18 ms·

Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

313 points by xjones 14y ago

The last thread by the same name got a lot of attention, but seeing as it's over a year old it would be interesting to hear from new people and also get updates from some people who posted in the previous thread. Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487

nicotoh 14y ago
make a few hundred bucks from a dating site i created www.likeapub.com
- nicotoh 14y ago
  http://www.likeapub.com http://www.likeapub.com
Hawkee 14y ago
I've generated over $200k in the past 6 years with a website I started in high school in 1997 called hawkee.com. It's always just been a coding playground for me to experiment with new technologies and to hone my coding skills. I coded a product price comparison to help pay for the server costs and it has more than paid for the server costs over the years. I do freelance coding, but I do come back to the site every couple months to play with new technologies and improve the user experience.
- holgersindbaek 14y ago
  How do you make money on this website?
  - Hawkee 14y ago
    Price comparison in the hardware section.
sergeytubin 14y ago
It looks like $70-100 is average for a "good enough" android app without any promotion. My IOU app is about the same. Launching a web-site for it soon (same as app, with sync) to see how it affects. Not expecting much income from all of this, it's just fun.
usmanity 14y ago
I wouldn't call it exactly passive but it's not really a focus right now. I setup an etsy shop on which I put some posters I've made. http://www.etsy.com/shop/Posterboard http://www.etsy.com/shop/Posterboard I actually have made -$1.40 b/c that's what it costed me to put up the posters. It's been up for about 2 weeks now.
alexkearns 14y ago
http://www.gambolio.com http://www.gambolio.com - $0 a month http://www.casualgirlgamer.com http://www.casualgirlgamer.com - $200 a month http://www.musicgames.co http://www.musicgames.co - $5 a month http://www.tiki-toki.com http://www.tiki-toki.com - $5,000 a month http://www.peopleplotr.com http://www.peopleplotr.com - $100 a month I make extra licensing some of my software but that does not count as recurring income and can vary massively month to month.
ideamonk 14y ago
http://instasync.me http://instasync.me - downloads all your instagram photos - about $200 every month. - expecting it to rise (pricing changes) Looking at a few longer lists below, I think I've just started!
djt 14y ago
Unfortunately you're probably going to get lots of old ideas anyway as no-one that has recurring (i'm guessing you mean Passive Income) will tell you their current stream. It's a Goose that laid the Golden Egg problem. What I would recommend is reading up about different ways to make money, looking at things that other people have done in the past, then find ways to think up what niche you could fill. After that its about getting it done. Look up Patio11 and read his comments, that's a great start.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
It's reasonably certain that the vast majority of entrepreneurs who are making large amounts of cash are going to remain silent!
- bdunn 14y ago
  Why?
  - lwat 14y ago
    "May you come to the attention of powerful people." -- Old Chinese curse
    - veyron 14y ago
      It's not even that. Oftentimes many of the recurring services are easily replicable. So until a market leadership position is cemented (until you set up the moat) you don't want others to know that building XYZ service actually could be significantly profitable.
      - matznerd 14y ago
        This is true, but also, competitors may find some of your strategies and numbers here. I know for a fact that people sign up for competitor services just to see what they are doing. I have live chat on my sales site and I have had competitors tell me they are ripping off my content, copy, etc...
      - mapster 14y ago
        Making cheeseburgers and fries is replicable, but I am not going after a piece of mcburger's pie 1st thing tomorrow (well, maybe I am, maybe I'm not). Selling is harder than most code jockeys can manage, so there is low risk. I think what you mean is that others are reading HNews too.
      - jtheory 14y ago
        I have a moderately-successful side project in the education sector that I'm not posting numbers about... not because I'm worried about competitors, but because I've already lost a few very large signups ("can we sign up every student in our school district?") when they get a sense it's a small project. Even though the site has been up & running (and stable) for almost a decade now, they don't want to make the jump unless there are OTHER entire school districts already on board that they can talk to. I'm not quite sure how to solve this chicken/egg problem yet. And since it's a side project, I'm not even sure I want to solve it right now -- that would sabotage my primary work, unless I could rapidly find someone capable to help with it. But posting obviously-non-corporate-level sales numbers just a google away really doesn't seem like it would help things; ESPECIALLY because those same numbers will still be just a google away 5 years from now, even if the actual numbers are an order of magnitude higher by then.
memset 14y ago
I wrote a simple android app which lets Virgin Mobile customers see how many minutes they have left on their account. [1] It is open-source [2], and I have optional ads. (I created the app without ads, and then added them in a later update with a note saying "hey, these ads are an experiment. You can disable them in the app's settings if you want, but otherwise, enjoy it!" This generates between $60-$90 per month, depending on... well, I honestly have no idea what it depends on. Pizza money. And bragging rights. This app is basically in maintenance mode though I have a lot of things I want to do with it. Android programming is so difficult, though (difficult documentation, impossible for me to figure out how to do anything gui-related) that it's been hard for me to really make big enhancements. In fact, since going to Google IO this year, I'm no longer a VM customer! Might buy a cheap VM account to do maintenance on this app, which would still be profitable for me. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jaygoel.virginminuteschecker https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jaygoel.vi... [2] https://github.com/poundifdef/VirginMobileMinutesChecker https://github.com/poundifdef/VirginMobileMinutesChecker
- Zaheer 14y ago
  Curious what ad network you use? I just created an Android app and experimenting with a few.
  - memset 14y ago
    I use AdMob - nothing fancy. There are other ad providers who send me spam emails about their services, but they seem really awful (they install their own apks to do more invasive interstitials, widget icons, etc.) They have a feature called AdWhirl, which automatically displays ads from different providers depending on who will pay you the most at a given time. I have not tried this. If you do, let me know how it goes!
    - Zaheer 14y ago
      Thanks, I use AdMob as well right now. I tried using it as a meditation layer and including MobFox but I was getting horrible results with MobFox so recently dropped it. One of the challenges I'm having finding networks is finding one that doesn't require location/phone state permissions. I added it one time and a lot of users got pissed off :O. Will let you know if I come across anything better!
hsmyers 14y ago
At the moment: 1. 1,108.00 --- VA Disability 2. 100.00 --- Client retainer 3. 934.00 --- Social Security (starting in October) Total: 2142.00 Analysis: It is good to like Ramen Noodles! --hsm
- genwin 14y ago
  Not to downplay your pain: I would love to get $934/month for SS! I've maxed out contributions for many decades but will probably get less than $500.
  - Symbol 14y ago
    I'm 31 and fully expect Social Security / other entitlement programs to be non-existent in 30+ years. At least I'm helping some of you collect something today. Enjoy!
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Presumably that's gross take home in USD? Arguably not "generated" income except the retainer. About €1600 EURO, £1250 GBP. How many are you supporting on this income?
the_bear 14y ago
A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that. My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the profits are mostly being reinvested back into the company, so I don't think it qualifies as passive income.
- irunbackwards 14y ago
  That's awesome, congratulations! Do you manage the PPC and stuff too? SEO?
