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matte_black

*Revenue though, not profit

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Not many expenses, though.

Then why not just list the profit?

Typically when I see revenues posted it means the profit must only be a fraction of that amount.

I guess it's mostly his living expenses and some hosting fees.

Yep. I spend about $1,500/month to live. Then there's Mapbox ~$500/month, SendGrid ~$500/month, and Linode $300/month. One part-time moderator as contractor $1,000/month, and part-time server guy as contractor $1,500/month.

I don't know anything about the person in question, but any "profit" number is going to have to be fictitious anyway. Ideally, you make as little profit as possible so that you avoid paying taxes. You want your money working for you rather than going to the government (or sitting in a bank account). This is one of the nice aspects of taxes and tax avoidance -- it provides incentives for companies to continue investing. Anyway, the point is the person could give an impressive sounding number (indicating that they are bad at managing money) or they could give a tiny (or even negative) number. It's kind of lose-lose.

But I agree with you -- anybody posting "I'm making $X/month doing something that seems easy" is usually trying to sell you a book/workshop/seminar (which is where they make their real money).

I agree and observe the same. I honesty do it because I want to show you can build a business without venture capital funding, and do it as an indie (and in my case solo) maker with a strong disregard for hip tech stacks and frameworks.

I sell a book but that’s less than 5% of my income. 95% is business.

It is certainly possible to make it as an indie and solo maker. This has never been in much doubt.

The question is for how long?

What does an an indie maker who has "made it" do next? What do the next decades of their life look like?

Will you ever team up with someone?

In terms of money, if you just save enough and have low costs, it means potential financial independence.

I think the most joy I get is from making, so I will continue that. Money was the goal in terms of me having to pay my bills, but the second goal was always that I just like to make things.

Before websites, I made music and visual graphic art. Making makes me happy.

Good point and I agree! I posted revenue first because it’s easier to collect the data.

I’ll be importing costs from several sources (like PayPal, bank etc) in the next few days and adding it to my open revenue dashboard:

http://nomadlist.com/open

Rough calculations is that it’s somewhere from 80% to 90% profit margin pre tax.

Let's use a car as an example. Say Peter's biz buys a car and he uses it. Is that an expense? Does the biz make less profit because of that car payment? Or is he just spending profit on it since it's mainly/entirely personal use? Not trying to get into a tax discussion but my point is profit can be massaged and is entirely subjective. Revenue is not. The money came in, or it didn't. Even in the US for single-job W2 employees, tax rates vary even by locality for folks at the same pay rate in the same company. So with identical pay, benefits, retirement savings, state and federal taxes, my personal take home pay is different than the guy next to me because we live in different townships. Same with business. Revenue is the easy number, profit is pretty subjective.

And by definition profit is a fraction of revenue. It can't exactly be more than 100% can it?

Bwaha, revenue can be massaged even worse. There are companies making BILLIONS in revenue, and it all sounds very impressive until you see they are actually burning more money than they are even making. Profit can’t be more than revenue, but it can certainly be negative.

Making billions but spending more is not "massaging revenue." It's being shitty at turning a profit.

Please explain the scenario in which you can take the same balance sheet and use it to show two different revenue figures. You can't. You can easily do the same thing with profit.

You could add in deferred revenue from previous quarters.

Is that what Pieter Levels is doing? Stop moving the goal posts.

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