Indie Hackers: Learn how developers are making money
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> Record high was $850/mo, record low was $40, with the average month bringing in around $300. Certainly not quit-my-job money, but it helps.
Posting the all-time high instead of the average is a bit off-putting imho, considering it's supposed to represent "paychecks." This is more like getting lucky once. Anyways, haven't read the rest of the stories, and I think it's pretty inspirational. I'd just appreciate more honest revenue reporting on the front page. (It actually says $900/mo, not just $900, so it's not like I'm reading this ambiguously..)
Edit: On second thought, it's not clear to me from the description whether he means that it made $900/mo for some kind of long streak or just one month.
Edit: I'll just note that considering the presence of peaks, probably median would be a better indicator than average. Hell, a whole distribution would be pretty informative lol, but that's probably too much info..
But mean over what period? It's a bit complex.
I think that probably @csallen was using "peak" because some of the projects had since gone defunct and he wanted to count them. Although I think in such cases it would make sense to do an average of the best year or something like that.
For projects like mine (https://complice.co/) which are still growing, "peak" is also weird, because it suggests that... I'm not still growing? I'm not even sure. At any rate, it doesn't make sense to use my average over the last year if my average over the next year is going to be twice as much. Better is probably just the total of my active subscriptions.
He says he's using Lamda, perhaps he should rethink that decision if his overhead is really that high.
Ping is running in 7 regions, has an Elasticsearch cluster for logging, another for the check data itself, thousands of checks running each minute and thousands of alerts running each minute. RDS for the primary store, SES for emails, EC2 for hosting the app itself. Add on extra services such as Baremetrics and these things add up quickly. Run 7 EC2 nodes and you're already well over $250, not to mention the loads in each region are different.
Lambda's pricing is indeed not competitive with VMs right now, but that will go down with FaaS becoming wildly available from other providers. The more important thing to me is that it's close to zero maintenance, no bastions, no AMIs, no provisioning, no third-party monitoring, etc.
If you've ever worked with Elasticsearch you'd also know that it requires a pretty substantial set of resources to function well. I'm happy to over-provision for the beginning if it means providing a better experience. Nothing would be worse than under-provisioning IMO.
Would you recomend starting something with a free tier and phasing it out if it's not working over charging up front from the beginning?
I can see pros/cons to both sides.
From successful bootstrappers in B2B, nearly 100% of the advice that I've gotten is to start without free and add it later as a lead-gen mechanism if it fits your business. Early on customer acquisition is a slog and generally relies on 1:1 conversations often with a pre-existing relationship (in-network). Hopefully feedback from these people help you get close enough to product market fit that outsiders will consider using the product. From there it's a marketing and lead nurturing game where freemium may make sense.
Advice for B2C would be quite different.
Typically base costs are higher when you design for scale vs when you don't. And marginal costs are lower when you design for scale vs when you don't.
And yes, that's obviously a concern, but you can design for profit first and refine for scale. It wouldn't be very difficult to put some of those things in a VM to start and then move them to lambda once breaking even is no longer an issue.
Some days ago I posted a very similar website here (http://www.transparentstartups.com/) and I didn't get barely any vote whereas this one is getting totally viral (385 votes and adding).
Please let me know what I'm doing wrong. The only thing I can think of is that I didn't mention some key words like "developers" and "money" but "startups" and "transparency". Or is there anything else I'm missing here?
Thank you in advance.
UPDATE: I'm learning a lot today, thank you guys for the feedback.
He had obviously done a lot of work scouring HN and Reddit threads to pick out people who fit his criteria of starting independent apps and emailed them one by one.
I was interested, so signed up on his site and started filling in my profile. And here is the clincher - I've filled out my startup profile on LOTS of sites, but IH was the only one where the creator emailed me back and asked for more information and clarification about my story. It felt more like an interview than a straight up submission, and it also lead me to believe that someone actually cares.
Then, yesterday, I received an email from Courtland mentioning that he would be posting about his site to HN as a "Show HN" post and asked me to support it by upvoting.
