6 ms·

Ask HN: How much time did you invest in your startup until ramen profitable?

78 points by clyfe 15y ago

Time.at(ramen_profitable) - Time.at(first_code_line) = ?

hrasm 15y ago
x
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
patio11 15y ago
I suppose I theoretically could have bought all my ramen with bingo profits after about 2.5 ~ 3 years, although a) I kept working at the job for another year, b) actually doing that would have resulted in an "interesting" discussion with Immigration, and c) you probably shouldn't use this as a comparable since I was very, very part-time on things.
erikpukinskis 15y ago
2.5 years and counting, for better or worse!
joelg87 15y ago
Short answer: 5 months with my new startup (to reach about $1500/mo revenue). Longer answer: I've completely immersed myself in startups for around 3 years and spent a full 1.5 years on a startup which never reached ramen profitability nor got funding. I don't think I'd have been able to reach ramen profitability in 5 months without the learning I did in the previous one.
- codabrink 15y ago
  Im also interested in hearing your story.
- mark_h 15y ago
  I'll be the first to ask... do you have a blog post with the lessons learned that enabled your current success? (congratulations, by the way!)
  - joelg87 15y ago
    Thanks Mark! I wrote this post about how I went from the idea to the first paying customer in 7 weeks: http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-week... I also write weekly on my personal blog and almost every post has some form of reflection comparing the previous startup with what I'm doing for my current startup: http://joel.is http://joel.is
    - mark_h 15y ago
      Great read, thanks. Incidentally, the link at the end 404s: http://blog.bufferapp.com/tagged/building_buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/tagged/building_buffer (looks like it should be http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/building-buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/building-buffer)
      - joelg87 15y ago
        Aha, thanks for that Mark, it's because we moved from Tumblr to Wordpress. Much appreciated.
spencerfry 15y ago
All bootstrapped: 1 year for ramen profitable for 3 founders; 3 years for full-time job for 3 founders; 4 1/2 years for hiring 1st and 2nd employee; 5 years for hiring 3rd employee; 5 1/2 years for hiring 4th, 5th, and 6th employee (present day). Re: http://carbonmade.com http://carbonmade.com
- Smirnoff 15y ago
  Just wanted to say that's a nice website. very simplistic. i assume you will let us change the url for a price.
  - spencerfry 15y ago
    Thanks. Yup. With the paid plan you can use a custom domain.
- autalpha 15y ago
  The sites looks good. Is the signup page (and CC processing) your own or are you using a service? It looks great--congrats!
dangrossman 15y ago
About a week. Back in January 2004 I bought a domain, a design template and set up a copy of the free osCommerce shopping cart. I created packages of advertising services, put them in the store, then started posting on webmaster forums with advertising sections, and participating in the forums with the site in my signature. Total time from idea to working website was two days. I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales! I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as well. I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live. I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.
- funkyboy 15y ago
  Do you think the same approach you had in 2004 is still "valid" today?
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    Absolutely. The concept of coming up with something to sell (or resell), setting up a barebones store, doing some test advertising and seeing results in just a few days is timeless. It's even easier today than in the past since creating a good looking ecommerce site is easier than ever with all the store builders and payment services available. If you've ever seen Tim Ferris's book "The Four-Hour Workweek", he suggests that exact system, except without accepting payment and without having the product available yet, so that if people do try to order from you, you've validated that there's a product-market fit before investing time and money into an elaborate website, stocking inventory, etc.
dangravell 15y ago
1.5 yrs part time for my work on bliss, of which a little over one year was with a commercially available product. Once RP, I went full time. This was aided by both shrinking my outgoings as well as growing revenue. I cut out as many monthly outgoings as possible, went PAYG with my mobile phone, stopped spending daft amounts of money on wine... You've got to work out what's more important - cable television or your startup?
steventruong 15y ago
First startup, within 30 days (or less) we had revenue and profit to sustain cost. Currently working on finding next idea so nothing yet.
preinheimer 15y ago
Probably around 8 months - 1 year for us (https://wonderproxy.com https://wonderproxy.com). My co-founder and I were both employed full time elsewhere so we used revenue to expand constantly, becoming profitable wasn't on our short to-do list.
jasonkester 15y ago
Depends on what level of ramenability you're setting your bar at. Here are some of my milestones for S3stat: 6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point). 18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand. 30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city. 40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first job out of college. That's for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month. So I guess the answer to your question is: longer than you think. But once you're there, it's pretty nice.
- omnipath 15y ago
  So if this is your secondary stream, what do you do for a primary income stream?
  - jasonkester 15y ago
    Consulting. In the short term, it blows the doors off of any entrepreneurial thing you could do. The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and use the runway to bootstrap product stuff. Seems to be working thus far.
powertower 15y ago
This greatly depends on your experience level, how much work you put in every day, the type of business you are in, you're personal situation, and quite a few other factors. If you're at the top of your game (you know what you are doing - have experience of 5-10+ years), I would say if the income does not come in after 3-6 months, you're wasting time and effort. Otherwise it could take years to get things right before you find out that the market for your idea is not there.
westiseast 15y ago
Interesting question, thanks for posting. I'm selling Chinese tea (a physical product sold online), so it's different from these SaaS guys, but it's about 3 months from launch and covered 1/3rd costs, but about 6 months since first line of code.
- wallflower 15y ago
  Check out this site. http://www.inpursuitoftea.com/ http://www.inpursuitoftea.com/
erikstarck 15y ago
Related question: how much faster can you do it if you quit your dayjob and do the startup full time? Is it worth the added risk?
- autalpha 15y ago
  I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.
Maro 15y ago
18 months for Scalien.
beeeph 15y ago
My startups first iOS game, Quotiac, was making ~$7/day within two days of making it on to the App Store. It took me about three months of full time development (programming + asset creation) to get there. My monthly expenses at the time were nil, so every penny earned was considered profit. http://itunes.com/apps/quotiac http://itunes.com/apps/quotiac
- amerine 15y ago
  It's only profit if your time spent on it was worthless.
  - beeeph 15y ago
    Time spent building anything is worthless until that thing is profitable.
azsromej 15y ago
nearly a year of writing iOS apps
DenisM 15y ago
5 months for my iPhone app. I broke ground in May 2009, released in Sept, and the money became ramenable around Nov, after I fixed the glaring bugs.
jeffrieger 15y ago
Breakdown for freshtemp (firmware/hardware/software) 10 months full time (80 hrs/week) - first customer ($200/mth) This time includes learning YUI to build the frontend (2 months) Hiring consultant to build the backend (3 months) Testing and building hardware (7 months) This was done with less than 40K of cash, financed through myself and family.
damoncali 15y ago
http://trackjumper.com http://trackjumper.com took almost a year to break even. Had I been working on it full time, it would have happened much sooner.

