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Ask HN: who started something in 2012 which is already profitable?
I think we are all interested in reading some inspirational success stories for summer 2012!
I would really appreciate your responses, HN!
- 10dpd 14y agoDefine profitable, it's extremely easy to build something that generates revenue. The difficult part is to build something that provides enough revenue to support 1+ employees, office space, etc
- fennecfoxen 14y agoThe economist will refer to something as earning an "economic profit" if it generates more profit than the alternative investment (of time/effort/money). This is, of course, difficult to measure, especially when you consider the worth of intangibles like "I am my own boss" or "I am stressed out and my soul is crushed by the culture of corporate conformity", but there you go. :)
- andyfleming 14y agoAnd sustainable revenue ;)
- withinthreshold 14y agoI think of profit as residual income (after expenses and overheads), which one can retain/invest or draw.
- TamDenholm 14y agoTo me profitable means making more money than it costs to operate. I personally wouldn't count my own time in that equation until I officially draw a salary from it. So if I spent 100 hours making something and spent 5 hours a week maintaining it and it cost £500 a month to run, and the revenue was £501 a month, to me that's profitable. Now obviously it's not profitable enough to keep it in its current state as 5 hours of my time is worth more than £1 but it is worth the time and money investment to make it bring in more revenue.
- rfrey 14y ago"it's extremely easy to build something that generates revenue." For some definition of "easy", I guess.
- bmelton 14y agoIf you assume costs as follows: - $1 a month for domain - $20 a month for hosting I'd say it shouldn't be terribly difficult to find audience enough to generate enough revenue to cover costs with even just ad revenue on even mediocre projects. Though I should also point out that the word 'revenue' doesn't necessarily equal profit. Are you having a hard time generating even the first penny? What's the niche? Who's the audience? What are the revenue strategies tried?
- lucaspiller 14y agoI've launched a few web apps and a mobile app but have yet to make a single penny. I've a few more as well 'in development', which I may get around to releasing some day... Basically everything I have built is because I found it interesting rather than trying to make money, so I'm not too bothered. However if it is so easy, where are all the "Hello World" tutorials for bringing in revenue?
- coderdude 14y agoBeware of posts like this from what is basically a new account with only as much karma as this post has received. Sharks and all that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4017843 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4017843 (Am I paranoid much?)
- notJim 14y agoI see what you're saying, and there is absolutely some risk involved, but I feel that replies to this post provide an incredible amount of value to the HN community. I hope that people will take the risk, so that we can all learn a little bit.
- withinthreshold 14y agoI think your point is valid, but what can i do - i am new here and i am interested to read some success stories.
- marquis 14y agoI think the OP just got lucky and asked a question in which many are interested in hearing about the answers.
- ch0wn 14y agoWhat's the worst thing that could happen? It's only on the frontpage because there are obviously a lot of people interested in this, including me.
- davefp 14y agoParanoid much. I'm not sure that the advice that article gives 'stay underwater while raking in the $' is really possible if you have a 'runaway success' on your hands.
- ktizo 14y ago(Am I paranoid much?) It isn't paranoid to try and develop good bullshit filters, bullshit abounds. I reckon that at least ninety percent of what even the most rational and well informed people on the planet say, is probably bullshit, and the best trick for working out what bullshit other people might be talking that I have found, is to become aware of how much shit I talk myself, especially unintentionally, which is usually by repetition of something I heard that made sense at the time. If something is truly important to you, triple check everything and test it against the real world in any way you can. Take no-one's word on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter, purely on the basis that a story sounds reasonable. As a species we excel in storytelling. That said, I am probably talking bullshit.
- cheez 14y agoI started a new social network for people who like weird socks.
- mikecsh 14y agoCan you post a link?! :D
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- creativityhurts 14y agoLet us know when you're ready for an IPO.
- janlukacs 14y agoi think i'll steal your idea and launch a social network for overweight hipsters who like weird socks. weird sock social networks are just too mainstream. If it doesn't work out we'll pivot into a social price comparison sock search engine. keep building, keep shipping, change the world!
- markessien 14y agoI started hotels.com.ng feb this year I think and it's already mildly profitable.
- withinthreshold 14y agoVery nice! So your target is an english-speaking person going for a (business) trip to Nigeria?
