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I have two! An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/ https://www.placecard.me/ A boilerplate for making SaaS a

• kungito 5y ago
  Judging by time spent, saas pegasus feels less like a side job and more like a full time job
  • czue 5y ago
    I went full time independent in June of this year which gave me a lot more time. Since then I've averaged 60-80 hours a month on it, so I guess it's approaching a half-time job...
• maclockard 5y ago
  How much time do you spend a month on marketing for placecard?
  • czue 5y ago
    These days basically zero because most of my attention has moved on. I invested a ton in SEO and content early on though.
    • dbbk 5y ago
      When you say invested, was this as in time (you wrote the content and worked on SEO yourself), or did you pay to outsource this? I'm struggling with this myself at the moment.
• jhunter1016 5y ago
  This is awesome! Your dashboard is awesome too. I’ve been wanting to track time spent on my side projects, but I’ve never implemented anything. You have a chart for your time spent! So I’m wondering what you use to track that with?
  • czue 5y ago
    I use an app called toggl: https://www.toggl.com/ https://www.toggl.com/. Highly recommend it!
• Graffur 5y ago
  I am surprised you're making $1000/mo when you're not printing and sending out the cards. Have you thought of doing that? Would it make it more profitable?
  • czue 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm sure it would but it would also increase the complexity a lot. I like how simple and low-touch the business is - it's one of my primary criteria for choosing projects!
• danielscrubs 5y ago
  Wow! Good job! Find it very interesting that the boilerplate was leading the pack. "Don't dig for gold, sell shovels." as the quote goes.
• wbharding 5y ago
  Love that dashboard! Makes me wonder what your Line Impact would be for the various projects, seems like you get a lot of business value from each line of code.
  • czue 5y ago
    Ha, there's a metric that would be interesting. Probably the secret is that I try to spend as much time marketing as I do coding... (I usually fail but I'm guessing I still manage to market more than most devs)
• asdev 5y ago
  how did you get users for Placecard and Chatstats?
  • czue 5y ago
    Place cards was a ton of content, SEO and a long game. Chat stats is so niche that I've literally just shared it a couple times on reddit and that's basically it. But somehow Google has figured out to show it for relevant queries.
• therealdrag0 5y ago
  How does chatstats make money?
  • czue 5y ago
    The free tier only imports 1,000 messages and hides a couple features. There's a $10/year upgrade to import your full chat and unlock them.
• unobatbayar 5y ago
  What happens when it comes to taxes? Do you pay taxes if it's from side projects? Or it's done automatically e.g. Stripe?
  • czue 5y ago
    Someone already added a great summary below, but yeah the short answer is "it's complicated". I personally have a single LLC for the businesses and also now hire help to make sure I'm compliant.
  • telesilla 5y ago
    Do you mean, sales taxes or personal income taxes? How a person manages those depends on their country. If you can, hire an local accountant to help or at least get advice. If the amounts get large enough you may need to open a business for yourself.
  • natalya-api 5y ago
    Stripe doesn't pay taxes for you. You may want to use Paddle (which takes a bigger chunk of your profits) for that or some other marketplace: in that way Paddle is selling to end customers, taking a cut and then paying you in a business to business transaction. You are also responsible for other types of taxes (assuming you are working via a limited liability corporation): sales taxes / VAT, corporate taxes, personal taxes, capital gain tax. Some countries allow you to do some trading without setting up a company but as your earnings go up it will become either not very efficient from a tax perspective or not allowed by the law. From my experience: You need to pay VAT in European countries no matter where you're selling from (I use vatlayer.com for getting all the different VAT rates). You generally don't need to pay taxes in other countries until you reach a threshold of earnings / number of sales. Quaderno.io is another service which track all these different factors for you. Sales tax / VAT is displayed and charged to customers and you need to pay it to the relevant authorities every quarter. Then you can pay yourself a salary (which is a cost) from the money you received in the company, based on your country's personal income rates. On what's left, on your company's profit you need to pay corporate tax rate, based on your country's corporate tax rates. On the remaining profits in the company you can generally chose to pay yourself dividends (on which you pay other taxes, based on your country's tax rates on dividends). If you sell your company, you'll have to pay capital tax gain taxes on the profit you made with the company (the delta between the company's capital and how much you sold it for). TL;DR: you probably need an accountant.