78 points by clyfe 15y ago

Time.at(ramen_profitable) - Time.at(first_code_line) = ?

hrasm 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

patio11 15y ago

I suppose I theoretically could have bought all my ramen with bingo profits after about 2.5 ~ 3 years, although a) I kept working at the job for another year, b) actually doing that would have resulted in an "interesting" discussion with Immigration, and c) you probably shouldn't use this as a comparable since I was very, very part-time on things.

erikpukinskis 15y ago

2.5 years and counting, for better or worse!

joelg87 15y ago

Short answer: 5 months with my new startup (to reach about $1500/mo revenue). Longer answer: I've completely immersed myself in startups for around 3 years and spent a full 1.5 years on a startup which never reached ramen profitability nor got funding. I don't think I'd have been able to reach ramen profitability in 5 months without the learning I did in the previous one.

codabrink 15y ago
Im also interested in hearing your story.
mark_h 15y ago
I'll be the first to ask... do you have a blog post with the lessons learned that enabled your current success? (congratulations, by the way!)
- joelg87 15y ago
  Thanks Mark! I wrote this post about how I went from the idea to the first paying customer in 7 weeks: http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-week... I also write weekly on my personal blog and almost every post has some form of reflection comparing the previous startup with what I'm doing for my current startup: http://joel.is http://joel.is
  - mark_h 15y ago
    Great read, thanks. Incidentally, the link at the end 404s: http://blog.bufferapp.com/tagged/building_buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/tagged/building_buffer (looks like it should be http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/building-buffer http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/building-buffer)
    - joelg87 15y ago
      Aha, thanks for that Mark, it's because we moved from Tumblr to Wordpress. Much appreciated.

spencerfry 15y ago

All bootstrapped: 1 year for ramen profitable for 3 founders; 3 years for full-time job for 3 founders; 4 1/2 years for hiring 1st and 2nd employee; 5 years for hiring 3rd employee; 5 1/2 years for hiring 4th, 5th, and 6th employee (present day). Re: http://carbonmade.com http://carbonmade.com