- markessien 14y agoTarget is actually nigerians who need a hotel at some location elsewhere within the country. Internet growth in Africa is off the charts atm...
- withinthreshold 14y agoVery interesting. Do you find it difficult to do business in Nigeria?
- prezjordan 14y agoGlad there are people out there taking advantage of this. How tough was it to acquire that domain?
- okal 14y agoYou do realize Nigeria IS an English speaking country, don't you?
- roel_v 14y agoFor very marginal definitions of 'English speaking' only. By any such definition, Germany, all Scandinavian countries, Belgium and the Netherlands would be 'English speaking countries'.
- eaurouge 14y agoNigeria is an English-speaking country, the other countries you listed are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_speaking#List_of_English_Speaking_Countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_speaking#List_of_Englis...
- bharani_m 14y agoI started Resumonk.com last month and it has already started generating some revenue.
- vharicharan 14y agoWould like to see some stats here for this claim.
- bharani_m 14y agoThe revenue is not much. It is about 300USD. I'll post the complete stats on my blog shortly.
- withinthreshold 14y agoGood work done, congratulations!
- Xcelerate 14y agoGreat work! I have one suggestion though. Let users immediately start filling in information and THEN let them create an account. I wanted to try it out, but then realized I needed to put my email in and select a password. Not a bad thing, but you'll get a lower bounce rate if you save the account creation for later. (Also, this sort of thing would work great with Facebook connect -- you could pull name, education, work history, and phone numbers automatically. Maybe LinkedIn has an API to?)
- thatoneguy 14y agoLinkedIn already has a similar service: http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/ http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/
- bharani_m 14y agoThanks. I'll try to remove the upfront signup process. I will also try to integrate Twitter/FB connect. There is a LinkedIn import, but it is one of the PRO features. More about that here - http://www.resumonk.com/pro http://www.resumonk.com/pro
- there 14y agoI created a push notification service called Pushover (https://pushover.net/ https://pushover.net/) and wrote its iOS and Android apps. I started the project in January and launched it in March (https://jcs.org/pushover https://jcs.org/pushover). In contrast to some competing free apps/services, the Pushover mobile apps are $3.99 which pays for the monthly hosting costs to keep the service running. Both apps are highly rated on both app stores and so far the app sales have paid for the domain name and other tangible development costs and are continuing to generate profit. I just purchased a Blackberry phone for development and plan to create a Blackberry app for the service.
- kaolinite 14y agoI have your site bookmarked reminding me to buy it when I have a good project that would use it. Really need to come up with something, it's a fantastic idea :-)
- electic 14y agoSite doesn't load here.
- there 14y agoSeems a rogue bot/spider was causing some trouble, it should work now.
- eps 14y agoHave worked out the math behind one-time purchases supporting unlimited perpetual service? I suspect it is possible if a substantial amount of users leave the service after the purchase, but I can't see how this is not a form of pyramid scheme - new users effectively cover obligations made to eariler users. How is this sustainable with a non-trivial volume? Or do you (plan to) charge API users?
- there 14y agoIt's hard to work out accurate numbers because users can have such drastically different usage patterns. Some users have signed up with one device and have only received a few notifications, others have many devices registered and receive dozens of notifications daily from chat plugins. The API is free, though applications are limited to a reasonable number of messages per month. That was put into place out of fear that a large company would use the app/service as a dirt-cheap platform to send large amounts of messages every day to its employees (like routing/dispatching directions, etc.) and burden the service. And rightly so, since shortly after launching, I got an e-mail from a large US company looking to use it in such a way (they ultimately decided not to use it). If such customers do come along, their API fees will cover them being on segmented servers.
- oron 14y agoI started a temporary email service called Air Mail which has processed over 2 million emails in the last 3 months and is already profitable. http://getairmail.com http://getairmail.com wish I had a cent for every email it processed ;-)
- justinchen 14y agoGreat looking service and easy to use. Do you monetize just with the ads?
- oron 14y agoYes just with ads, but trying to keep the UX good and not fill it with lots of ads.
- janlukacs 14y agodo you sell ads directly? might be interested in running some ads :)
- oron 14y agoyes, why not ? contact me through my HN profile (twitter).
- eaurouge 14y agoI really like your service and have used it a few times. I doubt the UX will be affected that much if you were to include a few passive ads. So I would say, go for it, make some money, you deserve to.
