It's profitable but my total investment still probably hasn't been recovered. I'm probably just over ramen profitable at this point.
It's been about 2 years since I started focusing seriously on it around jan 2012), it got to around cash flow breakeven in q3 2013. I haven't received any outside investment.
I write quite publicly about it and am happy to answer questions for anyone curious.
As a landlord you're trying to reach, I'm curious how you're getting the word out. As a developer, I'm curious what you've found most effective.
All the "growth hacking" talk out there makes you want to search for the "one secret trick" or the better placed share button, but for Rocket Lease I did/am doing just tons of unscalable, schleppy, inelegant stuff.
I personally have made thousands of cold calls, found property management companies with errors on their websites and offered to fix them for free to get a conversation started, tried tons of online ad channels (Adwords converts for me now, but I can't buy that many clicks profitably and the viable keyword space is smaller than expected). Flyers, postcards, calling brokers and taking them out to lunch....
Basically all the elegant automated stuff I wanted to happen didn't.
Dogged persistence has been the biggest winner to date. It's gotten easier and with domain age and more back links I'm starting to do better in organic search but it's still not that much (~70 hits a day). With more customers now I have some social proof and I'm starting to get more recommendations in but I think the tipping point for when that becomes a meaningful growth driver is still a ways away.
Oh, and customer service. Unreasonably good customer service. Not because I have to but because I obsess about my business, I personally get to support tickets really fast, try to personally connect with the customer and understand their needs and figure out how to help them.
If I think rocket lease isn't the best fit for their needs, I'll tell them and recommend them to a better suited competitor (this happens if, for example, the landlord wants online rent payments built in to the same system).
Landlords really appreciate the quality service and personal attention. This is typically only necessary early on, and after the customer has used it a few times, it's pretty much auto pilot and they're a customer for life because of the great on boarding experience.
There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.
I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.
That is probably not very good since IE usage is disproportionately high among my customer base (side note, I'm going to check my conversion stats by browser now...)
* One or more services that are intended to make money. Some of them never make it; I've more failed ideas under my belt than winners. But the winners really win and pay for all the time spent on the rest; Improvely and W3Counter are doing really well and provide a comfortable lifestyle financially.
* Projects that are never intended to make a profit. I have a few open source libraries used by thousands, but I never intended to build any business around them, and I don't ask for donations. One did once generate so much customer support e-mail and customization requests that I made a commercial version that sold well, but I was never passionate about it so I ended up selling the rights and probably wouldn't bother doing that again.
* Projects that I know full well will run at a loss, but I build them anyway for various reasons, from "it's fun" to "maybe it'll be good marketing for the paid stuff". I've hosted website guestbooks for people since 1996. I run the contact form and some other widgets for about 4000 Shopify e-commerce stores, which costs a VPS and some Mandrill/Sendgrid fees to send a few thousand e-mails a day. I just felt like hacking on their API.
I knew before I started that it wouldn't make much money. That's not why I wrote it; I wrote it because I wanted this app for myself.
It expands to fill much of my free time, driving my ROI even further negative, but I sure do enjoy it. :)
By Great Odin's Beard, a free copy! http://tokn.co/msvuyzp8
I have also open-sourced many of its iOS bits: https://github.com/splinesoft
> recite ritual of reminiscingMy favourite past-time is game development, nothing of value is produced, but I enjoy doing it and I learn more about writing software and OpenGL!
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
I'm just now seeing if the collaborative wiki calendar platform I've created could be used by other groups. I've made a platform where anyone can sign up for a calendar at https://hasacalendar.co.uk/ and Open Sourced the engine at http://ican.openacalendar.org/ This side of it has very little income currently. The next big task to do is redo the home page to make clearer what it does and work on the design, this side of things is not my strong point. :-/
I decided to Open Source it just because in the end that is what I'd rather do. There are a lot of pluses and minuses each way that are hard to compare, but both Open Source and Closed Source are a lot of work and as I'm doing the work I may as well have it the way I prefer. It already has it's first Open Source install, a live Jazz music calendar.
We launched 4 years ago with 3 folks and should be 20 by this summer assuming we find the right folks (we're 15 now). Just hired our first biz dev guy a couple of months ago. I'd sold the first couple of million in subscriptions. While I'm not sure if we should have hired a BD guy sooner, my co-founder and I did feel like we needed to understand the sales process first.
The good news is that I'm pretty far from a natural salesperson so if we get this product into the hands of someone who really knows how to sell, we'll be on an even better path. That said, I brought a really solid understanding of the product to sales calls which def helped us.
It's been a great and rocky road. We're about to reach escape velocity I think, and I'm really looking forward to that.
