8 ms·

Ramen profitable is not the most interesting milestone. Getting any kind of revenue is a major step: it shows there are people willing to pay for your product.

Ramen profitable is not the most interesting milestone. Getting any kind of revenue is a major step: it shows there are people willing to pay for your product. After that, it's all a question of scale. PG's definition of ramen profitable is useful because it gets rid of all the accidental revenue. Sure, if my aunt bought my software once, it shows somehone is willing to buy my product. But not really. By setting a bar just a tad higher than just "1 sale is good enough", it becomes a useful metric.

menloparkbum 18y ago
Sure, if my aunt bought my software once, it shows somehone is willing to buy my product. Right, but there isn't enough information to determine if this is not what he means by profitable. I am also a hacker, I know how much money it costs to run something like this. It could mean that 1 person paid $50 and the AWS bill and web hosting was only $49. Anyway, I don't find this conversation interesting anymore so congrats on the profitability.
nostrademons 18y ago
Not really. Diffle made about $60/month when we killed it, on costs of about $80/month. That's purely on AdSense revenue. Thing is, we could easily have downgraded to a $10/month shared webhost for Diffle, and it would've been profitable. The only reason we needed the dedicated webhost was so we could have a working, demoable version of GameClay (the next iteration, Flash game creation instead of just Flash game hosting) up all the time. Similarly, FictionAlley pulled in several thousand in donations a year, but nowhere near enough to support its 200+ person staff had they not all been volunteers. I still contend that being able to support founder living expenses is a much, much higher bar than just being able to support the operational costs of your product. It's not too hard to do $100/month or so in AdSense alone.

menloparkbum 18y ago

Sure, if my aunt bought my software once, it shows somehone is willing to buy my product. Right, but there isn't enough information to determine if this is not what he means by profitable. I am also a hacker, I know how much money it costs to run something like this. It could mean that 1 person paid $50 and the AWS bill and web hosting was only $49. Anyway, I don't find this conversation interesting anymore so congrats on the profitability.

nostrademons 18y ago

Not really. Diffle made about $60/month when we killed it, on costs of about $80/month. That's purely on AdSense revenue. Thing is, we could easily have downgraded to a $10/month shared webhost for Diffle, and it would've been profitable. The only reason we needed the dedicated webhost was so we could have a working, demoable version of GameClay (the next iteration, Flash game creation instead of just Flash game hosting) up all the time. Similarly, FictionAlley pulled in several thousand in donations a year, but nowhere near enough to support its 200+ person staff had they not all been volunteers. I still contend that being able to support founder living expenses is a much, much higher bar than just being able to support the operational costs of your product. It's not too hard to do $100/month or so in AdSense alone.