- oron 14y agoWhat are passive ads ? do you mean more GoogleAds ? I'm not in it for the quick dollar, I want to get this service to as many people as possible and be in it for the long run.
- process 14y agoDeveloped an iOS photo editor (http://proc.es http://proc.es) which keeps me from starving. Though, come to think of it I am a little hungry.
- creativityhurts 14y agoIt's hard not to be hungry with a 10 bucks app that has a landing page that says nothing about it and competes with Instagram, Camera+, Hipsmatic and such.
- Danieru 14y agoAfter your comment I was expecting a homepage with irrelevant information. Maybe some's blog. I will not spoil the surprise for others but I will say that I did not expect what I did not see.
- callmeed 14y agoBuying your app right now. Go grab yourself a burger.
- njx 14y agoLaunched a free service but already started selling the self hosted version during the private beta
- demat 14y agoHi, I've launched a website in January to find all your bills in one place sponsored by big french brands and it became profitable in may http://greenbureau.fr http://greenbureau.fr
- withinthreshold 14y agoVery good! So it's a sort of dashboard for a customer to see all his bills due?
- demat 14y agoAbsolutely, no need to crawl 10+ websites to see your expenses anymore. Thanks for feedback
- blahmeblah 14y agohow about a mobile app for your service?! i would certainly go with it first, if i had such kind of service running myself.
- demat 14y agoWork in progress :) App coming soon
- blahmeblah 14y agoThats gr8, looking forward, by the way, nice service! and nice idea!
- creativityhurts 14y agoThat's really neat! So those big companies pay to be on your service? How did you get them to do that?
- withinthreshold 14y ago
- markchristian 14y agoI launched a Mac utility app called DragonDrop (https://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/ https://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/) that got a lot of pretty good press (including getting fireballed — here's the HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404).
- johnroescher 14y agoI use DragonDrop 500 times per day. I love it! Thank you!
- jc4p 14y agoI bought your app after seeing a funny tweet chain between you and two of my co-workers, it's great!
- house9 14y agoLooks like a great app, going to give it a try
- cpeterso 14y agoI've often wondered why the Mac dock did not allow items to be temporarily dragged to it, like a multi-item clipboard.
- baby 14y agoWow, if only we had something like that on windows.
- waterside81 14y agoWe (littleheroes.com) launched an iPad app to read kids books purchased on our site. We were fortunate in that we already had a customer base to market to.
- maxjaderberg 14y agoLaunched http://www.TrickedOutTimeline.com http://www.TrickedOutTimeline.com on HN in february (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522255 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522255) and have made ~$2500 on around $100 costs from advertising and hosting on google app engine. Nothing huge, but good for a weekends work with a friend!
- notJim 14y agoI remember your post when you guys launched. I went to your site and spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell it was. I see now that you've greatly improved this, and added several clear examples that show it. Great work! Do you mind answering a couple of question? I'm curious how you guys have advertised this product, and where your users come from.
- maxjaderberg 14y agoyeah no problem - shoot me an email if you want. we took a lot of feedback on board from that HN post and really changed the layout since the initial launch. Most of our traffic comes from blogs and StumbleUpon! We are also now on the first page of Google for some relevant search terms
- ksat 14y agoLaunched http://cull.io http://cull.io 20 days ago. Revenue made till now $150. Spent: appengine $10, musicbakery: $47. (I don't really know how to cost my time, it's around three weeks to build).
- withinthreshold 14y agoVery cool idea and implementation! Is it limited to request/response type of challenges and do candidates have to deploy to localhost?
- ksat 14y agoThanks! Yes and yes. It is limited to request and response type of challenges and candidates have to deploy on localhost. Because of this limitations though, candidats can choose any language, library or framework and you need not limit yourself to algorithmic questions. A question for example can be "Find the top article on hacker news"
- WA 14y agoJust a quick feedback from my side: It "feels" to me that this website is empty - that no people use it and that I'd have a hard time finding a developer. Maybe it's just me, but if other people feel the same, you might want to do something about it and give it more "life".