  - the_bear 14y ago
    Thanks! Yes, I handle everything except writing the actual content. That includes PPC, SEO, and making it easy for my mom to promote posts via Pinterest and Facebook (Pinterest is responsible for our success by the way). Most of the revenue comes from the Amazon Affiliate program, but recently we've been making a decent amount off of display ads from the BlogHer ad network. Google AdSense contributes a little bit as well. As for SEO, I wrote the blogging software from scratch (I don't like Wordpress) so the SEO is entirely under my control. I'm no SEO expert though, so I'm sure there are many things I could be doing better.
- xjones 14y ago
  Great job on both of those! Very impressive. I definitely think the SaaS startup is relevant here. I just used the same title as the last thread, but personally I'd like to hear about any sort of recurring revenue. And as someone who's developing their own SaaS product right now, I need all the motivation I can get from others' success stories. I don't wish to pressure you about your metrics, but how long did it take you to get your SaaS startup to where it is now? And are you working on it solo?
  - the_bear 14y ago
asanwal 14y ago
ChubbyBrain (www.chubbybrain.com) makes $500-$700/month via good old Google ads and some Amazon affiliate links. It's not our core business, but it covers happy hour for the team and some misc expenses so we happily take it.
ksherlock 14y ago
~ $1,000/month in stock dividends.
- brador 14y ago
  What's the ROI on that?
  - ksherlock 14y ago
    Based on the original cost, it's 17% (10% excluding outliers). Based on current market value, it's 6%. I did sell off some REITs at a loss a three years ago for tax purposes.
ComNik 14y ago
I learned web-development while making a little price-tracking/wishlist app: http://www.rankique.com/ http://www.rankique.com/ (and a german version, pretty much for myself to use..: http://www.rankique.de/ http://www.rankique.de/) Together they make about 30-50€/month. I'm working on a couple of new features and I'm searching for a new name, but currently school takes up most of my time.
suresk 14y ago
I make between $200 - $400 per month off my HTTP testing tool: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ Not very impressive (who knew selling a niche tool in an environment where $5 is considered "expensive" wasn't the road to instant riches?), but it has been fun to make and it is always cool to hear about how useful the tool has been to fellow developers.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  Don't sell it to developers. Sell it to their bosses.
  - suresk 14y ago
    Generally speaking, I agree with you. In this case, however, this was just a weekend project and easy distribution was a goal of mine - hence the app store. If I were trying to make a full-time living off something like this, then there are a bunch of things I'd do differently - such as what you suggest.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Ah, OK. It's actually good you've thought it through. "Sell to the boss" is one of those little revelations I've had lately and, like any Damascene conversion, I'm being a bit of loudmouth about it.
- phil 14y ago
  That's kind of a strange attitude to have. Your competition (more or less) charges $50: http://www.charlesproxy.com/ http://www.charlesproxy.com/
  - omgtehlion 14y ago
    compare this to $0 fiddler2.com (only windows though)
rugoso 14y ago
About 90 dollars a month in a little iPhone app called TweakyBeat .. it was free for like three years, then some day I asked myself if I could change it from free to pay, and yes you can.
heeton 14y ago
About $20 a month, from some flash games I made about 8 years ago... Not too bad?
anon_builder 14y ago
In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions. Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.
- CWIZO 14y ago
  I would love to hear some more on this if you don't mind. If you are making that kind of money, then our company is clearly doing something horribly wrong :)
  - anon_builder 14y ago
    You're not doing something wrong per se. I started out at the right time in the right niche, that helped me get away with a lot. I started out when in high school, when I had no costs of living, which is a great way to learn risk-free. As a result I now do 'marketing' as well as technical stuff, which keeps margins high, and gives me breadth in all those fields, which, I think, hugely contributes to my success. But mostly it's a matter of right place, right time...
- bbayer 14y ago
  How many sites did you mention? And how much unique visitor do you have in total?
  - anon_builder 14y ago
    A few dozen sites, with a couple doing about 80% of revenue. About 8 million uniques.
- timurtamerlan 14y ago
  Few questions, if you dont mind :) 1. How long did it take to reach this level of income? 2. What is the total monthly traffic that generates 122k? 3. How much time does it take to manage the whole thing in its present state?
bryanh 14y ago
$700-800/mo from BitBuffet.com. Haven't touched it in about a year as I am 100% on my main startup.
dhimes 14y ago
About $50-$100 per month on reading and writing software I wrote a while back (mostly writing). I don't advertise or promote it any more.
rqphqel 14y ago
About $150 per month with http://www.catgifpage.com http://www.catgifpage.com (growing fast) and 10 bitcoins per month with a speed logo design service, I really enjoy earning money this way!
- brador 14y ago
  How about after hosting costs? I took a look at some image sharing sites today, some of the financials are painful to read. Key point is they're hoping for a buyout on the traffic rather than generating revenue themselves. We're talking break evens at 20mb per ad click. Possible for a blog, a balancing act for image sharing.
  - hahla 14y ago
    I own a sort of popular niche image hosting site (500k uniques per month) and while most image hosting sites do lose money as they get more popular there is still potential to make money in the area. Your right that it's never going to make as much money as any profitable niche pushing 500k uniques but it's still fun to run. I'm looking for a developer that can help take the site to the next level if anyone's interested email is in my profile.
  - rqphqel 14y ago
    I do not lose money. My Outlay are low and will stay as my host bandwidth is unlimited.
- mjballs 14y ago
  whats the total monthly traffic (including bandwidth), if i may ask?
codex 14y ago
I generate about $1K-$2K a month in passive income. I spend approximately zero hours on maintenance every week, and I bootstrapped it while holding down a full-time job. It took an extra 5-10 hours per week for about a year. Here's what I did: a) Got a job at a major software company for very high comp. b) Spent an extra 5-10 hours a week working intelligently at my full time job; got promoted. c) Invested the salary, bonus, and stock from my high comp. corporate job in real-estate and tech-heavy index funds, and reap the (literal) dividends passively. b) is optional; even without the promotion, I would still make enough money to generate almost all of my passive income via investments. Not bad for zero hours per week. A stable income has allowed me to buy a house at the bottom of the housing market, which will appreciate at about 1% over inflation; my other investments typically do 2-8% over inflation (especially retirement funds, which grow tax-deferred). All in all, at least $1K per month, spiking to much more. At the rate I'm continuing to invest, I'll likely double that monthly return within 18 months. Sure, this is all pretty volatile, but no more volatile than entrepreneurship, and with much better worse and average case scenarios. Best of all, these investments will, in the long term, outpace inflation, which is more than can be said for selling software or tech stuff, which tends to depreciate in price over time (after all, the marginal cost of software is zero, which depresses prices due to competitive dynamics).
- cageface 14y ago
  I've been saying for a long time now that people with the ability and motivation to make money in tech could probably easily do as well or better in other avenues. Tech entrepreneurship has its own rewards but on average it's hardly easy money.