Smirnoff 15y ago
Just wanted to say that's a nice website. very simplistic. i assume you will let us change the url for a price.
- spencerfry 15y ago
  Thanks. Yup. With the paid plan you can use a custom domain.
autalpha 15y ago
The sites looks good. Is the signup page (and CC processing) your own or are you using a service? It looks great--congrats!

dangrossman 15y ago

About a week. Back in January 2004 I bought a domain, a design template and set up a copy of the free osCommerce shopping cart. I created packages of advertising services, put them in the store, then started posting on webmaster forums with advertising sections, and participating in the forums with the site in my signature. Total time from idea to working website was two days. I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales! I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as well. I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live. I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.

funkyboy 15y ago
Do you think the same approach you had in 2004 is still "valid" today?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Absolutely. The concept of coming up with something to sell (or resell), setting up a barebones store, doing some test advertising and seeing results in just a few days is timeless. It's even easier today than in the past since creating a good looking ecommerce site is easier than ever with all the store builders and payment services available. If you've ever seen Tim Ferris's book "The Four-Hour Workweek", he suggests that exact system, except without accepting payment and without having the product available yet, so that if people do try to order from you, you've validated that there's a product-market fit before investing time and money into an elaborate website, stocking inventory, etc.

dangravell 15y ago

1.5 yrs part time for my work on bliss, of which a little over one year was with a commercially available product. Once RP, I went full time. This was aided by both shrinking my outgoings as well as growing revenue. I cut out as many monthly outgoings as possible, went PAYG with my mobile phone, stopped spending daft amounts of money on wine... You've got to work out what's more important - cable television or your startup?

steventruong 15y ago

First startup, within 30 days (or less) we had revenue and profit to sustain cost. Currently working on finding next idea so nothing yet.

preinheimer 15y ago

Probably around 8 months - 1 year for us (https://wonderproxy.com https://wonderproxy.com). My co-founder and I were both employed full time elsewhere so we used revenue to expand constantly, becoming profitable wasn't on our short to-do list.

jasonkester 15y ago

Depends on what level of ramenability you're setting your bar at. Here are some of my milestones for S3stat: 6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point). 18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand. 30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city. 40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first job out of college. That's for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month. So I guess the answer to your question is: longer than you think. But once you're there, it's pretty nice.

omnipath 15y ago
So if this is your secondary stream, what do you do for a primary income stream?
- jasonkester 15y ago
  Consulting. In the short term, it blows the doors off of any entrepreneurial thing you could do. The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and use the runway to bootstrap product stuff. Seems to be working thus far.

powertower 15y ago

This greatly depends on your experience level, how much work you put in every day, the type of business you are in, you're personal situation, and quite a few other factors. If you're at the top of your game (you know what you are doing - have experience of 5-10+ years), I would say if the income does not come in after 3-6 months, you're wasting time and effort. Otherwise it could take years to get things right before you find out that the market for your idea is not there.

westiseast 15y ago

Interesting question, thanks for posting. I'm selling Chinese tea (a physical product sold online), so it's different from these SaaS guys, but it's about 3 months from launch and covered 1/3rd costs, but about 6 months since first line of code.

wallflower 15y ago
Check out this site. http://www.inpursuitoftea.com/ http://www.inpursuitoftea.com/

erikstarck 15y ago

Related question: how much faster can you do it if you quit your dayjob and do the startup full time? Is it worth the added risk?

autalpha 15y ago
I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.

Maro 15y ago

18 months for Scalien.

beeeph 15y ago

My startups first iOS game, Quotiac, was making ~$7/day within two days of making it on to the App Store. It took me about three months of full time development (programming + asset creation) to get there. My monthly expenses at the time were nil, so every penny earned was considered profit. http://itunes.com/apps/quotiac http://itunes.com/apps/quotiac

amerine 15y ago
It's only profit if your time spent on it was worthless.
- beeeph 15y ago
  Time spent building anything is worthless until that thing is profitable.

azsromej 15y ago

nearly a year of writing iOS apps

DenisM 15y ago

5 months for my iPhone app. I broke ground in May 2009, released in Sept, and the money became ramenable around Nov, after I fixed the glaring bugs.

jeffrieger 15y ago

Breakdown for freshtemp (firmware/hardware/software) 10 months full time (80 hrs/week) - first customer ($200/mth) This time includes learning YUI to build the frontend (2 months) Hiring consultant to build the backend (3 months) Testing and building hardware (7 months) This was done with less than 40K of cash, financed through myself and family.

damoncali 15y ago

http://trackjumper.com http://trackjumper.com took almost a year to break even. Had I been working on it full time, it would have happened much sooner.