- ksat 14y agoYou mean as in a better design? This was designed by me and I am not that good designer. Will try to make it better
- coopdog 14y agoI think he means more people using it (classic network effect) Maybe put out ads and have as free weekend or something? The idea is that everyone arrives there at the same time for a short period until there's enough people that it's always busy
- jazzychad 14y agoI created ExportMyPosts after the Posterous acquisition so people could export and backup their blogs' data - http://exportmyposts.com/ http://exportmyposts.com/ - it has made more revenue than it costs for the hosting and servers, but not enough to pay a salary or anything. There are a few promo codes left, use HACKERNEWS at checkout. I also made StepStats - http://StepStats.com/ http://StepStats.com/ - for better FitBit data visualization; it's free, but enough people have donated money that it has covered all costs involved.
- sebg 14y agowould love to know the distribution of money donated. is it a bunch of "1 beer donations" or is it more of a power law?
- johnroescher 14y agoI partnered up with 4 other talented whizzes and started a user experience production agency. http://hnd.sm http://hnd.sm is sincerely 'coming soon' (next week) but you can see how much work we've already done on our Dribbble here > http://dribbble.com/handsomemade http://dribbble.com/handsomemade It's been a blast working with startups and existing brands creating new products, marketing them, and generally creating success through precise user experience. Very profitable already and showing impressive growth. Not a "web app" or socially networked, real time diet planner but we're a business and we're profitable! Started in Jan of this year.
- bdunn 14y agoLaunched https://planscope.io https://planscope.io late February. Netting about $1100/mo profit after server costs.
- mittermayr 14y agoI created fruji.com, a simple Twitter Analytics service and offered $5 and $25 accounts. People just keep buying accounts! It's fascinating!!! This was a weekend project and it performs already way better (a few weeks in) than my 1.5 year startup (which is something completely different). That's some scary shit right there. Purely fascinating.
- c0balt279 14y agoDid you do anything special to market it? (The site looks great, by the way)
- mittermayr 14y agoNot really, the past few days, I've tried a few things. Wanted to see whether any ads (Google or Facebook) would allow me to calculate a solid sign-up / purchase ratio. But neither helped promoting the site at a sustainable/affordable rate, I stopped both since more people arrived at the site through pure searching on Google, friends of friends or reading about it on Twitter or a blog. Also, I used Bootstrap as the foundation, it just helps a lot with getting things off the ground for weekend projects.
- timhaines 14y agoI thought you'd done a good job on Fruiji - I like the YAS factor. Are you TwentyPeople? It give the impression you have a bunch of staff, but in fact it's just one person?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mittermayr 14y agoAlso, HackerNews has seriously gotten crazy. I am one random comment, in a LONG list. And all night, we have been seeing a new user every 15-30 seconds. WOW. I also saw a bug prevented some of your reports to complete, which is perfect on a HackerNews day, haha #not. It's fixed, everything will proceed automatically. As a thank you (to the community for finding that bug) and being so MANY, I've decided to create a promo code that upgrades all of your accounts to premium. I'll leave it running until tomorrow or so. It's 'hackernews'. Wow, amazing community right here.
- arohner 14y agoNot quite 2012, but I started work on CircleCI (https://circleci.com https://circleci.com) in September 2011 and it's a real business now.
- bks 14y agoI released a service called http://www.formactivate.com http://www.formactivate.com where I convert form fills and web based leads to phone calls. It decreased the time between initial lead submission to when a you can get the prospect on the phone. We started to get a ton of activity after I integrated with Wufoo.com via the webhook API.
- bks 14y agoWe are looking for CRM or Form vendors to integrate with. We will be announcing a few more integrations in the next few weeks.
- einaregilsson 14y agoI created a few javascript card games, most of them in late 2011, but they really started earning this year. So far have made Spades, Hearts, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Shithead and a couple of solitaires. Revenue has been steadily rising, and is a nice little side income now. http://www.spades-cardgame.com http://www.spades-cardgame.com is one, the rest are linked from there.
- withinthreshold 14y agoReally awesome, i couldn't think you can make money with a no-sponsorship model on games. So your revenue comes completely from ads?
- einaregilsson 14y agoYes, I'm kind of amazed at it myself. I rank fairly well for some of the most relevant keywords now, and that's where almost all the traffic comes from. What I think I'm doing right: * Simple to start. As soon as you enter the page you see the table, you just need to press Deal and you've started. No "enter your name", no choosing options before starting, no nag ads. * Single page sites. The rules for the games are on the landing page, which means it has more content and is likely to be ranked higher by Google. * Keep it simple. As a programmer I had the urge to create high scores, multiplayer, logins, track results etc, but at the end of the day most people just want to spend 10 minutes playing, and leaving out those things also means it's maintenance free, and frictionless to get started.
