It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868
Thanks for gathering these
Thanks !
0 outbound marketing yet, and already have 22 customers at $100/month. This year my goal is to scale up to 200 customers.
It's a really weird market niche where no one has built software for in 10 years. Pretty neat.
We're currently building out our "Additional Services" tool, which are services that get applied on top of a reservation. I'm currently working with a couple of groomers to build in some tools that could help fit their needs. Could use all the feedback possible.
Not only can you manage your reservations online, we also feature photo/video report cards over SMS :). That's my personal favorite feature...love getting a video of my 2 dogs wrestling at daycare.
We have a pretty generous referral program, get in touch if you have a business you'd like to refer.
URL is: gingrapp.com Company Phone: +1-877-324-7759
I'm Lee, few free to call anytime!
Do you mind me asking what the development process was like behind this? You have a landing page and a great idea for a product in a good space. Specifically, did you develop the application yourself? If so, what language did you use and what were some challenges you came across? I am looking to start developing some SaaS product and have a few basic ideas, but don't exactly know where to start.
Thanks in advance.
Not at all! My girlfriend originally came up with the idea in January 2014...she works at a dog daycares/veterinary office.
I used LAMP, Bootstrap 3, React.js & Redis as my stack. I've been a PHP guy for a long time now, so I usually default to it for side projects.
I am the sole developer on the project. I have 2 non-technical co-founders who are heading up sales customer support, and business development. I just like to code :P.
The biggest challenge (read: the only real challenge) is to come up with a solution that works for a variety of businesses. This market is so fragmented; every business does everything their own way. My solution is to build abstract tools and data structures whenever possible. It's worked so far.
If you ever want to chat more about this, check out my profile and email me!
Partly that's because they can be cheap and hard to market to at scale, which discourages deeper-pocketed software companies from going after them. But if you're solo and just interested in a lifestyle business with recurring revenue, it's a very reliable path.
After looking into the non-veterinary pet services market I was really impressed by the consistent growth, number of businesses, and lack of offerings in the market. And I was only researching the US at the time. UK, Australia, and New Zealand also have booming pet services market.
I've been thinking of doing something like that, but my aim would be to find websites that I regard as sucking particularly hard.
We're looking to expand into a subscription service that provides a CMS w/ dog-centric themes to our customers.
Shoot me an email, we should talk. Email address on my profile.
Now make a dedicated cat-centric one.
Surely they will have some common elements between them. Find a way to make a pet-centric CMS.
Eventually you will have a flexibly configurable CMS that you could sell to many local businesses.
But you are better off writing a couple of hardwired, dedicated CMSs, then to try writing that flexible one from the very start.
My very first shot at Warp Life for iOS, a Conway's Game of life implementation, had a frame rate of about two per second. Now it's about 8,000 per second.
Now that I've gotten it up to 8,000 per second, I'm getting some real insight as to how to optimize it.
There are other reasons one would want a Life App than because it's fast. MY Life App is for those who care about the speed; not everyone does.
I can order domino's pizza with paypal but it is a PITA.
PayPal is completely convinced that I am laundering money in support of terrorism, however they are cool with my ordering pepperoni with olives.
It really is the case that I can't get cash out of PayPal, but PayPal does permit me to use it for online payments. A few days ago I bought a pizza with a eGift card that I bought from Newegg.
What I'd really like to do is to buy coffee and food at cafes. Starbucks once did a promotion where one could buy a prepaid card with PayPal, that they don't do that anymore. I've never heard of anyone else doing that.
If I could use my PayPal to buy coffee, or find some other ways to spend it at brick-and-mortars, there are all kinds of ways I could earn money online, then get paid via PayPal.
I use PayPal to pay for my phone. That and the pizza are all that I've been able to find that I either want or need, that I can use PayPal for.
Using it to buy coffee would enable me to work more productively. I do a lot better working at a cafe, out among the public, than at home by myself. It's not coffee that makes me productive; I buy the coffee to pay for my cable, power socket and wifi.
