I shut it down and it's a good lesson learnt: only spend time or money in a business you understand, and preferably that you build yourself. Since then I'm focusing on my startup (instaroid.sg) which is not passive at all but brings revenue on IP I own.
I didn't realize that just because I could make a better app doesn't mean people would be able to find it. Search is based on popularity - and popularity for tip calculators is usually based on how high up you are on search. This creates a feedback loop - and I didn't have a good way to push myself into that #1 slot even for a short while.
If I had to do it over again, I would focus first on finding a way to get to that #1 spot for a week, and then I could cruise on the traction.
There's also the point that no one really needs a Tip Calculator. Make something that once someone tries, they can't live without.
I haven't updated it because it contains a fatal flaw that, I think, keeps it from being anything more than just a better mouse trap: It can't split a single item between multiple users. It's designed for everyone to put in their own values independently.
If I were to do it again, I would add a "table sharing" feature with Parse and find some decent way of splitting individual items that didn't do it by hand. It could be very novel - but tip calculators just aren't very useful. It's much faster, easier and involves less friction to do it in your head and just round out the differences. Alternatively, just ask the waiter to split the bill.
It's called Tipsy Tip Calculator if you're interested.
I spent 18 months doing all the things I was "supposed to do" to build traffic and sell copies of it - frequent blog posts, SEO (including some recommended grey-hat stuff), weekly "newsletter" e-mails, etc.
Before the Google ranking algo change (Penguin? Panda?), I had my best month ever - US$ 150 in gross income. After the change, I lost 90% of my traffic and didn't have the heart to continue.
Even without the traffic loss, the site was going nowhere, due to a bunch of other mistakes I made. The biggest problem was that the maximum lifetime value of a customer was less than US$ 25.
I found a gap in my market and said that it needed to be used. Renting platform games in my country. You would pay online and the game would arrive by post to you. Play it and send it back to us in a month(max time).
Unfortunately it never caught on. My "partner" didnt really do anything. I designed, developed and marketed the whole thing. Tried to find clients and everything. But since i was alone, i lost motivation which come mostly to the fact that i was supposed to not be alone on this. If i was maybe it would have been different.
Either way, this never worked, people always complained that they bought a game,spend good money, played it for a month and then it ended at there shelf never used again. I believe that they would end up using the service. It was a win win.
Ended up losing a lot of money due to the games that we have bought. Amounted to around 1500-2000 euros.
Lesson learned : 1 ) Don't partner with someone that just talks and doesn't want to do anything. 2 ) Always do you due diligence and check that the market wants what you are about to offer. Talking to 2 - 3 people is not enough.
I had never really created anything before and wanted to learn Rails.
Built it and have been paying $10/mo in hosting for the last two years. I use it and have around 30 active users (couple hundred non-active). So I kind of keep it going just because I realize that the 30 people who use it have invested a lot of time entering scores and stuff.
My monetization strategy was to get traffic and rely on Google ads.