- WickyNilliams 14y ago
  Very interesting! I've been wanting to investigate this kind of thing for a while but just don't know where to start. Can you point me to any resources that will give me a good grounding in investment? In what way did you invest in real estate? How do you choose what to invest in? Would love for some direction here, would be very much appreciated
  - 14y ago
mittermayr 14y ago
I created FRUJI.com (Twitter Analytics service) and it keeps generating a minimum of about $50 a day, sometimes (often) more. It's fully self-maintained (unless the server or database crashes), which is just purely amazing. The machines sell, process the orders, upgrade, and provide the customer experience. All I did was programming it. I go for a run, my phone rings a couple of times, I look, PRO account purchased, PRO account purchased, THIS IS F* AWESOME. I tried creating/selling other things to businesses. This time, it's mostly you and me's, paying it out of their own wallets. Never expected this to work so well.
- hboon 14y ago
  ablabs.me (mentioned in your profile) doesn't seem to work.
- prawn 14y ago
  Been trying for 15 minutes and haven't been able to get the site to come up.
- sr3d 14y ago
  I think your pricing is really low. Even for the Pro plan, you're offering quite a bit of benefits so you can definitely charge more. $25/year is too low. It should be a monthly-recurring charge, something like $9.99/month for the Pro plan would do.
bdunn 14y ago
A little over $2700/mo with Planscope (https://planscope.io https://planscope.io), my SaaS product that's been out since February. I'm averaging about a 8% growth rate month to month, so very excited about how things are going. * Bootstrapped * Raised my consulting rates to free up more time for products (= same amount of consulting income) * Most new customers come via referrals from existing users and organic traffic (via targeted blog posts) * Wrote a complementary book targeting people who aren't necessarily looking for PM software (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com), and upselling Planscope through that. Extremely successful so far.
- brador 14y ago
  I love the layouts on these SAAS products. Is there a central resource you guys all use for design? Any recommended reading? Websites/blogs?
  - bdunn 14y ago
    The winning formula: Headline that keeps people from clicking the back button; subheadline that briefly describes the product; a few bullet points, testimonials, or short blurbs of text describing the benefits of the product; supporting imagery (screenshot); clear call to action (sign up!) I did my own design, but there are plenty of themes out there that could incorporate the above formula and do just as well (or better).
    - brador 14y ago
      Thanks, And how about for the Saas software itself? I note a lack of pure black text, it's always a dark shade of gray...softens the look nicely. Little touches like that, anywhere those tips come from? Any blogs, forums or such to follow on the design of saas software, specifically webapp deaign?
      - TimJRobinson 14y ago
        Check out theme forest, as a coder with very little design skills I generally grab a design from there Then once you are sure people want the product hire a design er to overhaul and improve your design (or you can do it yourself)
kevbam 14y ago
I used make about €200 a month on hubpages until Google Panda hit.The majority of this came via Amazon affiliate sales. I still make a bit now, but it is way down.
- ja27 14y ago
  I was making about $30/month from Amazon affiliate and Adsense on two different blogs. Once Panda hit, my Amazon affiliate blog died but the Adsense one (sports) does more like $150/month now
  - matznerd 14y ago
    Panda slaps are recoverable in most cases, you just have to change strategy...
cmaxwell 14y ago
-$20/mo from http://www.golfingstat.com http://www.golfingstat.com. Can't get any traffic and the traffic I do get doesn't click on ads. FML
- TreyS 14y ago
  I would have loved this kind of thing when I played junior golf. I spent a lot of time making spreadsheets with all of my statistics. Have you tried marketing towards junior players? AJGA and some of the really competitive junior tours have a lot of serious players who would love to have comprehensive stats on their rounds.
- softbuilder 14y ago
  That's really a pity because I expect the golf demographic to substantially overlap with the middle-aged-white-guy demographic which I've seen have high CPCs. How are you driving folks to the site?
- cmaxwell 14y ago
  I had $200 of adsense free credit. Ended up getting users (like 100). Then I had $50 of Facebook credit and that turned into like 20-30 users. Just don't know what to do at this point. Don't want to spend more time adding features if it is not going to lead to anything. Was thinking of making it like $10 a year or something and trying to get paid users instead of ad users. Just not sure if anyone would even pay $10.
  - jvanderwal 14y ago
    The beauty of golf is people spend a lot of money on it. I'd charge people a premium to use it. Couple recommendations: Lose the pop-up for Facebook sign-in. Optimize it for mobile (you're probably going to use this while you're in the cart). For marketing, try going directly to some clubs and getting in front of some of their members. Some exclusive clubs probably won't let you, but start small. Can't hurt.
    - cmaxwell 14y ago
ynh 14y ago
I make a little over 600$ selling a Newsletter script on Codecanyon http://codecanyon.net/item/newsletter-mailer-v13/149365 http://codecanyon.net/item/newsletter-mailer-v13/149365 Currently I am planing a SaaS Newsletter Mailer.
- noirman 14y ago
  MailChimp?
- ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
  I use your script. It's very nice and worth the price, but the script setup is more complicated than it needs to be and the smtp is broken and I'm forced to use phpmailer. Two things I've never had issues with from all the other scripts I've installed on my server over the past 7 years. I'd still prefer it over SaaS Mail because I don't have re-occuring costs every month and I like being in control of my own email lists and the iframe embedded email newsletter signup is awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm the one that asked you about how to check the database to see if a user had already signed up for a specific category newsletter before adding them to it again. That's another thing you should fix. 3 little flaws but the rest of the script is just sooooo perfect. It's sold over 1800+ times because designers/developers like us HATE SaaS newsletter mailers. We like your script.
  - matznerd 14y ago
    The problem with running your own mail script is your inboxing rate. Your IP is not going to be white listed and it can really hurt you later on. Not to hate on the OP, but if you are building a serious business that needs to ensure deliverability of email to users, I recommend an outside provider like SendGrid, SailThru, MailGun, MailChimp, iContact, etc...
    - ynh 14y ago
      The software also supports Amazon SES
egypturnash 14y ago
In a couple months I'll find out of the first full year of my Tarot deck's publication[1] will have resulted in continuing royalties. It came out only a couple months before the end of last fiscal year, and came close to earning out its advance, so I'm hopeful. Royalties: passive income 1.0. [1] http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/ http://egypt.urnash.com/tarot/
rdm2234 14y ago
Created an iOS dev company few months ago w/ a friend. We made $50k in August from a successful free iphone app. (around $40k in a regular month). We are only two in the company and we are still college students. Don't know what to say more about this but feel free to ask any question (except what is the app ^^)
- brador 14y ago
  Any tips on getting traffic to an app?
  - rdm2234 14y ago
    focus on popular niches, but not overdid ones (ex: games). Some have a lot of opportunities.
- dave1619 14y ago
  What ad networks do you use? How many daily impressions are you getting and at what eCPM?
  - rdm2234 14y ago
    10M/day ECPM ~$0.19
- bradddd 14y ago
  did you make that developing games for someone else, or is it revenue garnered from a game you made?
  - rdm2234 14y ago
    not a game, an app we made for ourselves. Our first one and we only work on this one now due to lack of time (takes a lot of time to maintain a 500k monthly users app :p)
    - bradddd 14y ago
timurtamerlan 14y ago
$25k in revenue, ~$15k in net income (at 12-15% monthly growth) from http://jivosite.ru http://jivosite.ru (English version http://jivosite.com http://jivosite.com is yet work in progress). This is online chat for e-commerce web sites sold primarily to russian-speaking audience, USA & Europe sales start in 2-3 months. Bootstrapped, no office, 2 co-founders (1 business+tech, 1 tech), 3 employees (1 marketing, 1 customer support, 1 programmer).