By this stage, I had totally 'bought in' to the whole deal, and when I woke up this morning, eagerly sought out the thread to participate and upvote. I was actually alarmed when I couldn't find the thread. A quick email and response from Courtland indicated that the thread name had been changed from a 'Show HN' thread.
I am thinking that it was the personalised contact with the participants, then the email follow and actual request to support the thread which lead to it getting the response that it has to date.
I've been through startups and know much of the work that it entails. I know (roughly) how much of my life I'm going to have to devote to that idea and the pain of fundraising/bootstrapping. But I've never had a revenue-generating side project or lifestyle business, so it's great to see examples of that and concrete numbers on how much those types of projects can generate. I'm far less interested in this kind of information at the level of a startup than I am at an individual level since I'm far more likely to put something together over the course of a few weekends and see if it can make enough for me to quit my day job rather than to opt into the commitment needed to do a startup.
Actually I have a mixture of young bootstrapped startups that were side projects just months ago like Nomad List (by levelsio), BugMuncher, StoreMapper, ... And other more stable startups like Buffer, Baremetrics, Groove, ... that are also very inspiring in my opinion.
I should add some filters asap to be able to filter by Bootstrapped vs Founded, Work Remotely vs Colocated, etc.
Thanks a lot for your comment! Great point mentioned.
Frankly, I'm not interested in someone who built a side business with <$1k/m in revenue. That's a single retainer for my consulting company.
Stories where the developer has been able to attract meaningful revenue are for more interesting.
The problem I'm realising now is that my site is maybe too generic and that makes not clear enough its purpose. I didn't want to saturate the list items with lots of info so I tried to summarised it with the "Champion" icon, but I agree it seems not 100% clear. I will work on that.
Despite my previous submissions didn't succeeded (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12127979, only 3 votes), I feel very lucky to have raised this question in this thread and then received the great amount of comments that opened my eyes about why Transparent Startups is not engaging as I expected. Now with all this feedback I can work on these issues to try to make something better and useful that provides value.
You are awesome. Thanks again, Rafa
First and probably most important:
* IH - Big empty block at the top that states in clear, large letters what's going on. The text pops out and draws the reader to it. * TS - First thing my eye's go to is the first startup in the list. I have no idea why it's there or what I'm looking at.
Second: * IH - I see companies, names and logos and a revenue number that ties in directly with the stated purpose. * TS - I see logos, and a name but again don't know why they are there. It looks like a generic feed of some kind.
Basically, I'd say IH needs a site redesign. The current one doesn't tell me, as a reader, much about what's going on or what an item being on the list is about. IH doesn't look bad, it's just not as immediately obvious what the purpose is.
(missed a t)
"Ghost" is actually very transparent :). Today there is a new one. I'm featuring one Startup every day at the moment.
Great thanks for the feedback!
For me is more inspiring and interesting the Story behind the startup rather than how much is the startup making at the moment... but yeah, that's me.
I've been thinking about it. I agree revenue it is a very interesting data to show but I see a potential big problem: keeping this money amount up-to-date.
So personally I'd try to avoid displaying volatile data (like revenue) unless I have a mechanisms in place to update it regularly. Otherwise the info could not be accurate after some weeks of the publication.
That's why I prefer linking to their revenue boards, so it's up to the startup/founder to keep them updated. What do you think?
The amount of time you need to spend on a side project to grow probably increases faster than revenue. So inevitably there will be some point in time where your level of effort is much more than what you'd call a side project, yet your revenue is much less than what you'd call a business. I bet that's a frustrating point for many, as you can't just quit your job and stop paying your bills. I'd love to hear creative ways people have gotten past that hump that don't involve mortgaging the house, selling all your possessions and depleting your life savings.
1. Work as a contractor, rather than full time. That gives you some flexibility in how much time to devote to your side project as it grows.
2. Compete with a Yahoo! property and wait for them to do something stupid.
My upvote won't be visible to others, so I'm also posting to second the above explicitly.
