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Comment by rozenmd | Hacker News Reader

$3.5k USD total over the year, roughly.

Not bad! What's invaluable is what you are currently learning about running a business. Something I learned was that I totally underestimated marketing :p

Am I reading this correctly that you worked 2 hours a day and only made $3.5k all year? Or about $300 a month?

He gets a valuable education, so basically he's getting free tuition plus enough money to buy a good lunch every day.

Interesting.

If he worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 1 year (52 weeks), thats 520 hours.

He made $6.73 per hour before self employment and income taxes (if applicable). Or $13.46 per day.

I’m not sure how you get a good lunch and tuition from that unfortunately.

Still, everyone values their time and talents differently, they also have different goals in terms of education and what they consider to be a financial success.

I guess, given the money he’s made, what he’s actually learned is a long list of things he still needs to learn. Because what he’s saying he’s “learned” hasn’t been validated yet. Maybe if he’s making ~$70k by the end of this year we can assume these things he’s learned have value, otherwise, they are mostly observations about the current state of his business and how making adjustments in these areas have mildly impacted his bottom line.

I wish him the best of luck.

Thanks (I'm in France, so it's 218 working days, 436 hours).

On the education side, my first 3 years as a maker, I didn't grow beyond 1 paid user on any product I sold. I still learned with every failed launch, and every product I shut down.

See "Year in review" at https://maxrozen.com/

The learning has been cumulative.

I went from "Hey if I just copy Pieter Levels, I'll be rich immediately" to "If I build it, they will come" to "Maybe if I write about the problem, people will come?" to "If I talk to people about their problems, maybe I'll understand them well enough to solve a problem for them".

I'm not trying to convince you to take up the life of a bootstrapped founder, I just wrote an article about what I learned from a couple spare hours before my job each day over the last 12 months.

How much do you expect to grow this year? When do you decide it's time to throw in the towel? And I don't mean anything with my last question, I'm genuinely curious about your criteria.

That's the beauty of my setup IMO, I don't plan on quitting full time work, so the revenue is all a bonus on top of what I learn.

That being said, I think I'm at a point where I could spin off an API from OnlineOrNot and make it similarly successful within a month or so.

I think you misunderstood. I was wondering when you cancel a SaaS project? What criteria do you use to decide that? Also how much would you like to grow this year or did you mean that you don't use that as a metric? Is it more about the learning aspect of it all?

Do you plan on going the API route?

Ah right.

I would cancel a project if it couldn't pay its own infrastructure bill after 6 months.

If I had to name a goal for the second year, it's to reach $1k MRR across everything I sell online. I still have plenty of ideas for OnlineOrNot, but there are a few APIs I built internally that I could see others paying for (that I'll be testing if people would, actually, before building).

Thing is, if you kept your JobsOk.io project for another year you would have been making bank (like Pieter did) from the remote job boom during Covid.

Oh well…

You've got to remember the math of compound interest. He's investing up front now for a steady stream later. The day he decides it's feature complete and to stop working will not be the day people stop paying. In many SaaS I've been a part of , the first year or two looks bloody to most people, but it's the continued stream that matters.

Presumably if they stopped working on their products now it would be some time before revenue started to decrease and then even more before it became practically non existent. In fact it’d probably be some time before revenue stopped increasing.

So they haven’t been working for $6.73/hour. They’ve been building a money printing machine that currently prints $13.46 a day.

Even taking it as working for $6.73/hour though, I’d make that trade plenty often even though I’d never consider regular employment anywhere near it. The flexibility of doing it whenever, whenever. No bosses or coworkers to be accountable to. These things count for a lot.

Not to mention that's the current value, he could stop working on it right now and that hourly rate will go up as time goes on, as long as it's making money.

I think his monthly average over the year is 3.5k, atleast that's how I read it.

Nope, total over the year.

That’s a win in my books. Lots of other ppl actually lose money their first year.

He probably learned a lot more than he could have, say, attending a code bootcamp — and he made money on top of that. So it's a huge win in my opinion.

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