I expect PayPal could promote itself to brick-and-mortars, but PayPal's marketing people don't feel that they need to, because PayPal makes plenty of money.
Most brick-and-mortars make enough money for their staff to be happy, so they don't look into how they could increase their sales by accepting other payment methods.
This might seem OK but "making enough money" is one of the factors than enables the lean and hungry to come from out of nowhere with a disruptive technology.
My co-founder is currently working on a true marketing site. I'll be sure to pass this along.
We offer the fastest, most intuitive SaaS platform for Dog Daycares with world class support.
Currently there are 2 direct competitors, one has a slow product with poor support and the other has a decade old product that's inexplicably convoluted. I wouldn't consider anyone else on the market a true competitor (and our customers agree).
A couple of our favorite features are photo/video report cards over SMS, 1-click check-in/out with payments, and the customer app where they can request reservations.
If you're interested in a personal demo, shoot me an email and let's set something up! Email address on my profile.
Do you think this type of software would extend into similar markets well? Maybe vets, or actual child daycare?
According to IBIS, there are ~11,000 dog kennels and daycares in the US alone. Self-performed research indicates ~12,000 similar facilities in Canada/UK/Australia.
I've looked into the veterinary world and beta tested our product at one practice. Turns out, there's tons of stuff vets need to keep track of that kennels don't. The basic premise is similar, though. We might fork the codebase one day.
Child daycares is a tough market. There are actually good products out there with medium-level investors. To be honest, I haven't spent much time looking into the market.
It was a really interesting story though...
My co-founder and I had the smallest possible booth in the very back corner of the room. Our biggest competitor had a triple sized booth manned with 4 people and 2 42-inch TVs in the center of the room.
We had 5 competitors within a 6 booth radius. Everyone else had a giveaway, huge screens, backdrops, lighting... the works. We had a 60" wide banner, a 24-inch monitor, 2 iPads, flyers and our phones.
These competitors had a decade of experience selling their product and had been to all these trade shows many times. This was our first trade show ever and only had 4 customers.
The first day was OK. Generated some buzz around the hall and had a few people really spend some time chatting.
In the afternoon, I branched out (co-founder stayed at the booth). I went around and introduced myself to about 1/2 of the other vendors. Then, I started walking up to folks randomly around the conference hall. I introduced myself, smiled and told them I was with Gingr. I then asked if they had a minute to chat about their problems with software. About 80% said yes.
I learned that just going out on a limb, smiling, being polite and asking people about their problems really worked. It makes sense IMHO ... everyone wants someone to listen to their problems.
Some were concerned that we were so new and small. I had practiced my spiel for that a hundred times by then. I managed to persuade most. A few had their "IT" person call me the next week. For the most part though, if you understand someone's problem and do have a solution, being new and small small wouldn't be a "deal breaker".
As far as closing a sale goes...don't treat it like a sale! I approached every conversation as just that.
> I had practiced my spiel for that a hundred times by then.
Mind sharing what that was?
-One charges $85/month, has decent support but a disliked and old product.
-The other charges $60/month, has poor support and a very slow product (~30 sec. page load time)
I knew that I had a superior product (months of real-world testing) and that our business wanted to make support a priority.
In the end, we priced at $100/mo or $1000/yr. It's higher than everyone else which implies a better product (kinda). I haven't run into sticker shock yet for anyone with an existing business.
We're planning on raising the price >20% for new customers within 6 months.
With the trade show did you just go and talk to people, or did you have a stall set up?
To date I've done 0 outbound sales/marketing. Just face-to-face interactions with folks at trade shows and our referral program. About 30% of our customers are referrals.
It's possible my co-founder are just so likable that our customers rave about us on private Facebook groups with their peers (our target demographic).
In this little niche, just being new and "not those guys" goes a long way. Add in a smile and an ear that really listens and you've got a pretty good initial sales strategy.