• hemmert 5y ago
  Amazing dashboard! Place cards are a more seasonal business, but the SaaS seems to take of nicely! Congrats!
• franciscop 5y ago
  I literally shared your /open/ page the other day, I find it very cool that you have a USD/hour and that for static-ish projects it makes sense that it only increases! That does put a lot of perspective, since I feel it's similar to some of my open source projects (minus the $) in that it just keeps on giving value.
  • czue 5y ago
    Awesome, so cool you are sharing it and that's exactly the goal I have (both for myself and to inspire others). I had the idea of adding a "time travel" feature to it, so you can see literally how terrible the numbers were early on. My hourly rate for the first year was about $3!
• Rainymood 5y ago
  I love this so much. No frills, just software solving (boring) problems in a scalable way. All the best :)
• mytailorisrich 5y ago
  "Rachel Green Table one" is a nice, funny touch!
  • czue 5y ago
    Haha, thanks! Dates me I'm sure.
• parmezan 5y ago
  Impressive dude. Also from a security perspective don't forget to update those very out of date nginx webservers :) My tool detects version 1.10.3 which was released on 31 Jan 2017
  • Graffur 5y ago
    What tool do you use?
    • markvdb 5y ago
      wget -S ?
  • czue 5y ago
    Good tip, thanks. Will make it a priority.
• archon810 5y ago
  What happened to the SaaS site in November? It jumped to $30k, is that right? That's a massive increase.
  • czue 5y ago
    Heh. Black Friday sale. https://www.coryzue.com/writing/nov-2021/ https://www.coryzue.com/writing/nov-2021/
• nickjj 5y ago
  Hello again Cory! If anyone is curious, czue and I chatted about how he built and hosts Place Card Me at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-lets-you-create-printable-place-cards-online https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let.... Basically a full break down of his tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. It also touches on his Django SaaS example app he linked above too. Really nice to see your Django boilerplate is pulling in those figures, congrats.
  • czue 5y ago
    Thanks Nick, loved geeking out with you! All the best. :)
  • jimmer22 5y ago
    Looks really cool. Would love to read a transcription of the conversation if you have one. Otherwise will check out the audio later.
    • nickjj 5y ago
      There's no exact transcript but every few minutes or so has a 1 sentence summary with clickable timestamps to quickly find points of interest.
      • Irongirl1 5y ago
        This will make transcripts, pdfs etc for you: https://designrr.io https://designrr.io
• wyclif 5y ago
  Hi Cory—your dashboard is really impressive. Did you have to reboot the wedding place card app? Because I remember you commenting somewhere—I can't remember where—that it had tanked. But obviously since this is an end-of-year report that can't be true, right?
  • czue 5y ago
    It tanked for the first six months of the pandemic. It's started coming back as the world has started having events again
• peanut_worm 5y ago
  Where did you get the art for your place card business?
  • czue 5y ago
    Mostly royalty-free image sites, e.g. pixabay.
• beacham 5y ago
  Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.
  • czue 5y ago
    That's odd. It's mostly SEO and content, actually. I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...
• averagely 5y ago
  Your Open Project Dashboard is really cool. Do you have a system for keeping track of everything? Is it somehow automated? I'd like to create something similar for my own work.
  • czue 5y ago
    Thanks! The tech behind it is pretty embarrassing. Source data is Stripe (profit), Toggl (hours) and a tiny amount of manual accounting for expenses. I manually dump the raw data once a month into a CSV file, and then have some Python scripts that do intermediate calculations and transform the output to JSON. Then a tiny bit of JS to wire up the charts. So, in short, not automated at all, but takes ~10 minutes a month to keep up to date!
• reitoei 5y ago
  The placecard generator is brilliant. Well done you.