Startups that are actually making money...not on advertising... | Hacker News Reader

Startups that are actually making money...not on advertising...

34 pointssmysore31 comments

Anyone know any startups that are becomming more well-known / popular that are actually making money (how?) in this terrible economy without depending on advertising? Thanks!

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I'm not sure what your popularity metric is, but here at GitHub we're making plenty of money on subscriptions for private code hosting without a single advertisement on the site. We've also never taken any outside money. GitHub was designed from the very first line of code to make money off of recurring fees for premium features while bringing in traffic, goodwill, and buzz by making everything free for open source. So far so good!

Someone asked a similar question awhile back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375417

Some of the better comments:

Some startups and annual revenue numbers (unsourced): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375896

Someone who modeled 37signals revenue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375771

Nextproof and bigfolio.com http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375575

Hope that helps!

I'm the guy who modeled 37signals revenue. You can download a spreadsheet with all my calculations if you follow the link above... I would appreciate any feedback from those who have experience in the area to improve my assumptions.

I like patio11's thing: http://www.bingocardcreator.com

Well, I don't really "like" it, as I could hardly care less about bingo cards, but it's a nice reminder that there is money even in what seems like really weird niches.

Just released my annual report, incidentally, if you care to read it.

http://kalzumeus.com/2008/12/21/bingo-card-creator-year-2008...

Highlights:

* $20.7k in sales from 1/1/2008 to 12/21/2008

* $10k in profit, which is about 62% YOY growth (did I hear something about a recession?)

* Works out to about $100 an hour. (It is a part-time thing at the moment.)

* Taking myself full-time in 2009, hopefully. (Got another product in the works.)

Why do you rule out depending on advertising? :/ Is income from advertising not real money?...

FWIW Mibbit makes real money, all from advertising at the moment. Premium paid accounts are planned, but it's a lot more work than just putting some useful adverts up.

It's real money but whether it's going to be stable is yet to be seen. That's why the curiosity.

Is anything stable? I haven't seen a good reason why online advertising would be hit harder than say subscription based saas.

Fair enough to only consider one though :)

advertising seems more stable than subscription based. At least according to the Economist, advertising spend changes little during recessionary periods.

I work in advertising, and we are seeing several clients greatly reduce their spend.

What sort of advertising? I can see "brand awareness" advertising being reduced, but why reduce any 'results based' advertising? There's not real reason to reduce advertising that yields a positive ROI - which is easily measurable these days usually.

I'm not sure if advertising is stable or not, but there's been a lot of talk about how it's going to collapse (and how Google is going to be worth $2/share, doom-and-gloom). I think that's the reason for this guy's question.

this girl's question

Micropayments + virtual goods & streaming music rights: http://imvu.com

Interesting work. Looks like your value prop vs. SL is that your world is more straightforward and simpler (in a good way). I.e. most people going to SL really just want to chat and goof around and don't need the complexity.

Poll Everywhere - http://polleverywhere.com

I'm selling software and books, both on-line and the old fashioned way.

yep - good 'ol subscriptions at http://uploadthingy.com - just started 2 new thingys too....

I think what you are doing with the Thingys is brilliant .. Keep it up !

We've been making revenues for a while at HubSpot (http://www.HubSpot.com). Business model is simple: monthly subscription for access to software that meets a need (internet marketing).

We've never sold advertising before (though we do have decent traffic on http://grader.com).

We just sell merchandise -- t-shirts, posters, etc. We were thinking about doing advertising stuff, but since we're a video game site, we decided to just give our users what they wanted (swag) rather than what they go out of their way to block (ads). It's been working exceptionally well, though that's largely attributable to the talent of our designers.

off the main topic but I'd love to stock some gamer hoodies on our retail site, ping me if you'd like to partner or have any leads (hasan {at} hoodiepeople.com)

http://ticketstumbler.com

http://draftmix.com

http://www.freshbooks.com

likely a bit diff from the core web app focus on HN, but we are a startup online retail site, launched in late September, smack dab in the midst of the big meltdown and fared pretty well in the 4th quarter. December provides a natural lift for retail, so Jan numbers will be very interesting but overall we did much better then projected and seem to be gaining decent traction in our niche: www.hoodiepeople.com

thanks - these comments help. economy is terrible (cant just say you have a great idea and you want to postpone thinking about money) and ad based revenue models arent really getting a lot of love these days...makes sense to look at examples of successful startups that dont depend on ads to see what they did right

You're buying into the hype. Think for yourself, don't listen to the news about the 'terrible economy'. This is just a way to push the blame from yourself to external factors.

Zynga FTW there.

Any idea on specific numbers?

Etsy http://www.etsy.com

http://theladders.com

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