That is very cool, thanks for the information and being so open about your business. With so many good stories on HN I am considering writing a short book of interviews of people who have set up businesses of the bootstrap/lifestyle genre. Would you be interesting in being a case study?
inquicker.com started as a hobby / learning opportunity (2005) and grew into a side project with about $20k/yr in recurring revenue from corporate customers (2008).
Eventually, it turned into a full-time job (early 2009) and I found a co-founder (late 2009). We hired our first four employees in 2010. In 2011 we signed our 100th customer and hit $1m in recurring revenue. In 2013 we hit $5m in recurring revenue.
If you can make more profit per hour spent in your spare time that in your job, then it won't be long until you quit and spend all of you time. If not then you will give it up, unless it is just a hobby. (Hobbies might be exception to the rule)
I read most of patio11's advice as being about exactly this: how to build a not-necessarily-scalable business that you can lose interest in without it dying. (Namely, by contracting out content-generation and community management and treating the commissions/wages of those people as part of your user acquisition costs.)
It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos.
Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.
I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always struggle.
I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where I put my ideas into a few sentences...
Creating content for me is always hard, but once it's done, I love to deliver it (via talks, teaching, videos or books...)
Please see: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3...
And yes - I've bought all the reddit ads I can get my hands on - they are in pretty limited quantity.
Here's another good informational link that delves into this aspect: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion
I'm glad you've bought ads (though I don't remember ever seeing one), but that doesn't exempt you from the rules about self promotion.
People demanding something for nothing doesn't scale, so it we must settle for something in between: Mutual value.
Thanks! Matt
The description says that it is for novelty purposes, but the reviews show people believe it works and it has a placebo effect. Most reviews say things like "I drove past a police station and it went off! 5/5".
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vox.radard...
It's funny to see it up in the top 20 of the Transportation category on Play, alongside companies that are heavily VC funded. https://play.google.com/store/apps/category/TRANSPORTATION/c...
amazing
So people believing it works are not stupid, they can legitimately believe you're pulling that from a common database with an app that lets user signal radar or police cars.
Worst case this probably encourages people to slow down when driving and doesn't actually help them avoid tickets, but you're still being quite dishonest.
You really should add something like "WARNING: this is just a simulator, it doesn't work in real world at all".
And common sense really.
I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).
The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.
There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).
I am extremely strict with what I count as a hit (I have a whole GEOip & browser combination) so if two people come from the same country with the same browser, it's only one hit, ever.
As a user, that's more complicated. In European Union it's legal. Everywhere else? Hard to say.
Don't you arrange the download and provide a way for the user to "actually" download the video?
To be honest, I am very frustrated with the ads, but I have to make money somehow and I never found a better way how to do it.
To convert one video, I was subjected to each of these popups three times:
http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png
You're probably paid per install, unless the distribution model for malware has significantly changed in the past six years.
Assuming $2 per install, that would mean you're infecting 15,000 machines per month.
At bare minimum, this malware you distribute probably maliciously replaces all ads loaded on the infected machine with ads controlled by the hackers who created the malware, and it does this for the remainder of the lifetime of that machine.
The legitimate site operators currently obliviously and naively praising you in the comments here are the very same victims who are robbed by the criminals you are colluding with via this ad-replacing malware you distribute. Their CPM and CPC numbers are suffering because of crooks like you.
All that aside, none of this takes into account the people who are duped into calling the 1-844 number in those popups who then have their bank accounts cleaned out by the scam artist on the other end who succeeds in socially engineering the victim into sharing their credit card details.
What you're doing isn't praiseworthy; it isn't impressive. It's despicable.
http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793
Checking that script, we see a lot of "gunggo" references, which is the ad network doh admits to using. Gunggo apparently owns directrev.com, and both are considered pretty shady from what I can gather:
https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,5379.0.html
Savedeo.com is ranked 49,679 on alexa. I'm guessing it gets around 9,000 visitors per day. With such little traffic, and no legitimate product or paid services being offered, there is absolutely no remaining way to earn 30k per month other than to spray hapless visitors with the most aggressive/malicious advertisements known to man.