- sneak 14y agoWhy do you have different second-level domains for each game? Why not use one domain with a bunch of subdomains for each game? That way you'd build brand recognition at the same time, and avoid people running out and registering things like "cribbage-cardgame.com"...
- einaregilsson 14y agoStarted by accident. First game I made was Idiot, and got the domain idiot-cardgame.com for it, since I had no plans to create more at that time. When I made Crazy Eights I couldn't really use idiot-cardgame.com for it, so I gave that its own domain. After that it was just a kind of pattern I guess. I also had some vague ideas that maybe I'd get more google juice out of having links from different domains to each other. I have thought about changing it all to one domain, and setting up some 301 redirects, but I'm just afraid to mess up my google rankings. For the solitaire game I re-use a domain, e.g I have http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com for Klondike solitaire (or classic solitaire), and then I have http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com/freecell http://www.solitaire-cardgame.com/freecell for Free Cell solitaire.
- simplyhire 14y agoI recently started http://simplyhire.in/ http://simplyhire.in/ . I started working on this about month back ( may starting ). Couple of local startup has started using it. This looks good. But right now unable to push beyond these local startup, lack of networking etc. Let me know if guys can help.
- jvanderwal 14y agoA friendly fyi: simplyhired.com might make a case that you're infringing on their trademark.
- simplyhire 14y agoYeah got to realize that, will be changing the domain name soon.
- sejje 14y agoThe English on your site is bad enough that I would pass it up.
- simplyhire 14y agoThanks for the feedback. I appreciate you taking the time to view the app. I have tried to improve the english and prevention on website. Let me know if you have any more suggestion. You can also use demo@simplyhire.in and demo123 to signin and try out the website.
- zsherman 14y agoStarted a curated ecommerce site for vinyl lovers that's been profitable since day 1: http://vinylloop.com/ http://vinylloop.com/
- withinthreshold 14y agoGreat site! How do you think vinyl lovers are different from other niches? Do they spend more money?
- jhuckestein 14y agoOver the last couple of weeks I created http://hipdial.com http://hipdial.com with a friend. You can buy your own, dedicated, PIN-free phone conference line from us. We've opened doors to the public teo weeks ago and are already paying for the servers. Press launch following next week. It's all very exciting :) Once things relax a bit we'll definitely share our experience on some kind of blog. Would love some feedback if you have a minute, too. Edit: typo in URL, oops
- Zaheer 14y agoI launched a service recently that sends people a new technical interview question every other day (www.InterTechTion.com). Subscribers are slowly growing daily and people seem to really like the service. I'm a first-year college student (so I'm new to this stuff) and am trying to figure out how to get advertisers to sign up. Any advice?
- gfosco 14y agoI started a business text-messaging service, and succeeded in my first two sales calls with local businesses. It was instantly profitable and is growing. Currently I am not ready to sell it nationally, as I am refining and adding some new features for a new client, or I would link it.
- scottmotte 14y agoI started http://boxysign.com http://boxysign.com 2 months ago. It is a way to share and sign documents with just a link! It's been profitable from the start - ableit still on a very small scale.
- cpeterso 14y agoThis is a very interesting, focused service. I like how you quietly create a phantom account so users don't need to login to start working. btw, I think I broke your site when trying to upload two test PDFs. The first worked correctly, but second never finished processing and now every page says "Application Error". The Done button on BoxySign's Account Settings dialog does not seem to work (but the X button does). Also, the sharable URLs seemed disconcertingly short for documents that may contain private information.
- scottmotte 14y agoThanks for the feedback. It's encouraging. Yes, that is a bug I need to fix. Thanks for catching it. Indeed, and that is by design right now. I chose to focus on the clearest solution to the end user to start, but do have plans for longer/harder-to-guess urls. I'm considering moving that list further up my todos though. (working on .doc support right now)
- gokuknows 14y agoDude your service is awesome! I signed and loved it. I also think the UI is kick ass!
- scottmotte 14y agoThank you!
- tertius 14y agoWhen you clock on the video it should start playing automatically.
