Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I
tbbuck.com
tbbuck.com
None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;)
Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part written and live by early next week.
Looking forward to the rest.
Rob Walling's book, "Start Small, Stay Small" has some pretty good advice for those of us in that boat: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...
however, it was a good read. thanks.
Now, paginating articles (you know, it's not like there isn't infinite vertical space). That is a different story.
Btw, couldn't you earn more money by lowering the price? I personally find it too high.
I'll mention something about that in part II ;)
Do freelancers sites bring enough jobs/money to work on it full time and make a living?
Is it a positive experience?
I guess it depends on where you live, but for here in Poland, sure :)
And whilst freelancing can be somewhat of a lonely business, I found it very satisfying :)
Some feedback:
* [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into.
* Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.
Great work, I look forward to the second part!
Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.
> Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed on Twitter.
It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.
The way I read it is "don't do things we don't already do" which is a really bad constraint, effectively forbidding any kind of innovation. I can understand the spirit of their selective desire to address this specific violation, but I'm not convinced it's as much of a problem as they're making it to be.
Oh well.
I couldn't find the pricing either, so I think it is hiding in plain sight.
Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).
Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D
It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. A reason I've avoided buying a theme, don't know what I'd do with it once I had it.
Honestly, it's pretty simple: you have the HTML for each page that is demonstrated. Chop out the relevant bits for headers, footers, and then any tables etc. that you might need, copy across the various css, js and images directories and you're done! It really doesn't take long. Sometimes the themes come with PHP versions as well, but not always.
If you want to test yourself, why not try downloading an open source theme (e.g. http://www.oswd.org/) and take a look at what's in the HTML? I can't guarantee it'll be an identical process, but it should be fairly similar :)
That said, if you dedicate all of your time to doing that (sifting through all of the bad postings on multiple freelance work sites to find the gems) and build a reputation, it seems possible to make some good money.
A blog post about it would be nice.
not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin panel...
I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)
The main thing you cannot do is offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part of a project. So you can use the item in a free game, but not in a game that is on sale. You can use the item in a website, but not in a web template that you sell.
Here are the full legal terms: http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-te...
Specifically, I wonder if you are referring to this line:
(d) Unless you have our prior written consent, you must not directly or indirectly license, sub-license, sell or resell or provide for free the Work or offer to do any of these things. All of these things are referred to as Resale.
(g) You must not incorporate the Work in a work which is created for Resale by you or your client.
I wonder what they mean by "indirectly selling" the Work. Does this apply to SaaS? What about Freemium products?
Regular License Examples - The Regular License could be used for any of the following: Single website (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single website for a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single intranet site project.
Extended License Examples - The Extended License could be used for any of the following: Template for a web service such as WPMU. Part of a software package for sale.
To me that reads like in this case, the Regular license would be fine. The extended license seems more about situations where your customers will be creating their own unique and publicly accessible content using the template (You start up a blogging service www.omgblogs.com and someone could create their blog at mahblog.omgblogs.com then pick from a template you got from ThemeForest)
Make the rules so that a blog post referral only requires a single click - that way you can verify that the blog post is from who they say they are
Once you have that infrastructure, you can use it as a more generalized referral system for people that want to tweet out a link to your product, etc. For eg. every tweet referral signup gets you a free month
There are hordes of freelancers out there who do nothing but affiliate marketing. For those types, you want to send them 30-50% of revenue. There are entire products to do this for you - cj.com et al. Their referrals made up over 50% of new users on a product I worked on previously.
this would solve the problem of people who don't produce clickthroughs getting paid, but it wouldn't solve the problem of looking scummy, and if you have a bunch of duplicated content all over the place, you look scummy, and the person who actually wrote the content is going to be cheesed.
Reputation management (which is to say, wanting to not look scummy) is the primary reason why I don't have a referral system. Well, that and I'm not willing to put that much cash in to customer acquisition. But it's primarily about reputation; It's hard enough presenting a consistent message when you have two or three employees.
