Ask HN: What's your side project and how much recurring income does it generate?
Try to be descriptive in your comments. When you started, what you've done, challenges you've faced, methods of earning revenue, we want to hear it all!
The hard part has been managing burnout, stress, backlog stuff, and generally just everything ... there's so much non-programming stuff that goes into a business. Once I can get someone to manage all that stuff, it'll be interesting to see what I can do with all that extra time, haha. That and revenue/funding. I'm completely bootstrapped and solo on this, no cofounder, nothing ... what a pain in the ass, why can't someone just manage the business stuff and marketing stuff.
As far as revenue, I've gone with a subscription model. I tried to split the features so that as a free user, you have no ads and you can manually everything. Subscribers get power-user-esq tools like slice-n-dice analytics, soon the routines and auto-logging, etc. As far as managing the users, I just try to be honest and transparent with them, and actually take their feature requests into consideration. A lot of times it's userA wants feature ABC and userB wants XYZ, clearly not the same, but if you step back you realize the just want special-use cases of '123', see if there's a couple other cases for it, and build it if it fits with the direction of the site. Sometimes features take a long long time to get implemented, but I get to them because I have several more pre-reqs to do first, I just try to weave them into the pipeline as logically as I can because it'll be a different problem to solve and help the users so why not.
How's that for a response? Any questions or anything? I try to be open and honest about myself and TSR because I want to be proud of what I made, it's like digital legos.
for printing photos using text message and through DropBox.
We generate around $100-$200 every month..mostly through our DropBox application
I built the site because the only way to get what you want is by voicing that you want it. It's especially important presently due to an increasing disconnect between Congress and citizens. Our system of government functions best with a politically active population. Otherwise the will of the people is impossible to express and the laws become the will of the few.
I've mailed several letters to lawmakers and it's a tedious process, but ultimately necessary as letters actually stand out, while email blends into the noise. Removing the encumbrance of mailing the letter enables participation in government, something I believe in very strongly.
Have you thought about extending this to say city councils or mayor's office also.
There are tons of local small problems, which can be sorted out by city offices, only if they are pointed out in a positive manner, but people do not do so.
A few suggestions for you:
- For the Rep lookup, you should probably plug the user's address into a geocoder, and figure out who their rep is - I'll be the vast majority (maybe even 90% or more?) of voters aren't sure who their rep is. You should also remind them that they can and should write to both senators. - Also, you might want to include a mad-lib style fill-in-the-blanks template on some major issues of the day, for those people who are extremely short on time, and even ask submitters if you can share their letters anonymously with others as a template. Even add popularity ratings for later users to easily get to the most popular letters.
Again, great idea. Good luck with it!
Reoccurring income is pretty low, usually less than a dollar a day. All revenue comes via advertisements.