- martin_rusev 14y agoI launched a paid version (http://amon.cx/plus http://amon.cx/plus ) of my server and web app monitoring toolkit - Amon ( http://amon.cx http://amon.cx ) back in February and have made something like $3000. It took me 2 months working full time to build it.
- epaga 14y agoWrote and launched http://app.net/emptyinbox http://app.net/emptyinbox with my wife as a spare time project over the course of a few months. It's an inbox zero assistant for Gmail on iPhone. I am my own app's biggest fan, I use it almost daily and love it to death. :) Unfortunately a crash bug was in the first version for people running the iphone app on an ipad, which wasn't discovered until after an AppAdvice review came out which drove tons of downloads...so that led to a bunch of 1-star reviews. But reviews since the fixed version have been very positive.
- ctek 14y agoI created https://www.pageblox.com https://www.pageblox.com, a layout tool for web designers. I've been getting between 1500-2000 uniques a month, so when I turn on the paid version, I should be making at least a few hundred a month depending on how the conversion rate turns out...
- csomar 14y agoI started a WordPress Plugin (http://wpadpress.com http://wpadpress.com) and it's now generating a close to a 4 figures monthly income. I'm working on lots of improvements and will be joining hands with Theme authors for promotion, so it might turn to something serious in the future.
- Lukeas14 14y agoI created "I Want An App That" (http://www.iwaat.com http://www.iwaat.com), a web app discovery engine. No real business model has been implemented but so far affiliate revenue has been paying for hosting costs and other services.
- mzarate06 14y agoI started TimePanel (http://timepanel.net http://timepanel.net) this year. I've always had the desire to build a product, and wanted a time tracking and invoicing solution that was extremely fast and simple. TimePanel is the culmination of that. Number of users is slowly growing, and I just released its 3rd beta update; looking to formally launch very soon.
- ww520 14y agoI launched https://boxuptext.com/ https://boxuptext.com/ couple days ago and have yet to turned a profit. :)
- RutZap 14y agoI like it!! I wonder how many people will use it though! Anyway... how do you encrypt the text? sha or some other algorithm?
- ww520 14y agoNot many people using it since I haven't publicized it. For encryption, it's using the high grade AES algorithm, which is a standard cipher approved by the NSA for top secret information.
- frankdenbow 14y agoI started Startup Threads Monthly (https://StartupThreadsMonthly.com https://StartupThreadsMonthly.com), a subscription service for startup swag, at the beginning of the year and is profitable. Have 200+ subscribers, thanks in part to HN! Will do a breakdown soon.
- ryangilbert 14y agoI recently started www.Polls.io. Haven't made any money yet since there aren't any ads up but the costs are only $5/month so it's not bad.
- hariis 14y agowhere are you hosting that the cost is only $5/month?
- spiredigital 14y agoGreat thread! I love seeing actual projects people are working on. I wrote a 55-page eBook on starting a profitable drop shipping business which has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month (http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/ http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/). I started writing in late April and released it May 15th. Since I'm giving the eBook away and my monetization goals are mostly long term, revenues have been very minimal - less than $100 in affiliate commissions so far. But in 2.5 months since I launched the blog, I've received nearly 10,000 visits and almost 600 subscribers which I've been really happy about...
- frankdenbow 14y agonice! thats something I might have to check out
- ra 14y agoI just read your ebook; you write very well and it's definitely an interesting topic.
- chaseideas 14y agoThis year has been an exciting one from the very start! I've had several successful (read: awesomely profitable) new ventures this year, such as an ad network that I established and sold to a private party for a solid 5 figure amount within a month. On one of my more established networks, I was able to grow the unique impressions by over 100k a day within 2 weeks of focusing on it. I also established a domain parking system that already has over 500+ domains parked on it and growing quickly. During a random latenight coding session, I created a unique new channel/model of selling category related emails to advertisers bidding on a CPM basis real-time, and lining up another venture to integrate with this platform. These are but a few of the cool things currently being worked on by myself and my growing staff. Hoping to be hiring on more talent on soon and probably getting a swanky office in La Jolla, CA soon. Have some pretty exciting plans for the year!