- rizz0 14y ago
  How long have you worked on that, and how long have you been in business in Russia?
  - timurtamerlan 14y ago
    We started coding in october 2011, first pilot customer was december 2011, and active sales started february 2012, with approx linear growth ever since. I'm in business since 2008, and this is my second business, first one was hosted PBX service.
- yudmiy 14y ago
  неплохо, хотя думал что больше)
dangrossman 14y ago
I won't go into numbers, but I make a living running http://www.improvely.com http://www.improvely.com , http://www.w3counter.com http://www.w3counter.com , and http://www.dialshield.com http://www.dialshield.com Improvely is a monthly subscription with a free trial period, W3Counter is freemium, and DialShield is pay-as-you-go. They are all bootstrapped and profitable.
- timurtamerlan 14y ago
  How do you compete with Google Analytics? From the first glance, most of the features of Improvely might be implemented with GA as well... or am I getting something wrong?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- xjones 14y ago
  Dan, I respect your decision to not discuss numbers, but judging by the quality of your products I'd have to guess you're generating an extremely healthy revenue stream. Of all the SaaS entrepreneurs I've found, you seem to be the one who's closest to exactly where I want to be eventually (running a suite of SaaS products). Do you have any general tips for people following the same path? Anything you'd do differently?
- crawdog 14y ago
  Your products look great!
brendino 14y ago
A flash game I built in high school (about 7 years ago) went from an average of $30 per month on AdSense to $500 the next month, to $3,600 the month after that due to an unexpected surge in traffic for a keyword for which it ranked #1 on Google. The $3,600 month happened in May, and it has since dropped steadily to about $1,500 a month now. Regardless, it was a nice surprise since the game was just sitting there from when I spent a weekend building it a long time ago.
- rizz0 14y ago
  Which game is that?
- Eduard 14y ago
  How is it making money? With ads?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
iguanayou 14y ago
I launched http://bestattendance.com http://bestattendance.com 20 months ago working solo while holding a full time job. Profitable and bootstrapped. Growth was slow at first, but things are really starting to take off now. It still does not support a full time income but I project that it will soon(ish).
philip1209 14y ago
I make about $5/month on Food Trucks Near Me [1] through ads. At least it's not losing money! [1] http://foodtrucksnearme.com http://foodtrucksnearme.com
- noirman 14y ago
  I assume the hosting is not free?
  - philip1209 14y ago
    I'm on a single Heroku dyno, which is free.
- matznerd 14y ago
  PUT MORE ADS! In between each row should be an ad unit! Contact all the Food Truck owners and get them to put up an ad on a monthly basis. Food Truck owners are relatively easy to sell to (I have experience here) because their business is small. Take that money and reinvest it back into generating traffic and build your own list of food truck customers and then charge for blasts etc...
  - philip1209 14y ago
    Fair enough! I'm writing a Stripe page to allow food truck owners to buy a 'priority listing.' It's currently set at $100/month and you are put in the top row. I'm thinking of dropping it to $20/mo. Any input on pricing?
    - phil 14y ago
      Impossible to offer pricing advice without knowing about your traffic. Done right, you are offering a fairly valuable form of advertising and one that restaurateurs understand well.
    - matznerd 14y ago
      Since you have 4 cities, you can test different prices in each. $100 sounds a bit steep for a food truck unless you can guarantee ROI for them. I think it would be smarter to just add more cities and keep the price lower. I would try something like $25 a spot and try to make them sign a 3-month advertising contract. If they balk, just remember you have 30 other food trucks and only 3 spots. This makes more sense if you had a good amount of traffic.
joss82 14y ago
I generate maybe $10 a month after paying expenses (server, some small design work) on this spare time website, through adwords: http://www.challengelistcreator.com http://www.challengelistcreator.com Not sure it could go much further though.
codypo 14y ago
I have had a few interesting experiments here in the past year. Experiment 0: I bought a hotel affiliate site off of flippa. It did pretty well initially, but I didn't do enough investigation into how the previous owner had been generating traffic. In short, there was a lot of untoward stuff going on. As I was getting all of that straightened out, the site got (deservedly) banned from Google's index for a few key terms. I made my money back and learned a valuable lesson: don't buy sites off of flippa. Experiment 1: I created a few different sites around a big product launch, and monetized via product reviews and the Amazon Affiliate program. This worked very well for a period of time; the site was grossing $100 a day for several weeks with essentially 0 work. Slowly, my site dipped in the rankings for the key terms as much bigger players got their act together. From this, I learned that one-off sites can be valuable, but probably not in the long term. I should've sold the sites at their peak. Experiment 2: I wrote some algorithms to find underpriced stocks and then examinate a few strategies around that security's options. This was actually a lot of fun. Based on my program, I ended up buying out-of-the-money puts on 5 or 6 different stocks. I'm sitting on a small profit right now. The next step is to exit my positions, finetune the algorithms based on a few key things I learned, and put more money into action.
- codypo 14y ago
  One note here: Experiment 2 isn't exactly passive income, not until I get a lot more comfortable with the code. That's the goal, though, and I think it's the likely choice for the greatest amount of income (and least amount of work) in the long run.
  - thejerz 14y ago
    Are you willing to tell more about Experiment 2? What kind of strategy are you using? What development platform (e.g. what language and libraries and what OS)? What trading platform (e.g. what brokerage / API)? Where did you get your test market data from / how much did you pay? What other strategies did you try first that didn't work? What blogs or sites do you read on the subject? What is your background in? Finance/Econ? Or programming? What other details would you like to offer? Some of us are very interested in this field. :)
nathanbarry 14y ago
I make between $1,500 and $2,500 (used to be higher) on the App Store from two iOS apps (called OneVoice and Fluent). The rest of my income comes from design consulting. Right now I am working on a new book that launches on Tuesday about designing iOS applications. If you are interested in iOS apps you should check it out: http://nathanbarry.com/inside-app-design-handbook http://nathanbarry.com/inside-app-design-handbook
sunnynagra 14y ago
We get anywhere from $50-250 per month from an iOS app called Basketball Shot Tracker HD (www.slyceapps.com/shottracker). It tends to depend on how close it is to the basketball season. We found the in app purchase model to work really well for us.
fourstar 14y ago
~10 bucks a month. http://hipsterorhomeless.com http://hipsterorhomeless.com :|
- mkhalil 14y ago
  genius!
- matznerd 14y ago
  Funny concept. Re-arrange the layout so that the ad units are on the left and right of the photos, not all the way down on the bottom. Also, allow for tagging so that the ads are more closely related. Also, after clicking the vote, it just takes me to the next page after quickly displaying the score, I want to know if the person is actually homeless or hipster? There are a few directions you can take this, and while I doubt it could ever be your main income source, you have potential to at least bring in a few hundred per month. ..