Working independently usually means you have more flexibility in both time and money than you typically get as a regular hours, salaried employee. You can balance how much contract work you take on against what you need to do for your side project. There may well still be a point where you have to give up a relatively large amount of immediate revenue from the (absence of) contract work in return for much less immediate extra revenue for your side business. However, if you think the side business will grow in the future based on that work, you might consider that a worthwhile investment.
Another advantage is that operating independently also usually means you have a contract to work on one specific project. That contract would normally be explicit that things like the IP rights transferred to the client are only those relating to that specific project. In contrast, an employment contract is usually broader, and shady employers often try to include clauses that claim IP rights to pretty much anything the employee ever does, out of hours or otherwise. This is a legal minefield and the effect of those clauses depends on where you are, but in any case the last thing you need if your side project starts to become successful is a dispute with a past employer's lawyers.
Got some bad news for you bub
The only thing I would add is how many man hours the project took over what period of time.
I have to click on them and sort of guess if that site took 5hr/week for 10 weeks, or if it took 10 people working 10 hour days for 2 years.
Since you already ask for the tech stack, this would also help launch a dozen "which tech stack is more productive?" studies.
On a final note, I appreciate that you also ask about marketing. Maybe the marketing efforts and man hours can be summarized too?
These are all total ballpark estimates that I made a couple weeks ago: I've used various time-tracking systems but none that give accurate overall time spent. Based on my within-Complice stats though, I can tell you that I've done 2800 tasks towards Complice. That's not very specific, but still kind of a neat figure.
I don't have a good breakdown between programming and marketing time, but I would estimate that 80-90% of my time was spent on things more product-development related. Only 75% of Complice tasks, but the programming tasks are more likely to have been eg 8h working on a single feature.
The site is around 22,000 lines of Ruby code, and has around 80 database tables. Not sure whether that is a normal rate of productivity for most devs, but as my interview explains, I am pushing 50 years old now, so my speed of development and my endurance is nowhere near what it was decades ago.
I did all the front end stuff as well for the public site, and the documentation site and the blog, status page site etc. About the only help I got was my wife to do the voiceover on the explainer video on the web site. (I had to learn After Effects to do the explainer video too).
You seem interested in the tech stacks. I have to say that when people have asked me what they should use I just tell them to go with whatever they are most productive in. Unless you're doing something to try out a tech or you're dependent on an outside system that demands a specific stack I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to learn too many new things while also starting a company. It's hard enough without adding tech concerns.
Patrick's thoughts on this resonate with me: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/763650535727648769
AWS Lambda on the other hand has been a nice time saver aside from the fact that there weren't any good frameworks available really (with Go support) so I wrote https://github.com/apex/apex.
I'm game to answer questions that people have that weren't answered in the interview!
How did you get those people paying you, and how much they paid? Since you have a monthly service, surely they haven't been paying your usual monthly fee for all that time while you were coding?
One of the nice things about offering "I'll help you achieve your goals" is that pretty much anyone wants it if you can actually do it. The latter part is of course hard. But yeah, because of this I probably asked only 15-20 friends and got 10 to pay based on that. It also helps that I have friends who are willing to experiment and who trust me not to just run off with their money.
Part of what also helped, I'm sure, is that I reached out to people I knew individually and they got to have the sense of being part of this early group of testers.
I followed the "do things that don't scale" approach. At the start, I didn't have custom software, but I queued up emails manually using Boomerang, to bug people each day at the time they specified, to plan their day and reflect. They replied, and I put their data into a spreadsheet and elsewhere. I spent about an hour per week for each of those users at the start. I was giving them value manually/personally, rather than with software.
...and then their trial ended and they paid.
Even though I'd written a full software system at that point, the app was still fairly hands-on, and it wasn't until then that it was fully obvious that someone would pay for just the software. In retrospect this is a pretty big thing that it would have made sense to test much earlier somehow.