- iuguy 14y agoMy second company (Sense/Net) ran it's second ever event this year, 44Café. It was a one day event alongside the UK's biggest infosec exhibition. We didn't make any money from it (in fact it cost us about $5,000 all in) but we did the event to raise awareness of the main conference[1] we're organising for September, which I hope will bring a return in (although the olympics are doing their best to make anything in London ludicrously expensive). I'm also working on something for our first external event (i.e. an event organised on behalf of someone else), which will be really cool if it goes ahead. [1] - http://www.44con.com/ http://www.44con.com/
- mleonhard 14y agoI launched https://www.rootredirect.com/ https://www.rootredirect.com/ in April and it's paying its bills. It provides high-availability root domain redirection for websites that use CNAME-based services like EC2+ELB, S3/CloudFront, and Google App Engine. Plus other features not offered by your DNS provider, such as cacheable 301 responses and page redirects.
- matvoz 14y agoI launched a web site about alternative fuel LPG, mostly about fuel stations in Europe (http://www.mylpg.eu http://www.mylpg.eu). At first it was a test to feel the market, but now I found out it has potential.
- withinthreshold 14y agoWow, does it take a lot of (crowdsourced) manpower to keep the database up-to-date?
- HarrietJones 14y agoI created a simple website alert-if-down service (http://pingdipong.com http://pingdipong.com), and it's just started paying for its own hosting. I wouldn't call it profitable. It's not paying anybodies wage. It's not covering the cost of advertising. It's been an interesting and turbulent couple of months. I went into it thinking there was only big name players in the market (pingdom, etc), that it would be an easy market to break into and found out much later that there are a host of similar products out there. And it's really, really hard to sell simple / boring stuff to people. It's utterly true that the development is only a small fraction of the process. People told me before, but I didn't listen. It's also true that the funnel between getting a clickthrough and getting a payment narrows frighteningly quickly. It seems to cost me a fortune to get a paying customer. I wanted to make something useful that wasn't built on VC money, and although it's possible, I'm not sure that there's much success to be had for small players in the web development arena. It's heartening to hear other peoples stories though. Another reason to keep trying. :-) I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that website development is coming to the end of its homebrew phase (much like games and desktop software previously), and it's becoming almost impossible for tiny teams to make anything useful. There still seems to be some space in the mobile market, but that appears to be being swallowed by larger development teams with VC money. And yes, I'm obviously making this post with the intention of also plugging my own service. I hope I've added something extra to the conversation though.
- lrobb 14y agoI agree somewhat... I tried to launch an app in a space that was attracting single digit MM investment rounds. A bit disheartening to see a company get 5mm and all of a sudden they hire a dozen developers and have prime ad space on all the big websites for your vertical. Not that it can't be done, but it sure feels like spitting into the wind.
- kolinko 14y agoI've built http://AppCod.es http://AppCod.es - a tool for App Store SEO. It was launched around february 2012, in march we got covered by Techcrunch (instant break even) and our sales were increasing month by month since then.
- EarlofGrey 14y agoI started building http://www.splatsearch.com http://www.splatsearch.com A comparison engine with big plans to compare everything in the world. One online marketer and 2 developers building it. Currently the live version is a very different snapshop from the dev version which we roll out soon and just has 14 million sample products. We bootstrapped it and it probably just about profitable even though its barely live.
- withinthreshold 14y agoWow, i think the most difficult part is the parsing, isn't it? Are you using any open-source solutions or is everything custom-built?
- EarlofGrey 14y agoEverything is custom built. The parsing is the easy bit. The architecture is what i find the hardest.
- alex3t 14y agoWedding planning app for Mac - Weddinglan(http://weddinglan.com http://weddinglan.com) About $800 per month, but hope for more profit after next version which will include also iPad version
- withinthreshold 14y agoLooks great and i'm sure enjoy using it aswell! How did you came up with Weddinplan? Do you come from the industry or was it just brainstorming?
- marcomassaro 14y agoLaunched http://Pumpups.com http://Pumpups.com in under 3 weeks. Have paying customers and work directly with brands.
- chrishaum 14y agoI launched the Pest Management Roundtable (http://pestroundtable.com http://pestroundtable.com) in February. After several months of good ol' fashioned hustling (mostly email marketing + telephone interviews and sales), I'm up to nearly $500 in monthly recurring revenue. It's not quite "ramen profitable" yet, but I've been picking up customers quickly the last 2 weeks, so at this rate I'll get it there within the month. A recent milestone was that last week I interviewed the owner of the 10th largest pest control company in the US (Joe Clark, of Clark Pest Control in California). He joined the Roundtable immediately following the interview.