twitter and facebook.
- jasonlotito 15y ago> Why must it be a web app? Because that was the original question asked, as well as the topic here. Stay on topic, stay on topic.
- tjogin 15y agoI would not take business advice from anyone attributing all of Apple's success to their image and none to their products.
- Keyframe 15y agoIs it hard to write a story or make a film that people will watch? Same thing, just a bit different. "Everyone" seems to know the answer, but the truth is nobody knows. Because everyone would do it then.
- riffraff 15y agoI agree in part with your cimment but even if everybody knew how to do it, not everybody would. Compare: basic healthy habits.
- mootothemax 15y agoI think saying, however sarcastically, that if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it is kinda pointless. The most important step is to get started in the first place. Even if you don't make huge amounts of money (disclaimer: that's my blog post linked at the bottom of the answer), there's a huge gulf between those that spend their days thinking about possibilities, and those that get up and start their projects. If you're in the latter group, you stand a much greater chance :)
- antirez 15y agoI think it is harder to go from zero to $1000/month than from $1000/month to 100,000$/month. What is sad is that instead to create a spam engine, adsense powered, doing $1000/month is pretty straightforward.
- VB6_Foreverr 15y agoOK I've done the first part, but I've been a bit stuck on the easier second part for a long time. :)
- Vmabuza 15y agoA person asking such a question shouldnt be building stuff for profit in the first place.
- Mz 15y agoWhat are better questions to be asking? (Serious question. I suck at asking questions that get me useful answers. I have some websites that have been around a while and make next to nothing in spite of having something of value to offer. I want to make $2000-$3000/mo. How on earth do I get there from here?)
- syllogism 15y agoYou can start by being specific. There's no generic answer here. You can't really try to understand "succeeding at businesses" in the abstract. You have to do things on a case-by-case basis. So if you ask about one of your _specific_ sites, people can help you.
- Mz 15y agoOkay. How would one get more quality traffic with this specific challenge: It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim it cannot be done. The rest of the world thinks it cannot be done either so it's a hard sell. So far, I have been working on building an audience painfully slowly. Since I am also working on getting myself well, content does not go up as regularly as I would like. My feeling has been this is probably a good thing for now because the first thing I have to do is win over my audience and the world just does not believe this can be done. Maybe I am completely wrong (about needing to build the audience this way)? But without participating in email lists and hearing what other people are asking, I also don't really know what to talk about -- I don't just psychically know what is different about what I am doing compared to other people. So for me that relationship to the audience is important and there has been a huge barrier for a long time. It is gradually coming down. Maybe I do know exactly what I am doing and it just takes time. Or maybe I am an idiot and someone else would have no problem slapping some content onto the site and generating an income. Thoughts?
- swah 15y agoWhat does a "recurring billing system" do? I'm new to this, but all I did for now was to store PayPal's (actually the clone that exists in my country) transactions in my database, and bump the "good_until" timestamp when a new payment is received (via POST in my case).
- SandB0x 15y agoConfirmation bias overload: this is Quora.
- thetrumanshow 15y ago"Its hard, but not THAT hard!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY 6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month). I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working. But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product. You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.
- patio11 15y agoDefine "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed. It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
- chopsueyar 15y agosince development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast. Well put.
- joshklein 15y agoYes, a very important point. This is the central idea of The E-Myth (i.e. doing a thing and running a business that does that thing require very different skill sets). ref: http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280 http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...
- mise 15y agoIt is certainly achievable. My worry is being able to do it once (along with a full-time job) but not being able to sustain multiple such projects.
- patio11 15y agoBreak down exactly why you think that that isn't sustainable, then engineer those worries away. Do you think your project will need new features regularly? Pick a project whose problem domain changes rarely, and get out of the features = value mindset because it is outrageously false. Do you think you will have to be constantly selling? Don't pick something with high touch sales processes for a side project. Do you think your project will require support regularly? Do something less critical, so you have less time pressure on support. Do something simpler. Give people self-help resources and push them. Automate as much of your support burden as reasonably possible. (e.g. "Hey Patrick I need a receipt" takes me about 10 seconds to answer. It used to take a few minutes, but I get asked it frequently enough to justify 30 minutes of dev to make it quick.) Do you think you will need to play sysadmin frequently? Become a better engineer. (I have a couple articles about this.) I am not the sharpest knife in the HN drawer by a long shot. Currently I'm travelling internationally doing some networking at a Silicon Valley startup and, on the weekdays, consulting in NYC. I profoundly hate flying right now. I also have two software businesses and, from their perspective, this state of affairs is exactly identical to me just sleeping in back at my house. It is rather unlikely the businesses will cause significant work for me.
- ahoyhere 15y agoIt's not hard at all. Here's what you need to do: 1. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people. 2. Build it for people who will pay. 3. Market to them. 4. Build it. 5. Ship it. 6. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.) I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)
- raarky 15y agoyou missed out the steps: ??? and Profit!
- rhizome 15y agoEasy to describe is not the same as easy to do. You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.
- ahoyhere 15y agoThis is Hacker News, not "Write A Business Book For Me For Free Then Hold My Hand" News. There's a lot out there on how to do each one of those steps, in books mostly and some of the better software-biz blogs. The fact that I didn't write a 30,000-word essay doesn't make what I'm saying any less true. So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.
- chc 15y agoI'm not asking you to do it, but honestly, I really haven't ever found any of these places that contain much more info about step 1 than was contained in your rough outline (but I have found lots of places that contain roughly the same amount of actionable info in longer form). If a piece of writing does go further, it typically just advises the reader to do something like "Talk to people and find out," which is frustratingly circular. Talking to people is something most of us do every day without any profit, and "find out" just restates the problem. It may be that this has been written about well somewhere, but I have never seen it. I figure it must be one of those things where you just have to figure it out for yourself, and for those who have figured it out, these vague platitudes look like actionable advice because they're able to mentally fill in the blanks.
- seanp2k 15y ago>"Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?" Yes.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pknerd 15y agoA mobile web app mashup having a social layer+LBS on top could be quite good to earn revenue which you are looking for.