  - fourstar 14y ago
    Hey thanks for the tips :) This was my first actual site done from scratch. I've come a long way now and work for an awesome company, and have another website that I am eagerly trying to find time to complete, but I definitely will try to attack some (all maybe?) of those ideas that you've shared!
    - matznerd 14y ago
      No problem, if you need any other tips or clarification, fee free to drop me a line... Good luck!
- devb0x 14y ago
  Interesting concept there, plus some great shots
DanHulton 14y ago
$0, but hey I just launched. Asked again in a year. (For those interested, it's a security plugin for Wordpress: http://www.panic-press.com http://www.panic-press.com)
- zackzackzack 14y ago
  This is smart. Kudos.
- RobotCaleb 14y ago
  Neat idea. I like it.
- matznerd 14y ago
  I recommend putting some sort of security seal or emblem instead of just "Protected." on the pricing page or and some other places... http://www.panic-press.com/pricing http://www.panic-press.com/pricing
- nickwoodhams 14y ago
  Dig the design Pricing page needs a sign up button
tluyben2 14y ago
I see a lot of people mentioning passive income; i'm not a native English speaker; is recurring the same as passive? If you make $xxxx every month with a job it's recurring right? But that doesn't count here? As I see some 'used to' posts as well; I used to make quite a bit from blogging (especially reviews I did, but real ones, not paid ones), however Google Panda tanked that. Even though it was nice content. It made over $10k/month. Dropped to around $100 which is just enough to pay the server.
- fuzzythinker 14y ago
  Passive income means you built a method of generating income while you're doing minimal to zero work, example, built a website that require maybe an hour of work per week/month, or built a biz where operations have been/can be delegated to someone else. Having income from a "job" is active income where you actively have to work (or pretend to work if your work can actually be automated and you've managed to fool your boss otherwise).
- corysama 14y ago
  "passive" means "not active", as in "I didn't do anything." Here people are talking about projects that, after they are set up, continue to generate income with minimal continued work being put into it. This is in contrast to a product that you continue to invest work in maintaining, supporting or selling.
anon_educator 14y ago
I have a free website/webapp in the education space that does about $90k/m right now (2012-2013 school year) while school is in session, and grows about 2.5x each year. Revenue is 100% Adsense. I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.
- slig 14y ago
  I'll be entering in the "worksheets" space, both free ones made by us and worksheets generators. I have a kind of a niche in a non-English website and I think it's a nice move. Do you happen to work on anything related to that? Thanks!
  - anon_educator 14y ago
    Nope, nothing like that.
- ryankeiser 14y ago
  Is the site/app targeted towards educators or students?
  - holgersindbaek 14y ago
    What's the website called?
    - olalonde 14y ago
      > I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.
  - anon_educator 14y ago
    It was originally targeted to students, but more specifically individuals not necessarily students who want to improve on our particular skill. Over time we found out that our user base was about 80% students in k-12 schools, so I added a lot of tools specifically for teachers to manage lots of students, and I've also started targeting educators more in my site copy. It was very unexpected, with my thinking being that schools had their own paid solutions and would not be willing to use an ad supported product, but I was definitely wrong!
domainkiller 14y ago
$700 to $3000 a month running 2 job boards. UXJobs and MusicGigs. http://uxjobs.org http://uxjobs.org - this is a site I've had for about 4 years and slowly dominated the search term "UX Jobs". It's powered by SimplyHired (jobamatic) but using my own framework for pulling in jobs. The revenue from this site is 60% job postings and 40% clicking on other SimplyHired jobs. MusicGigs http://musicgigs.org http://musicgigs.org is using the standalone jobamatic platform. It's revenues are 80% simplyhired clicks and 20% job postings. No advertising, just a good SEO strategy and time.
akeck 14y ago
I haven't gotten very far into passive income. So far, I get 10.00/quarter in sparse CafePress sales and ~60.00/quarter from dividend investments. CafePress has been a rough ride. I've put up a good number of designs I think should do well, but have yet to sell. That being said, I'm not really putting time into all of the other aspects of doing well with CafePress. At this point, dividend investments seem to be an easier route to consistent passive income.
nonce42 14y ago
About $10-100 a month through Amazon Associates on a moderately popular blog (usually the lower amount). And $12,000 a month from a small Bay Area office building.
patio11 14y ago
Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Sales are up by about 40% year-to-date over last year, owing to a combination of increased AdWords spend, organic growth in the business, and a successful redesign (and related conversion optimization) right before summer. Appointment Reminder is doing fairly decently -- monthly recurring revenues (on the publicly available plans) are up about 4x versus the last thread. I've recently gotten some time to actually work on it (my wedding kept me busy for much of the earlier part of this year). My run rate is currently up about 50% since, oh, two months ago? (Why? Interesting question -- re-did pricing, tweaked my marketing knob to "slightly more than zero work", and started getting a wee bit serious about e.g. my use of email to people in their trial period.) The enterprise pipeline, which is not tracked in those figures, is... well, like all enterprise sales operations ever, I cry a lot and dry my tears on stacks of money. Not terribly relevant to folks who like recurring revenue because it feels like avoiding work, since Enterprise Sales is pretty much exactly what work always felt like, but it is work you get to bank in the past and then get a fairly motivational check from monthly for the present and extending into the future. I guess consulting doesn't count as recurring revenue, at least not on my model, so I'll skip it. I'm productizing one of my consulting offerings and should be releasing it later this month -- we'll see if that works out.
- cmaxwell 14y ago
  patio11 is a god...can't imagine his consulting offerings will fail.
  - patio11 14y ago
    While I appreciate the sentiment, I would appreciate it even more if you that that I was impressive for shipping stuff and gradually doing process tweaks targeted at things that actually matter. People jump directly from "X is a god" to "I am mortal, and therefore, cannot be like X." Pretty much all HNers capable of shipping product are equally capable of doing the sort of things I do to tweak those products' success upwards. There's not really any secret sauce or black magic involved, and to the extent that I'm better at it than other folks are, that's largely a function of a) having six years of practice and b) actually using the bag o' tricks. (Most common process failure with A/B testing: not A/B testing. Most common failure mode for lifecycle emails: sending 0 emails. Most common pricing mistake: doing no work on pricing whatsoever. etc, etc)
pook 14y ago
Domainkiller, you have apparently been hellbanned since your one-word comment 38 days ago.
cageface 14y ago
Was pulling ~$600/month from iOS apps but yanked them all off the market in response to Apple's patent bullying. I plan to port the ones that make sense to Android.
- mkhalil 14y ago
  I appreciate the stand against the horrible lawsuit, but your hurting yourself far more then your hurting Apple. Maybe take that 600 and use it to inform people of how you feel about Apple, or FEED a bunch of families.
  - cageface 14y ago
    The problem is that $600/month, in its own small way, strengthens and legitimizes Apple as a platform. Living in Vietnam I definitely appreciate the dire needs of some people in the world but I also think that the stakes in these cases are very high. I expect to have a similar Android portfolio in the next six months anyway.
    - tomotomo 14y ago
      Do you happen to live in Saigon? If so I'd love to meet up.