Here are the stats from his ad network which he showed off earlier: http://i.imgur.com/LfgWL7D.png
I'm assuming those numbers are ad impression counts. There is no possible way savedeo.com is receiving anything close to that many page views per day. If it were, his alexa rank would be closer to 1,800; certainly not 49,679. I run a site approaching the alexa 2000 range, and it only gets half as much traffic as his ad network statistics screenshot boasts. Since the numbers in this ad network screenshot cannot possibly represent savedeo.com's traffic, we are left to guess what they actually do represent.
Here's my guess: It's the number of ads served to infected machines per day via the malware he helped install through popups like these. Assuming he's infected 25,000 machines, each infected device would only need to maliciously replace 20 legitimate advertisements on victim sites per day for him to reach this absurdly high impression count. If that is indeed what is happening, he's earning roughly $1.50 per thousand ad impressions which is fairly standard.
My other websites have Alexa rank 23,000 with 15k to 20k visits/day and Alexa rank 250k and 5k visits/day.
Though I like how you based ALL of your reasoning around a probably false alarm, and you just kept going on and on with conclusions.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jasmcole.w...
http://jasmcole.com/2014/08/25/helmhurts/
It reached the reddit front page for a day, and earned £3,000 during that day. Since then, it's averaged ~£150 per month, with only small input from me (minor updates)
I then saw the traction the blog post was getting, so wanted to capitalise on that quickly. I had an Android phone, so for simplicity (and ease of monetisation) decided to write an app for that. From zero knowledge of Java it took probably 30 hours over a weekend to get the app out, then perhaps another 10 hours over the next week on a few updates and bug fixes.
Getting the app up and running was relatively simple, most of the time was spent looking up API functions in Google's SDK documentation (and SO!). The only complication was making sure the CPU-intensive parts ran in a separate thread to avoid locking up the UI, and dealing with different device display sizes and resolutions. Everything else (dealing with input, generating images etc.) wasn't particularly difficult, but did take time to implement.
[1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com
Edit: If you'd like to read a preview, you can do so here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read
That way, your venture ends up with the combined page-rank of your personal brand and the exact-domain bonus. (Whereas if you just redirect from one to the other, you lose one or the other.)
Quite a change from my day job working in software but I enjoy the diversity.
I've been trying to understand the full remote supply chain, going directly from the offshore supply chain directly to FBA.
I'm starting to ramp up my marketing but to date I've done some adwords and advertising on Amazon.
Sales are steady, I don't reach $1000 every month but the holiday season more than makes up for it when you average it out.
Thanks!
The first year, I sold for $0 of librairies. In 2014, I've made ~$45,000 and it's 100% passive income. I'm not proud to say that I've worked a total of 30 hours on the site last year (it sounds as if I'm lazy, and I'm not). Moreover, I've never spent a single dollar on marketing, no matter its form.
It works so well that I've taken the decision to leave my daily job to work on the site full time. I (perhaps naively) think that if I make that much money while doing practically nothing, I can surely make a ton more by actually working on it every day for a year. On Feb 1st, I'm making the jump.
It has been tough to get there though. The first year has been a disaster. I nearly abandoned the site. Then, one day, I started to gain traction. To this day, I have no idea why. Then, months after months, the sales went up. It took me weeks and weeks of work to create the libraries I'm selling today. I also did a lot of variations, based on the feedback I received from my customers. My customers are the best, I think. They like what I do, they give me a lot of feedback. In the course of my business, I also did stupid things I regret immensely, like copy a competitor (but honestly it was not intentional), and I'm really, really not proud of this.
Sales have reached a peak of $7500 for the month of May 2014.
The site is based on http://jekyllrb.com/ and is hosted on https://www.webfaction.com/, on a 9$ per month plan. As the site is static, I just need Nginx. That's it. GetDPD allows me to collect payments with both Paypal and Stripe.
To let people pay and downlaod, I use http://getdpd.com/. They are fantastic. I've tried a lot of other options and even though GetDPD looks terrible, it's a great product, well worth the tiny monthly cost.