I'm pretty optimistic by nature, and Complice has felt promising since the beginning. I think it probably helped that while I had a vision/goal (= become ramen-profitable by graduation) I didn't spend too much time fretting about it. I just focused on making incremental improvements to the system (eg UX).
And this in many ways is the philosophy of Complice itself: stay oriented towards the big picture, but focus on what you can do today.
I normally hate divulging figures too, but these days I have given myself permission to do so. I realised that in the past, I was acting from a scarcity mentality and was afraid that people would steal my ideas and concepts. But of late, I have realised that this is simply not true.
I am grateful that in my previous posts here on HN and on Reddit, when I have asked questions about marketing and sales, the most helpful answers have been from other developers of HR or Time and Attendance apps (Special shout out to the founders of StaffSquared and Tanda). We dance in the same space, but we all recognise the difficulties inherent and look out for each other, rather than steal from each other. In fact, I have actually referred some of my customers on to these competitors when I have realised that we don't fit their needs 100% and that someone else's solution will be a better match.
why not?
Yes, someone could copy your idea and implementation.
But are they going to dedicate themselves to this full time for a year like it took you before you reached a poverty level income? Are they going to cold call 10 people per day for three months? Are they going to learn to write, nurture a following of people and provide content and value to those people in the hopes that <5% convert to customers? Anyone who starts by copying an idea probably doesn't have the same drive to make the idea successful.
The actual trouble isn't that transparency invites competition. The trouble is competition that already exists somehow using the transparency against you. Numbers, to me, don't seem like the type of thing that an outsider could use against you. Effective marketing tactics and growth hacks on the other hand can be gold.
Basically a founder says something like "We've recently discovered that paying a couple of talented designers to re-purpose our blog content as SlideShare presentations works surprisingly well for."
Companies have tried SlideShare as a means of creating additional distribution around their content marketing. It works for some and doesn't for others. It's basically target market dependent. Some markets have bloggers/curators who will pick up the Slideshare content and embed it on their site. Other target markets don't attach to that kind of content.
So, this founder shares this (and keep in mind Slideshare is just an example, it could be any marketing tactic) and the week after his podcast is released their largest competitor starts publishing content on Slideshare. Maybe their marketing team just decided to run an experiment? If the same thing happens three more times? Eventually that founder is going to start doing a cost-benefit analysis of this particular brand of transparency. He could continue sharing some stuff, their MRR and ARR seem like fair game to me but he probably wants to hold back on being specific about growth tactics.
This is just a guess though - I'm not one of these founders.
First don't forget that the money doesn't get into OUR pocket, but to the company, then I'll have two reasons for me to share this info:
1- Having competitors is actually motivating, forces you to always do better and validate your market.
2- What matters the most is the execution. Google arrived after Yahoo, Apple took over Microsoft, etc. Nowadays, it's pretty "easy" to copy a software, but the way you'll deal with everything else (employees, customers, communication) is what will make you be the winner (on top of a product that people want... and some luck!)
3- (bonus answer) I'm not doing this for money anyway, mostly because I'm passionated about the delivery business and the food space and I believe it's lacking good tech. I started this as a full time job, and I'm still working more than everybody else in the company, while paying myself less than my employees.
I believe most of the founders feel the same, and if you think of starting a project that you want to make full time, you shouldn't do it for money. But if you do want to work on a side project as a complementary of your income, then it's a totally different approach. But in any case, you shouldn't be scared about the competition, if they do better, then learn from them as well :)
You can click and hold the back button to move backward more than one history instance.
Of that 180 sign ups, about 30 or 40 are quite active and visit the site often, although it is hard to judge because some only need to revisit the site once a month or so to update details and respond to reminders etc.
We are looking at scrapping the free 10 employee limit soon, and making everyone pay (except the early sign ups - we will honour their free tier pricing indefinitely).
If you want to avoid a money pit, I think you can. The trick is to pipe conversion data back to AdWords. This is pretty easy with Google Analytics but also not too bad to set up with any analytics provider.