- signalsignal 14y ago
  Since you won't be selling them on the app store, what are the names of the apps?
  - cageface 14y ago
    The major ones are on my site: http://www.plastaq.com/ http://www.plastaq.com/
marcofloriano 14y ago
First, sorry by my English (i'm Brazilian) Last year i recorded an Joomla course (video) by myself and sold it successful on Google. Made around $500 per month (R$1.000,00), for around six months. Than a new version of the tool was available and my course was out of date. So instead of recording a new one, i build an entire site with PHP and MYSQL (www.cursos7.com.br). There my students can watch the courses online. Right now i have one course, the Joomla one, but it's up to date. It's selling good, around $500 (R$1k) last month (august). Now i'm recording the WordPress one. You see it's not passive income, i have to record a lot of videos, but i'm doing this at my free time (do IT Consulting to eat and i'm finishing my graduation in CS). My wife have a small food blog, delicie.com.br that's generating $20 per month. I help as web designer. Everything is very small and new right now, but i think in two or three years we will have bigger numbers to show.
muratmutlu 14y ago
This is one of my favourite Ask HN's, really insightful
emilw 14y ago
Right, I've pondered a while if I should be posting this but here goes. Out of sheer boredom I created a adult orientated site, yes the whole nine-nsfw-yards stuff. It's free to use, no sign ups, no premium accounts, no ads, no pop-ups etc. Content is user generated and aggregated. Aug 3rd - Sep 2nd 2012: Visits: 81,045 Unique Visitors: 54,386 Pageviews: 3,189,136 Pages / Visit: 39.35 Avg. Visit Duration: 00:14:12 % New Visits: 63.69% Are these numbers good enough to even start thinking about monetization?
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
I'm the proud Loser of the bunch, behold my magnificent FAILS. (The ironic thing is, I do UI/UX consulting. So I make time to optimize other people's sites but not my own) http://residentevilradio.com http://residentevilradio.com = -$10/month in shoutcast server hosting (will switch to HTML5/Flash jukebox soon) http://timeforzen.com http://timeforzen.com = $0 no monetization or affiliate links yet http://tasck.com/2 http://tasck.com/2 (NOT finished, PRE-ALPHA) = $0 no monetization or affiliate links yet ===== Dead Links Below ===== http://moviestop.info http://moviestop.info (success, no income, now offline/sunsetted) http://humanchan.com http://humanchan.com (failure, no income, now offline) http://humanchannel.net http://humanchannel.net (failure, no income, now offline) http://onenotes.com http://onenotes.com (failure, never launched) http://businessgardening.com http://businessgardening.com (failure, no income, no traffic, now offline) http://extremephotoshopping.com http://extremephotoshopping.com (failure, a little traffic, no income, now offline) As you can see, I'm a designer (markup, some php, some javascript, some jquery), not a developer. I can hack things together, build original themes, but can't code complex things from scratch. So I have to stick with small projects that I can actually finish. It sucks but I'm working my way up. I've got some really interesting sites, products, and services I want to experiment with in the future as I learn to program as much as I can. http://chrisnorstrom.com http://chrisnorstrom.com (the best site I ever launched, a small collection of my ideas and inventions (the non-patentable ones anyway) ) BTW, We should start a fail thread where everyone posts all the failed projects/startups they've worked on over the years.
- npguy 14y ago
  Here is the fail thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4469081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4469081
consultutah 14y ago
http://testplanmanagement.com http://testplanmanagement.com = $2,000/month http://courtdatereminder.com http://courtdatereminder.com = ~$100/month http://enigmatic.me http://enigmatic.me = ~$200/month http://jobs.consultutah.com http://jobs.consultutah.com = ~$30/month http://rubytoolbox.com http://rubytoolbox.com = ~$10/month
- sherwin 14y ago
  I'm assuming you mean https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/? Props! I use that site all the time... surprised that it only nets you $10/month
  - consultutah 14y ago
    Nope. I wish Id thought of what he did there. Mine is just a job board for ruby devs now.
heliodor 14y ago
I make about $200 per month from Android app sales. $30,000 and counting over the last few years. Back when Android had no apps (2008-2009) and all you could do was check the 'new apps' list for new releases, I noticed a spy camera app was released. The app was terrible and there were many comments asking for various features. I took a day off work, repackaged some camera code I had from a work-in-progress app, implemented the requested features, and blew the competition out of the water.
dherken 14y ago
I make between $500 und $100 per month off my stand-alone cross-browser testing tool: http://www.browseemall.com http://www.browseemall.com The product was launched on february this year and it's growing nicely so far. Not real recurring yet, as every sale comes with one year of free updates.
- ctek 14y ago
  Interesting. How many unique views a month does your site get now and what kind of conversion rates are you seeing? I am planning to launch a paid version of my app, http://www.pageblox.com http://www.pageblox.com and my potential customers are also developers/designers.
  - dherken 14y ago
    About 200 - 300 a day...
sideprojectbook 14y ago
we just launched an ebook that has 17 interviews with hackers who built recurring revenue apps: http://www.sideprojects.com http://www.sideprojects.com
- 7null 14y ago
  nice, how much have you made on the ebook
gagabity 14y ago
About $300/Month on over a dozen Android Apps all Ad supported. AdMob with Mediation including Millennial Media.
muellerwolfram 14y ago
i made ~80$ in the first month after launching http://www.themescroller.com http://www.themescroller.com i had a lot of traffic coming from my show hn thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354376 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4354376) but since then i'm struggling to find new traffic sources...
- JayNeely 14y ago
  I'd write a personal email to some writers at web design blogs. SmashingMagazine might be interested.
DominikR 14y ago
About 500€ with an Android app (a Facebook client, link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster), though I do not know if it will go up or down in the future, since I've just activated payment options in my app. (activated In app purchase on 1st August, released Pro version a few days ago) Haven't done any marketing other then contacting a bunch of blogs (~20) before realizing that this feels a lot like "farming" in a MMORPG, which I hate doing, so I stopped. ;-/ Other than that, it's a nice playground for trying new stuff, which in some cases is directly reused in the products I build for the startup I am working for.
nodemaker 14y ago
I made an app for reading Hacker News called HackerNode which makes about $300 a month. http://www.hackerno.de http://www.hackerno.de Do you guys have any ideas on how I can increase revenues? Thinking of a subscription based model with a lot of killer features but don't know if there is a market for it.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- hilko 14y ago
  Only thing I can think of is to often look at AlienBlue for inspiration.