I hope my story will let people know that it's totally feasible to do a great business as a side project. I honestly wonder EVERY.SINGLE.DAY how come it worked for me, but well,... it worked :-)
I'm wondering if it has to do with where the site appeared in search results. For example if Google changed their algorithm or if perhaps your web host somehow changed something?
Do you remember when it started to gain traction?
I've successfully stopped 1 full blown exploit (admanteumcoin) where there was code that allowed a block to mine any amount of coins desired, (and had RPC calls modified to hide this).
I started out doing it to try to help the altcoin ecosystem, because it's pretty interesting, and because it's a great way to learn more about cryptocurrencies and all their implementations. My code review directory (that isn't actually up to date) is on github: https://github.com/Earlz/coinreviews
Kudos on your About page too, instantly builds connection through good taste in music & drinks!
I really don't pay enough attention to my blog these days, but glad you like it :)
Temporary email. Got lucky with traffic, and run two Google Adsense ads.
Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
Ever had any ideas for monetizing the junk mail you receive? I'd imagine most of the mail filters do something similar to learn on, but it seems like there has to be some value from that volume.
What sort of hardware do you need for that kind of load?
Edit: this depends heavily on your traffic pattern, of course. Super bursty traffic from Reddit, TechCrunch, etc is going to swamp your IO, but CPU will never dominate the equation.
At all.
How do you get that? Assuming 4M/month, that works out to 130K/day. Even if all that traffic comes in a 10-hour window, that works out to 130,000/36000 =~ 4/sec, not 70/sec.
I have a massively overspecced server that I use for this, and many other sites/projects - 24 GB RAM, dual X5670 CPUs, etc... Typically runs at a load average of only 0.5-0.6. Like I said, overspecced:)
PS: I will disable uBlock on your domain. I like people who advertise properly.
Thanks.
Have an assistant that helps curate freelance/contract positions from around the internet and through opportunities I hear about offline. I'm a mobile developer, so it's an effective side business to be working on.
Many people have scored new clients and worked on interesting projects through the service. Some people find it's not for them. Definitely offer a money-back guarantee if you're working on something digital/saas. No reason to be taking people's money if they're not getting value out of your product.
Another valuable lesson: we did really well with podcast advertising thanks to Release Notes (http://releasenotes.tv/). If you can find a podcast with 10,000 - 20,000 listeners that serves a niche, you should be able to produce a nice return. IMO our landing page is terrible, but it converts quite well.
If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show.
I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it certainly hasn't yet.
The folks at Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.io/) run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe. If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith in your advertising dollars.
I've been very successful in the technology world, including running my own scientific and software consulting company for many years, but as a novelist and poet I've been a complete failure, despite approaching the two in very similar ways. Maybe the markets are simply very different, or maybe it's just luck, or something else. So I think it would be interesting to see some side-by-side of projects that took off and projects that didn't.
There are lots of really interesting things people are posting here, but I bet for every success story there is a story of failure that involves a great many of the same elements, yet somehow never grew beyond the "that was an interesting way to spend my spare time for a while" stage.
Here is one that makes $5-$10 a month from admob. A lot less than I hoped: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martincapo....
Most of the installs are from non-english speaking countries. I spent about $20 on Fiverr to get the descriptions translated into Russian, Portuguese etc, which helped me get a few more downloads. I now have 1000 downloads, 250 current installs, and about 10 new installs (and 10 uninstalls!!) per day.
Thanks.
>What is an ABA routing number?
The ABA routing number is a 9-digit identification number assigned to financial institutions by The American Bankers Association (ABA). This number identifies the financial institution upon which a payment is drawn. Routing numbers are sometimes referred to as "check routing numbers", "ABA numbers", or "routing transit numbers" (RTN). Routing numbers may differ depending on where your account was opened and the type of transaction made.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/deposits/manage/faq-routing-nu...
My app/website simply provides this information to users for free.
One of the good things about affiliate relationships in the betting niche is that they offer lifetime earnings if you go down that route. They also offer fairly strong CPAs if you negotiate with the brands you drive a lot of traffic to.