If you're starting fresh, you will need to spend some money blindly (without the benefit of historic conversion data). But, once you start seeing some conversions, you can use our automated bidding strategies to say "only advertise when you are confident you can drive new users to sign up for less than $X."
My other tip would be to spend some time writing good ads (clear articulation of benefits, use all of the space provided to you, and make at least 5 that can be rotated against each other) and picking good keywords (multi-word as a general rule, and specifically related to your business, not too general and not too competitive).
Finally, call support and say you're new and you'd like help. We have big teams of specialists ready to get new advertisers off on the right foot, because we know that your first couple of weeks are crucial to keeping you. They're actually really good.
I personally recognize your project's name and remember what it does just by its name, but lately all the Docker orchestration tools seem to do pretty much the same thing. Maybe create a blog post explaining the difference and pros and cons of each one? Case studies maybe?
Best of luck with the project!
sideProject.generate(8500, 'dollars').per('month');
If you're comfortable living at a middle class level or just want to travel the world for a couple of years, then this is perfect for you. Do the Tim Ferris thing and just devote the bare minimum of time to it so that it keeps running and generating money - until it doesn't.
If you hope to become rich, then you would be better off either focusing your time into this business so you can grow it 100x+ or use it to cover your bills and to stack some savings while you try to build whatever business you are really passionate about.
If you instead want to get your education (like pursuing advanced degrees) then you can use this to cover your tuition and living expenses while you do so.
Just know that whatever makes you $8500/mo today will probably not keep doing so without some type of conscious effort to acquire new customers, to support current customers, and to either buy out or otherwise stave off competition. All of these require dedicated focus to do correctly. You can either do these yourself or you can hire help to do them for you but someone has to do them if you want your money to keep flowing in.
If it's not that kind of business though, I definitely agree - go the Pinboard route and blog about your trips to Antarctica or whatever while doing a minimum of work.
sideProject.generate(8500,'USD','monthly');
revenue { amount: 8500, currency: 'USD' }
periodic_revenue { interval: 'month', amount: revenue }
> Learn how developers are writing their own paychecks.
Would love to see a forum dedicated solely to "indie hacking" for developers. ie. threads related to all the ins-and-outs of independent product development, idea validation, market research, dealing with customers, marketing strategies, founder Q&A, etc.
But yes, I've been looking for a a place where sharp solo tech entrepreneurs can talk, and even created a failed slack channel once, but I have yet to find it.
EDIT: A few people have submitted their businesses since I posted this Show HN, too.
UI nitpick: when I navigate to the project's page, the if the project name is long, it goes out of screen on Nexus 5X + Chrome.
I'm blown away by how good these and so many "show HN" entries usually look. Everything I've put online is functional but looks so obviously "designed by a programmer" that it's embarrassing to mention.
Do people first work on a prototype and then run it by a graphic artist/UI designer to make it look decent? Where do you find these people?
One thing that has helped a lot is doing a lot of "hallway" tests: you watch someone sign up, then you cringe at how bad your UI is, then you fix it.
(I'm the guy behind https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice)
I like the effect when transitioning from grid view to list view. Is that just CSS or is there some Javascript magic doing that?
:)
This reminded me of the story of Builtwith, which started without knowing the commercial potential (http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one...)...i wish you to reach the same results!
I thought the site was about self funded single developers? I am missing something?
Either way congrats and best wishes.
Chris, however, was working alone when he started Instapainting. His funding had dried up and he was in significant debt. And it only took him 2 days to build and launch his product. So there's a lot there that we can all learn from, and nothing that none of us could do without relying on personal savings and a lot of creativity and hustle.
I am merely asking whether Instapainting was YC Backed company as mentioned in TC Article as reading TC and looking at CrunchBase gives different picture from whats mentioned on Indie Hackers.
Hope the question is not out of line.
Anyways, nice website I will come back! Looking forward the rss feed ;)
I like it and I have subscribed.
Very useful to see practical working examples of options for passive income in the field. I say passive because I could see myself doing something as a side business.