Even if you only care about money, reputation is worth quite a lot.
I'm sure there are ways to do affiliate marketing without looking scummy, but it's not obvious or easy.
A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do with.
Exciting stuff!
Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively.
Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.
We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in.
We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc.
One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.
On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing.
About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-f...
I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.
So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.
Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting.
It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story.
In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).
The reason I'm curious is because I "launched" my first web app a few months ago. In actuality it was just a feeler to see how the product faired in the wild - core functionality was there, but greatly lacking features. The only place I shared was HN and it was received tremendously well. It hung out on the front page for the majority of the day, resulted in thousands of hits and hundreds of signups, with more trickling in during the weeks following. At the time, I was reluctant to promote anywhere else before incorporating a few new features. Unfortunately, I was pulled away by more demanding projects, so I haven't had time to make all of the changes and features I had planned on (or marketing), resulting in significantly decreased traffic.
Now that my other projects are winding down, I can focus more time on building and promoting this app. Stories like yours help a bunch, so I appreciate the details.
Could I get your e-mail address? I'd love to stay in touch, but I don't see it anywhere in your profile.
I updated my profile.
It's banehn and I'm on gmail.
At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs).
I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer.
Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?
FWIW, Basecamp offers a 30 day free trial for their services.
But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice to turn that $500 into $5k :)
For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)
Periodically make full restore from bare metal or fresh VPS image using your backups and following written procedure.
Make corrections if something does not work as expected.
I've been looking at some VPS options and I wanted to make sure I select the right one that is not oversold + performs well.
I'd heard rumblings in the past to the effect of "Linode has better performance than Slicehost," but I hadn't really seen such a detailed, quantified comparison until now. Now I'm thinking about switching as well.
My Slicehost slices have never impressed me from a performance standpoint, that's for sure. Their admin console and service have kept me in the fold so far, but I think it's time to at least spin up one Linode instance and do some re-evaluating.
I'm using the 1GB offer. This is something that I may blog about briefly, so far it's running TweetingMachine and a couple of other tools, and has supported the Hacker News traffic decently as well. That's most likely thanks to me using nginx and w3 total cache on the Wordpress blog. That said, if someone really wanted to DDOS me, it wouldn't take much for it to fall over ;)
I could do, but honestly it doesn't differ much more a standard Linux setup - the only difference is a lack of control panel.
If you go down, how many customers may you lose for life?
What do you tell those users if you happen to lose some of their scheduled tweets?
How many refunds will be requested?
Not to mention the time it will take you to bring everything back to life on a new server.
I'm teaching a couple of the users on thingist python, and I've been wanting to give them accounts on a box so that they could have a real-world sandbox to play in...$48/yr lets me afford that pretty freaking easily.
prgmr sounds freakishly awesome. What was that site the other day? showoff.io or something? $5/mo for a VPS vs $5/mo for a dynamic DNS updater/NAT traversal mechanism.
(Just waiting for my instance to spin up now)
(It took a few weeks/months to get my money refunded...and forever convinced me that amazon's customer support is completely worthless)
I'm sure AWS works for some people, but that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
The micro instance - the free tier - is actually free, and if you run more than one, additional ones cost roughly $15/month.
However, what most likely happened is that when spinning up your first instance, you started a "Small" instance instead of a micro. "Small" is the default server selected when adding a new instance through the AWS webpage, and I did the same thing without realizing right away that it was not the free tier.
Small instances cost roughly $67.50 per running month, so it would seem to me that this could have been what happened to you.
I guess it just felt kindof "bait-and-switch"y to me. Imagine going into a restaurant that says "free buffet", where there are some non-free things mixed in that aren't really labeled all that well.
The thing is, yeah, I made a mistake and clicked the wrong thing. That happens. What was frustrating to me, though, and why I'll never use AWS again was how long it took to find out what happened. There was no support email, no support chat, nothing.