I am now branching out into more sports such as Tennis over the next 6 months!
(Chances are this will be less of a side project and more of a full time gig in a few months time if it keeps growing)
I prefer to make it available for free and then make the money by signing people up for bookies that they might not normally use.
Maybe at some point in the future I will consider a premium tier but it is not on the roadmap at the mo.
It is just on a stock wordpress theme at the moment as I am currently developing a better site for it.
The algorithm selections can be seen here: http://betalyst.com/tips-zone/
Still a lot more work to do on it! - Feel free to share are potential improvements, I am not afraid of constructive criticism! It is very much something I threw together to get the algorithm into the wild, an MVP if you like.
The app is currently not available on the app store as I have to re-launch it with some changes as Google were not happy with the amount of 'gambling' content in it, they paused it when it got to 200k downloads!
It is due to be re-launched before the end of the month once I have time to make the changes they requested.
That is not something I am looking to do, I would prefer to hand out all my tips for free.
I have on two occasions run my predictions vs theirs and have beaten them on both occasions which is good.
I may set up a tracker between both algorithms over a longer timescale to see which is more accurate.
In my new template there is a section that will have a graph of stats on performance and ability to check how the algorithm has performed across segments (leagues, etc).
I am planning on using a Betfair bot in the future. Once I am happy that I have everything in place I will create this.
May ask for some feedback in there!
Am deffo going to keep a close eye on the Reddit group so might shoot you an email about that in a couple of days
Email away!
There is a Useful Resources section on the sidebar of the reddit page. How would I go about requesting a link to my site in there?
Your site would not be accepted into the Useful Resources section (lots of spam in the gambling industry, affiliate stuff etc). You have to be careful about how you get links, otherwise your domain will be quickly banned from the sub. A better suggestion would be the daily picks thread, perhaps auto posting the picks....
I plan on expanding this functionality over the coming months as well, as there are a number of websites that keep requesting feeds and API access to the algorithm predictions.
A good place to start out would be here: http://www.football-data.co.uk/data.php
It currently makes about $1,200/mo. I do somewhat detailed income reports over at http://www.it-engelhardt.de/income-reports
My wife has always hated the meal planning/recipe organization and sharing process and available tools (she'd used a few different products). After asking lots of friends for recommendations and hearing enough times, "I use X, but I don't like it, so if you find something better, let me know." it seemed like a promising lead for a side project!
Worst case: I make no money, and my wife finally has the meal planning tool she's always wanted.
It's something I could see myself using, but it seems too US-centric at the moment :) . Still, I'll give it a try :)
Do you have an e-mail or something for feedback?
Feel free to e-mail me directly (in my profile) or there's a feedback form on the site (in the profile navigation dropdown). I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Best of luck :)
Edit: also, U$ 8 / month is a huge barrier for international adoption.
It'd be really fun to have enough data on user's recipe preferences to see if sensible groupings ever emerged as a basis for useful recommendations. (I guess not unlike Netflix's projected ratings.)
I only launched the book about 1.5 months ago, and I'm at about $1500 in revenue. I'm definitely hoping to see greater income with the higher tiers (including video) and greater marketing. I'm also speaking with some companies about them buying site licenses of the book, which would increase the revenue even more.
I tried some ads (Facebook, Google, and Reddit) for a short time, but they didn't work -- mostly, I'd guess, because the landing page is still immature, and because I didn't give away any free chapters or other elements.
The landing page is now better than it was, and people now have a choice between buying the book right away and getting a chapter's worth of exercises and solutions over a 10-day period via a drip campaign. These improvements have definitely raised the conversion levels.
I just signed up for your samples as 'pbhj' if you want to get in touch.
Incidentally, when one adds themselves to your email list for samples it takes you to https://lerner.leadpages.net/new-practice-makes-python/thank... but there's no route back other than using the back button. IME this tends to mean people will just close the tab, providing a route back or on to a related page might help conversions or give you chance to get affiliate conversions or what-have-you.