NameNickHN 14y ago
We run a couple of short URL and disposable e-mail websites like http://melt.li/ http://melt.li/ or http://www.fakeinbox.com/ http://www.fakeinbox.com/ that make around $280 per month. That's not much, obviously, but there was one month last year where we made $3.400 due to a traffic surge caused by someone using one of our short URL domains for spamming.
jjets718 14y ago
$8 a month from http://pillsoftware.com http://pillsoftware.com, but I just launched, so I'm hoping to get more traffic soon.
marcosero 14y ago
In my spare time during my first year of university, I coded a Mac app to calculate arithmetic and weighted average for italian universities: http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/mylibretto/id470129723?mt=12 http://itunes.apple.com/it/app/mylibretto/id470129723?mt=12 I gained almost 50 $/month during last two years and it costs me some hours a year for customer support.
egomaksab 14y ago
Just launched, $0/month . Breeze ( http://letsbreeze.com http://letsbreeze.com ), a simple agile project management tool. It's kind a hybrid between Trello and Basecamp (yes, the interface design is influenced by Basecamp, but it kicks ass :) ) Basically it's a Kanban board with added time tracking and reports.
orangethirty 14y ago
I just launched hacker fiction. It is a collection of stories (no more than 100 pages long) focused on hacking, sci-fy, and just about anything else I can imagine. It already made its first $20 on launch day. :) You can read a sampler here: http://orangethirty.blogspot.com/2012/09/hackfy-space-raven-issue-1.html http://orangethirty.blogspot.com/2012/09/hackfy-space-raven-... I don thave a website yet, because Im still testing the idea to see if its worth investing time in. Plans would be to write a collection of stories and then sell them. Maybe some merchandise if any of the stories stick.
jbrains 14y ago
I generate about $25k/year in mostly-passive-income from single family rental homes. I average 20 hours/year maintaining this income stream in answering email, collecting invoices for my accountant, and making the occasional tough decision about renovating/repairing/waiting. I got there after placing subcontractors for about 2 years with various companies, which built up the cash reserves that let me purchase the rental properties with no mortgages. I got /there/ by inviting some young dude to a conference I organised whom I'd met at another conference. He and I worked together to match talented young programmers with companies that wanted them. Nice work if you can get it.
mapster 14y ago
~$200/mo from digital download ecommerce site I launched last April. I have 3,200 products, all made by me. Magento store, $15/mo hosting. Adding more products and services in the future.
robbiemitchell 14y ago
Over $100k last year from educationalrap.com - ~45 educational rap songs, divided into middle school subject areas, that include PDF worksheets and multiple versions of each song - One-time purchases via song/album downloads and shipped CDs; recurring subscriptions to rrr.fm, a streaming music service for schools we contracted out (built on Rails) - rrr.fm signup happens via Formstack, which drops the data into Campaign Monitor, PayPal, and our app - $0 spent on advertising - Sells mostly to teachers directly, but also to schools, libraries, etc. - Part-time help to handle support and ship the CDs - Still paying off debt from production and high burns 2007-2008, but comfortably cash-flow positive for a while now
tachibana 14y ago
Sorry, no hard numbers for privacy reasons. The basic living needs of my family (food, clothing, mortgage, utilities, cars, etc.) has been covered by my investment portfolio for several years by now. Any additional income goes straight towards increasing said portfolio. Rough estimates for the source of the principal for the investment income: - 50% - savings from worked income - 30% - earnings from real estate investments - 20% - earnings from outside consulting / freelance software projects. I personally believe that anybody who exercises a fair amount of discipline to save away their income and spend reasonably can become financially independent within 15-20 years. Thanks to what I learned from my accounting classes, I was able to accomplish this in less than 10 years.
- mattm 14y ago
  This is what I'm currently aiming for. I have about $100/month coming in from dividends and distributions and am looking to seriously ramp this up. I haven't really been paying that much attention until now. I figure if I take on side work, I could have my basic expenses covered within 5 years and within 10 years I would have enough to cover expenses for any children that might come along in the future and provide some cushion.

noirman 14y ago

The food blog is awesome! http://www.theyummylife.com/Refrigerator_Oatmeal http://www.theyummylife.com/Refrigerator_Oatmeal

tedmiston 14y ago
The detail and personal experience make it feel more adventurous than a normal cookbook or recipe blog. I have a few questions: * Are you building on top of a blog platform, or is this mostly custom? (The BuiltWith page makes this site appear full of tech [1]). * What % of the revenue comes from Amazon referral links? * Are there other revenue sources? * Can you discuss your visitor distribution (first time vs. repeat), and traffic sources? 1: http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fwww.theyummylife.com%2fRefrigerator_Oatmeal http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fwww.theyummylife.com%2fRe...
- the_bear 14y ago
  The blog is entirely custom. Several years ago I made my own blogging software just as a fun side-project, and I decided to use that code as the base for The Yummy Life. It sucks missing out on all the great WordPress plugins, but it's really nice having absolute control over the entire experience. I know you technically have control with WordPress, but it's much harder to edit someone else's code than your own (for me, anyway). Until recently, Amazon made up almost all of our revenue. Now that we're doing slightly better with advertising, Amazon makes up about 60-70%. We also sell a $1 eBook, but we only sell about one per day, so that revenue isn't significant. This information isn't up-to-date, but you can read a blog post about our monetization: http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_a_blog_in_30_days%3A_what_worked_and_what_didnt http://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/articles/259/How_I_monetized_... Visitor information: -65% new, 35% returning -1.7 pages per visit -1.2 million page views last month -Most traffic comes from Pinterest or direct. We get ~3000 visitors from search each day. My mom (understandably) hates link building, so we don't have many inbound links meaning there's not much referral traffic, and we also have weak SEO relative to other blogs our size. -Almost all traffic comes from the U.S.
  - tedmiston 14y ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  - verganileonardo 14y ago
    Have you ever tried selling the book for $30+? Probably the user do not see enough value in a $1 ebook to justify the effort to make the purchase...
001sky 14y ago
Awesome! also: w/steel cut oats cook 1 min+chill =>AM bingo

My aim is actually not to spend very much time on investing. Investing is not my area of specialization and I want to enjoy a high quality of life. I take advantage of division of labor to monetize what I do best--software development. In a past life, I read many books on investing, primarily Jack Schwager's Market Wizards and my personal favorite, Reminisces of a Stock Operator. There's a lot of interesting stuff about the markets--game theory, behavioral finance--but unless you're going to spend a lot of time on it, the markets can be approximated as casinos for which you do not have an edge. Best to put your money in small and mid-cap index funds. Similarly, most consumer real estate investments take a lot of time to manage (rental properties), so I've focused on my home, something which I would have to maintain anyway. In this climate you can get a loan so cheap you're best off putting as little down as possible and investing the rest. But you may want to buy a house within the next year or so as a hedge against inflation and to take advantage of the unholy combination of low interest rates and a relatively cheap housing market. If the Euro cracks or the Fed ends up printing money, we may find ourselves in an inflationary environment. If you have a fixed rate loan, you're golden--your income will rise with inflation, but your monthly payments will not, cheapening your debts. Overall, my advice is to focus on setting up some compounding investments very early in life. Many people dabble in all kinds of things, like entrepreneurship, as a youth because they're fun. It's important to have hobbies, but for things that really matter, you can't afford to fool around. For example, I could join Y Combinator straight out of school and spend two years at a startup eating Ramen, or I could join Google and eat Ramen. If I did the latter, I'd have $50K in my 401Ks and up to $150K in other investments. Invested wisely, proceeds from those two years will give you $4M of today's dollars at retirement, even if you don't invest another penny--a nice safety net which will allow you to do riskier things later on in life. Entrepreneurship is a lottery ticket which is likely to fail. There are only so many good businesses (born of confluences of macro trends) out there, and it's hard to be in the right place at the right time. You could try to get lucky and end up scratching a living out of hardscrabbble, or you could use your talent to rise within the few companies which are actually printing money, and then let your dollars work for you.