An EC2 micro instance is around $15/mo (0.02 x 24 x 30). If you were charged $60 (0.085 x 24 x 30), you were running a small instance. They aren't the same thing, and Amazon did/is doing a shit job of making people looking for the freebie account aware of the difference.
AWS is pretty awesome if it meets your needs. We use it at work, and don't have many problems with customer support. That said, it seems like there's obvious support prioritization based on account value.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. For what it's worth what you saw was more terrible marketing/support handling for freebie accounts than anything related to the service as normally used.
Here's the math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049196
I'm actually working on a cheap low-performance storage service designed for backups (webdav and zfs snapshot accessible. I'm targeting 1/10th the price of s3 before bulk discounts, but I also am also targeting a lower level of redundancy and performance.) but I thought the primary demand would be people on other services or on their own servers wanting a backup, so it's interesting to hear if other people place a much higher priority on ease of setting up backups.
From my perspective though, it is unfortunate: I'm interested in the story, but I don't know if I will be interested enough to check back a few weeks from now to see the updates, perhaps because I forget the URL, perhaps because I don't see a post on HN about it, or perhaps because I just forget. I also think I'm spoiled by the internet: I want things now! :)
I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly.
Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall:
The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X.
he then turns and build the application to do X himself.
This in and of itself is fine -- but it will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely.
The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit.
I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way this article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind)
This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369
To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way.
> why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing work
That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best.
Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are busy building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are many amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off.
Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?
To Random42's point, simply having an idea like: "Wouldn't it be cool if cars could fly" is obviously worthless.
I think that I was not clear enough:
I think of an idea as a vetted plan. An idea, based on an understanding of a problem and a market, a vision on how it will make money. A design a spec and even mock-ups.
Far more than a simple statement of wishful thinking.
For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed.
For example, I have a current "idea" in the medical space (which is where my current full time focus is) that is a patient entertainment system.
This idea is based on several years of full time health care systems design experience designing two hospitals each with a budget of more than $500 million. It is an iterative evolution of a previous idea which we implemented and built and released open source, and a solid understanding of the market, the challenges and the sales cycle. Further, it is arrived at with the inclusion of hospital IT and Clinical staff that I have worked with on two projects -- and input from the founder of one of the existing market leading companies in this space.
I have a product spec, financial model, business plan and mock-ups.
This is my "idea" -- it is not worthless because it is a proven, fully informed documented product plan.
I still need development and a host of other things to accomplish this.
I have millions of simple wishful thinking ideas as well, but for anything that has value - real potential I go through the above.
I apparently was not clear with what I thought an idea was... I hope this makes my perspective a little more clear.
But that's the problem. You know why? Because anybody can do this. You can have one million people do this, for one million years, and you know what you'd end up with? Nothing.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that you also attach careful research to your idea, but that only serves to lessen the risk you've overlooked obvious reasons for it to fail. It doesn't mean it won't fail. If your idea was guaranteed to succeed then crossing over into development wouldn't be a problem. You'd be able to get the money somehow. I know many ordinary people who have set aside as much as $50-100K just by being focused. Or you could get investment, or a SBA backed bank loan. But idea people won't actually work to do these things, because they know the truth: their idea may end up failing (being worthless when actually tried). Either that or the other truth: even once an idea is developed it takes time and effort to grow it into a success.
I am very early in my own development abilities, but I have a technical co-founder, a hospital that has agreed to pilot this and experience in my field which informed the design of the idea.
I think I see way to much arrogance on HN. It appears that you guys are so eager to try to find why things shouldn't be built, when maybe its better to figure out why things should.
I love how you all assume that one comes up with an idea, then just sits around and attempts to wish it into existence.
Lets take a poll. How many of you here think of yourself as a mediocre developer?
I'm willing to bet that many are under the impression they are some Ninja Star developer and that NOTHING in this world can possibly work unless you personally come up with it.