As an aside, I try to convene a group of bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs for lunch/dinner periodically to exchange ideas/tips/help one another so if you fit the bill and are based in or near NYC or going to be in NYC, please reach out. (details in profile)
We're not religious about bootstrapping. We may raise funding at some point but want to do it when we find the perfect partner(s) whose interests are aligned with ours. Ultimately, we think bootstrapping and building the company up to be real gives us leverage down the road, i.e., we're not raising money to survive or test a hypothesis but to put more fuel in the tank so we can accelerate growth.
Because of what we do, our 1 requirement is that they have o have been a customer of the product. We need believers :)
We'll see. Right now, the focus remains squarely on the product, customers and the team. Thanks for the kind words.
For bootstrapped SaaS projects it's worth remembering how long it can take to grow the flywheel and see growth. It took Rob from HitTail a year after launch to connect with the right audience and Freckle took 5 years to get to $57k/month. It's a multiyear investment to grow something substantial.
http://unicornfree.com/2013/5-years-of-saas-growth-every-mon...
SpeedCurve has been in development for a year and available commercially for only 5 months. Haven't even started doing any marketing yet with all current growth via word of mouth.
This has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding things I've ever done despite having to make some serious sacrifices. Even if we don't succeed financially, my personal growth has been reward enough.
My brand new start-up http://crowdscore.io is targeted at mid to large business's so is going to need quite a bit of cash to get traction, I've had some early interest but I think its going to be a much harder sell than my first.
Edit: worth pointing out, I learned to code building this the last 4/5 months in my spare time.
Double edit: Eh, it's pretty clearly Definitely Not Finished. Lots of placeholder text and stuff, but yeah.
(PS: If you know anywhere that has a free, REST/JSON livescore API, that would be grand...)
Revenue is not my goal. I built Poemia http://poemia.com with the goal to be the best publishing platform for poets. I launched it 2 weeks ago. If there will be any revenue along the way it will make me very happy :)
Our first goal for it was, "can it cover the cost of its own domain?" Which is an absurd $500/year because that's what the .nr registry chooses to charge for registrations at their top level.
After reaching that goal, our next milestone was the .nr plus California's silly $800/year LLC tax, which we also eventually hit. From there we've set more milestones, such as "occasional nice meal-profitable" to "monthly rent-profitable" and beyond.
It's also inexpensive to operate, because it's stateless.
Which is not a niche I expected to be in. I made what became Gatekeeper as a one-off for a client at the time, saasified it, and threw it on the Shopify app store. I got lucky, but its success (five figures annually since then) has pretty solidly convinced me: there's value in solving your own problems and sharing the solutions. (And also that Shopify is a solid platform to work with. I love you guys.)
The last few years, I’ve switched my side-projects to helping people with their backend infrastructure or architecture. This is definitely not profitable and most times I don’t even charge money. I like helping people and this is very satisfying work. Cold-email me (details in profile) if you like to discuss infrastructure.
My startup silota.com will be profitable as of April. I started hitting the road actively looking for customers in Jan of this year. The product isn’t self-serve yet and requires me to actively hand-hold people during the on boarding process. It’s been great and looking forward to the next few months!
If you're doing it to obfuscate for spammers, then hyphens is the better bet.
I don't really have any plans to monetize it, and I think asking for donations is a bit tacky. But who knows - it's good practice with Javascript and the Chrome API even if it never breaks even.
Meanwhile I'm spinning off an internal tool for black-box testing web apps. It should launch today: http://think200.com/beta But I really don't know what to expect.
We help companies respond quickly to their inbound leads by routing using text to speech to route their text inquiries to phone calls. We have some national accounts that are using our products, that give us great feedback and call volume.
It's going to be two things. First, a wiki for hobbies and interests like home improvement. That's the basic, ho-hum part.
The other, exciting part is that it'll provide a variety of finder and recommendation tools. At the moment, I'm working on a tool to help people find career matches. But in the long run, I hope the site will cover topics like finding apps and video games, cars, outfits and so much more!
its still there! http://www.residencymail.com
I'm currently writing the automated backend to enforce payment (along with some improvements), and then we'll see how much revenue it brings in.
May I suggest a 7 or 14 day trial, then prompting people to pay once they're invested in your site?
I don't want to pay without trying :/ but might be lazy in 14 days and let a few automatic payments slip through the cracks to your service.
http://trendshare.org/how-to-invest/
It amuses me that most of the revenue comes from warning people about the risks of penny stocks.
I think I need more appealing landing pages and better web design in general.
In hindsight we could have gotten there a lot faster if we actually charged earlier and had a better signup/payment model. Oh well, lessons learned!
If it had 10x-100x the number of users, it might be worth trying to turn a profit. For now, it's just a side project.
I think this year I should be able to make around 180k, but life is getting tricky with all those tasks.
No: we don't have revenue