cmaxwell 14y ago
Now that I have your attention.. my site: http://www.golfingstat.com http://www.golfingstat.com Should I quit it (brokeback style), spend some time making it mobile + setting a annual fee and trying to find the magic adwords amount to grow my userbase without losing money or keep on keeping on (trying to make some ad revenue with my current userbase of 150ish)
- patio11 14y ago
  I know little about golf. I know a bit more about selling software -- I can tell you, for example, that "Facebook integration" is not a benefit for most people (you mention it prominently like you believe it solves problems, but no golfer wakes up in the morning and goes "You know what was missing from my last golf game? Facebook!"). You're not making economically rational decisions trying to sell ad networ ads against a userbase smaller than X00,000 to X million. (You can have one-off ad deals which are viable much smaller than that, but that gets you into ad sales.) You're probably not going to have success with AdWords unless you can get people to a 3 figure LTV -- "make it mobile" does not strike me as getting you there given what I know about app store economics. But help me on the golf front. Does this solve an actual problem real people actually have in their lives? Have you talked to avid golfers and have gnashed their teeth about how not knowing Average Score By Hole Distance is just crushing their enjoyment of the sport? Are these customers willing to pay for better golf scores, for example because it helps them invite more clients to more golf games and hence close more real estate sales, which is the reason they golf in the first place? Talk to your customers. (Or the people who should be your customers if you were actually charging for this, which -- by the way -- is a great discipline to have from day 1 since it focuses you on reality.) If they're not wildly hair-on-fire enthusiastic about this, I don't know that I would spend lots of time on this when for the same effort of getting you from 150 non-paying users to 300 non-paying users would let you write software people that people would passionately care about.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Agreed. He should make sure people actually want to use this, and if not, then just move on. Seems he built the software before testing if there was a market for it. Golfers spend lots of money on the actual game and equipment, though. So maybe he could use this as a channel to sell some golf equipment. Maybe he can test different golf balls and then have the software tell people which to buy from his website. Though this would require more resources to be invested into it.
- nwilkens 14y ago
  As an avid golfer, the only golf tools I have paid for are: League scoring systems & Callaway uPRO GPS for course downloads. A few thoughts.. Have a free individual version (many of which are league members), and give them an incentive to switch their league to this platform. A mobile scoring system integrated into league play allowing you to see realtime scores against your competitors may be compelling.
  - trafficlight 14y ago
    I've never golfed before, but I'm a huge bowler. During league, we have a lot of side-bets going on between individuals. High game pots, high series, brackets, etc. Is golf league similar? In bowling, it's obviously very easy to keep track of the current score and standings throughout the night. Would a live scoring tool enable, or improve, this aspect of league?
- danenania 14y ago
  I think there's definitely a market for this type of tool if you target it correctly. I'm only a casual golfer, but my dad's a golfing nut. He plays everyday with likeminded golf nut friends, and they all track and talk about their stats to varying degrees. They also watch golf on TV and play fantasy golf leagues. I could see my dad and his friends getting utterly obsessive about a tool like this if it was done right. I could also see them paying for it if they liked it. Golfers tend to be pretty well off on average. I don't think they're likely to be very price conscious about a <$20/month service if it brings them any value or enjoyment at all. That said, I think you need to work on your presentation and design. It doesn't inspire much excitement. Instead of listing features and talking about the app, I would focus more on capturing the user's imagination. Don't tell them what the app does. Tell them why they should care. Communicate more on an emotional level. That's where the decision to use/buy will be made. The screenshots also look a bit dull. I know it's just an analytics dashboard, but I think a shiny interface is going to be important. You don't want someone's subconscious visual impression to be 'glorified excel spreadsheet', you want it to be 'futuristic intelligent stat crunching engine that magically improves your score'. Regardless of what the app does, the way it looks will deeply influence how powerful it is perceived to be. Imagine a golfing scene from some sci-fi movie set 100 years in the future. What's the interface on their super advanced tablet going to look like? That's what to aim for. Last piece of advice: I would look at the ads in golf magazines or on TV for guidance on design and language. Selling equipment, gadgets, and media to golf nuts is a huge industry. The companies that have been around for awhile are experts at marketing to this demographic. The same techniques that convince someone to buy a new $500 driver or instructional dvds or some useless magnetic bracelet could definitely convince them to buy software that provides useful statistics if you present it right.
  - jonwinstanley 14y ago
    I agree with a lot of the points here. Also - I think you should work on your slide show content and the headlines. Title's such as "Golf Stats" and "Golf Handicap" will not inspire your users. Hit them with something more interesting and thought provoking. Your main heading might be the first thing your potential customer reads so make it memorable.
- kerryfalk 14y ago
  If you're not already familiar with them: www.golfshot.com It's the best app I have ever purchased, and the most expensive. It does pretty much everything the amateur needs. They'd be tough to compete with.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
I jump from "X is a god" to "I suck and therefore cannot be like X". Thank you, X for publicly stating this line of thinking is wrong. It's funny because I'm literally taking a 5 minute break from a project that's taking me down that line of thought so maybe the fact that I headed here to read this comment at just this moment does make you a god. Or maybe I just read the right thing at the right time haha.
xiaoma 14y ago
What drew me into your blog is that you started it when you weren't very successful. I don't remember the specifics but it seemed like you weren't all that confident and you were super conservative about how much you spent on your side project that has now become so much more. That makes for a much more interesting (and useful) read than a blog in which the author is apparently cut of a different cloth than normal humans from the beginning.
- rmc 14y ago
  I started reading patio11's blog from the start, and as far as I remember, he started blogging before the product was released. Right from the start!

cageface 14y ago

I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far. Is this a deliberate decision or just a question of sticking to tools/platforms you're more familiar with?

patio11 14y ago
I don't love the kingmaking economics of App Store distribution and don't know how to work them to my advantage. Price points for mobile apps are two to three orders of magnitude lower than software I routinely sell. The stores seem to be dominated by design, something that I am not good at. I prefer writing Rails to Java or Objective C. My consulting clients largely sell B2B software, and fairly little of that is currently mobile. That said, there is literally infinite software that I personally will never write. That doesn't necessarily mean I would recommend against HNers looking at those projects either.
- cageface 14y ago
  Good answer. I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling. It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
  - sycren 14y ago
    Do you feel that there is more value making a desktop web app and making it responsive to work with mobile devices, rather than making a straight mobile app?
    - cageface 14y ago
      I don't feel particularly qualified to answer this question, but my opinion is that these questions should be secondary. The most important thing is identifying your target market and figuring out how to most effectively meet its needs and if you understand that well then that will probably dictate the details of your strategy. What I think is pretty overdone at this point though are approaches that revolve entirely around a mobile app. Unless you're going for an aqui-hire or your potential customers just happen to all be entirely on one mobile platform I'd think twice about betting the farm on an app.
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