Well, now we're talking! :)
You are under the wrong impression. It's not that hackers don't want to see idea people succeed, it's that we don't have much respect for people who are on the sidelines and all talk with no action. I'm a developer, but first and foremost I'm an entrepreneur. If a person is willing to put their neck on the line while facing risk and uncertainty, they have my respect. I don't care if they can't even set up a Wordpress blog.
I wish you best of luck with your venture! It's not about arrogance; it's about action. You're in the club as far as I'm concerned.
A * Idea + B * Execution == N Units of success/value.
Most of the people here believe,
C * Idea * Execution == N units of success/value.
Ideas all alone ARE worthless. Only when coupled with decent execution, they generate some success/value. They are more of a multiplier factor, than having a worth of itself.
Let me give you some (admittedly) extravagant example of ideas (They are not my original ideas).
1. cars that can fly, just based on solar energy.
2. A machine, that lets you travel through time.
3. A medicine, that makes you live forever/ you dont grow old.
Do you believe, should I (Or the person who had these original ideas/fantasy) call for the share of money, when these ideas are implemented?
If someone else implementing a vaguely similar idea makes those people pissed off, well, it's certainly not the implementors fault.
I've had a zillion ideas only to find out that someone has already executed them. At first it somewhat pissed me off, like isn't there anything that hasn't been already done? Then I got over it and realized that you need a crapload of hard work, persuasion and elbow grease to make the ideas a product that people want to use badly enough that they pay you for it.
what kind of architexture you are using for the app and why - what frameworks , languages ( django, jquery )
also what other tools you are using for development/testing and why ( github, eclipse, firebug etc.)
I'm glad for the author's success so far (and, as another HNer said, that the word "lifestyle" has not yet reared its head in discussion).
On the other hand,back in October, about how my products had brought in $216,000 in revenue in 2010 to date (from $0 in 2008), and I got maybe 30 votes on HN, barely made it onto the front page:
http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/
Which leads to me to wonder: Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular, but nobody was interested in mine?
For me, it's not just about getting the hits, but getting my message out there (I am all about making & SELLING paid products, not "startups"), so it's a question of effectiveness.
I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between (which is where I fall -- now). But there's probably also something else going on, whether it's me, my essay, or the audience.
If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.
If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.
Hi, original post author here! :) I think the main difference between our two posts is that mine goes into more detail about how I created the app and bought in revenue, whereas your posts lists only that you're already making serious dough (incidentally, congratulations! :)), and how your revenues have grown - not a lot about how to get there in the first place.
Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular
I'd like to take issue with this point, although please do correct me if I'm seeing criticism where none was intended :) This is obviously not a full-on startup - I don't work eight hours every evening on it; in fact I barely put in that many hours on it per month. Maybe I need to clarify this in my next blog post. Either way, I don't understand why you're knocking it for being 1.5 years old.
If we look at stories like ours PURELY as inspiration fodder (vs personal sagas), wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who ended up with a hundred thousand instead of a hundred? :) That's not to downplay your success at all, because you've gotten what you've wanted in the way you wanted. That's what success is about, IMO.
Thanks for the tip about the specificity, I bet you're right & will try that approach next time.
> wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who > ended up with a hundred thousand instead of a hundred?
How about if it's presented as "$100,000 with full time hours" compared with "a $100 with a few hours"?
From my perspective at least, I view an article about how to achieve "a $100 with a few hours (spread over a year)" as seeming more attainable and accessible than one about "$100,000 with full time hours (spread over a year)". I'd think "Hey, maybe I could do that" about the former and more "That'd be cool to do that" about the latter.
I like that you've got a "mission" to show that what you've achieved is attainable for others as well and I look forward to reading more about how.
I suppose it's like comparing watching Rocky to watching 2 hours of Lennox Lewis in his prime, you want to see the progression happening, not necessarily look back.
That would be the main point from my perspective and it's simply a matter of preference.