Ask HN: How much time did you invest in your startup until ramen profitable?
Time.at(ramen_profitable) - Time.at(first_code_line) = ?
I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales!
I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as well.
I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live.
I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.
If you've ever seen Tim Ferris's book "The Four-Hour Workweek", he suggests that exact system, except without accepting payment and without having the product available yet, so that if people do try to order from you, you've validated that there's a product-market fit before investing time and money into an elaborate website, stocking inventory, etc.
First month = $495 in expenses. $20 for my first month webhosting. $99 for Dreamweaver (I was still hand-coding HTML). $375 for that damn Verisign SSL certificate.
First month I made $300, so was a little in the red. Second month I made $700 and was profitable ever since.
First 10 musicians were just people I knew. After that were friends-of-friends since the first 10 were so happy with my service. Then some people started mentioning it in their newsletters, and more strangers kept signing up.
That whole first year, the site did almost nothing. I didn't even know PHP+MySQL at the time, so it was just a hand-coded HTML site that let you put a CD in a shopping cart, and enter your payment info. Whatever you entered was emailed to me, and I'd copy it by hand into my merchant account to charge their card, then copy it by hand into a label printer to mail their order, then copy it by hand into Eudora to email them a thank-you email.
Though this was 1998, yes I think the same approach applies today.
I was just surprised to see that, since it's such a well known Bad Thing now.
6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point).
18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.
30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city.
40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first job out of college.
That's for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month.
So I guess the answer to your question is: longer than you think. But once you're there, it's pretty nice.
The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and use the runway to bootstrap product stuff.
Seems to be working thus far.
1 year for ramen profitable for 3 founders;
3 years for full-time job for 3 founders;
4 1/2 years for hiring 1st and 2nd employee;
5 years for hiring 3rd employee;
5 1/2 years for hiring 4th, 5th, and 6th employee (present day).
Yup. With the paid plan you can use a custom domain.
Longer answer: I've completely immersed myself in startups for around 3 years and spent a full 1.5 years on a startup which never reached ramen profitability nor got funding. I don't think I'd have been able to reach ramen profitability in 5 months without the learning I did in the previous one.
I wrote this post about how I went from the idea to the first paying customer in 7 weeks: http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-week...
I also write weekly on my personal blog and almost every post has some form of reflection comparing the previous startup with what I'm doing for my current startup: http://joel.is
This was aided by both shrinking my outgoings as well as growing revenue. I cut out as many monthly outgoings as possible, went PAYG with my mobile phone, stopped spending daft amounts of money on wine... You've got to work out what's more important - cable television or your startup?
If you're at the top of your game (you know what you are doing - have experience of 5-10+ years), I would say if the income does not come in after 3-6 months, you're wasting time and effort.
Otherwise it could take years to get things right before you find out that the market for your idea is not there.
10 months full time (80 hrs/week) - first customer ($200/mth)
This time includes learning YUI to build the frontend (2 months)
Hiring consultant to build the backend (3 months)
Testing and building hardware (7 months)
This was done with less than 40K of cash, financed through myself and family.