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Comment by jaredtking | Hacker News Reader

I launched Invoiced [1] as a private beta in June of 2013 while in college. In November I took it out of private beta and have since been fortunate enough to be able to focus on it full time.

Invoiced provides simple invoicing for the small business/freelance crowd. It is bootstrapped, profitable, and currently producing 4-figures of MRR. I learn something new every day and get to work with awesome people (customers).

[1] http://invoiced.com

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Cool, this is something I had thought about trying to make, but decided on another project instead. It's just big enough of a project to be a primary endeavor, but small enough for a single person (or two) to handle. It also doesn't seem like it would require tons of maintenance once you get everything worked out. There's not many competitors, it's something in high demand, and it's easy to charge for. Good job!

Cool, good job. I had two issues: 1. The fixed header is an issue when scrolling. Also, the pricing table has the <li> bullet points still showing. (edit: on Chrome current version) 2. Looking at the pricing page, it took me a minute to distinguish between the names of your packages. Maybe have something less "mathy". Otherwise, great job.

Thank you. I fixed the pricing table. I plan to do a refresh of the landing page in the near future and might remove the fixed header at that time. Also, great tip on the packages. I let my passion for math slip through into the pricing.

What did you do to get the word out to the world? Word of mouth? Ads? Tech blog writeups? I have a pretty polished app I wrote a couple of years ago but it didn't even cover the AWS fees once I dropped off the free year. :( Great app, I just don't know how to get the word out...

Thank you. Actually this all started at as a simple web page [1] where you can plug your invoice into the site and get a PDF of your invoice back with no sign up required. I climbed up the search rankings and eventually was getting tons of requests for more features. That is when I decided to make a premium version. Even today a majority of traffic comes through the Upgrade button on the free tool. The second source of major traffic is referrals from existing customers. To date I have spent $0 on advertising and have had virtually zero coverage on tech blogs. I got lucky that my target customer starts out using free invoicing sites.

What app did you create?

[1] http://invoice-generator.com

Just sent you an email. :)

Great service ! Can please share on which hosting to you use , how much many does it cost you monthly? Thanks

Invoiced is hosted on Linode and relies on several other third-party services. I spend ~$110 per month for everything excluding yearly stuff like SSL and domains.

This is awesome! What made you build this, I would have thought the market were too saturated? Have you considered blogging about your process? Would love to hear about what marketing you did to achieve where you are at today.

Thank you! Honestly, I built Invoiced because a lot of people using this invoicing website I made [1] kept asking for more features and offering to pay for them. Initially I was hesitant about building a product that already had competitors. Fortunately the target market is huge because we solve problems faced by most businesses. Many of our competitors have built full-stack accounting platforms whereas Invoiced focuses on building and maintaining your revenue stream.

I might take a break at some point to blog about my experience. It's been an incredible journey so far.

[1] http://invoice-generator.com

Great work. I would love to transition to a model that you've done with invoiced! p.s. Small typo on your 'Features' page, 'inforamtion' instead of 'information'

Thanks, fixed it.

looks neat. And kudos for being profitable.

How does getting paid via stripe / paypal work? Do your customers provide their own stripe / paypal details? or does the payment from your customers' customers go through you? is there any commission involved?

Thank you. Our Stripe integration works through OAuth aka Stripe Connect. Basically, you click the Connect with Stripe button, create an account or sign in, and then confirm that you want to give Invoiced access to your account. We then generate a payment form for your invoices that your customers can pay you with, i.e. https://invoiced.com/username/cust_no/inv_no/payment. The payment goes directly to your Stripe account and we do not add any commission on top of Stripe's fee. This setup is ideal because you can revoke access from our service at any time and we only have access to your account through a unique token that Stripe provides us.

Our PayPal integration is even simpler. Just provide your e-mail address and we generate Pay via PayPal buttons for your invoices. Again, no commission.

Very well executed! Thanks for the info.

Cool! This is something all businesses need, and seems to be something they never get right.

How'd you manage to get that domain name? Did you have to buy it off someone else?

I bought it from a seller on Sedo in January '14 using proceeds from the site.

Do you ever think of develop paymill integration?

If I knew there was demand for it then I would build the integration. So far you are the first person that has suggested it. Thanks for putting paymill on my radar.

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