TBH, the worst part about this is that it's so easy, I got pretty lazy about it. This is why I haven't answered the "what did you make?" question - I got so lazy about it in 2014 that the side projects brought in about half what they made in 2015. Kinda painful in retrospect.
Likewise, if I had web sites for this stuff, if I built email marketing systems, I'm sure they'd make more money. I even have a Kindle version of one of my books, and I still haven't gotten around to sharing it with my customers. Kind of embarassing, actually.
But even then, I'm well over the $1K/month mark. No worries there. All you really need to do is create stuff that people find worthwhile.
The site generates >$1.5k per month at the moment from AdSense alone, without any marketing other than SEO and broadcasting to the social followers we've accumulated. This revenue is secondary to the real and long-term value being generated in the form of large numbers of membership/email subscriptions and social followers.
No AdSense optimisation at all; barely touched the account. The most sophisticated it gets is that it's using the async code (which we got access to quite early on), and there's a bit of conditional logic which fires to determine which size to serve based on the viewport width. Love to hear any ideas you have - though AdSense is really a temporary cost covering measure while we grow the email database, develop the app, etc. We'll bin it when we're large enough to move reliably to other methods.
I have a small directory website. It's pretty boring stuff, but it is a good source of almost passive income. Never published it. I just created the website and sent the sitemap to Google Webmasters. It's 8 months old and I have 400k pageviews/month.
I have lots of projects in idea stage, I want to execute at least two in 2015. My plan is to reinvest all money from this first side project to create others.
I started with AdSense 3 months ago and I'm still afraid of being banned and lose all my revenue. I don't explicitly violate any terms, but it is not original content and can easily be framed as doorway pages.
One of my goals to 2015 is a better project to publish here.
bots4 is a freemium text/browser-based robot fighting game. It was making $3,000/month at one point, but revenue has dropped significantly since then (and it fluctuates a lot based on the activity of whales). Operating cost is $25/month for Linode VPS hosting. Here's the revenue history as of August 2013:
http://i.imgur.com/rqcxQgv.png
It makes money purely through in-game purchases. Players can buy what are known as "stars" for $10 USD each. Stars let you order items for your bot so that you don't have to camp for them. The alternative if you don't have stars is to wait for your item to appear, so stars ultimately don't enable you to do anything you couldn't do without them, but they are a big convenience, especially in late game where certain items appear very infrequently (still only O(hours) though).
If you want more info, you can read through my posts here (linked to archived version because it's not loading on the original domain):
https://web.archive.org/web/20140210074542/http://community....
The amount you make from the Job Board post is heavily dependent on the amount social followers (drives traffic and makes purchasing more appealing).
https://www.angularjobs.com started making ~$1000/month in revenue with a highly targeted social reach of ~10k followers.
Technical co-founder type? Take what you know about programming and offer recruiting services to the early users of your site. Both companies and developers visit job boards, providing both the clients and talent needed to collect recruitment fees(over 10K in major US cities).
My main gig is http://www.LinkPlugApp.com where I play a technical role.
LinkPlug is how I drive traffic to the JobBoard from social media accounts like the ones below(click a tweeted link to see an ad for the JobBoard):
https://twitter.com/AngularJS_news
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?groupDashboard=&gid=4896676
https://twitter.com/angularjobs
edit: added Twitter account examples.
The JobBoard is a great way to get some passive income, but, there is a lot more money to be made if you want to devote your time to recruiting.
Having a non-recruiting domain in the space you want to recruit in is a huge advantage when getting both JobBoard and recruiting leads.
Definitely focus your recruiting efforts in one locale at first. DC, SF and NYC are the top markets if you are based in the US.
The JobBoard should be worldwide (easier to facilitate than restricting it anyway).
Feel free to send me sensitive questions via email: brian at linkplugapp.com
These contracts made building the JobPosts and driving traffic worth my time(contract = collect a sizable a fee when someone you refer to a position gets hired).
JobPosts drive the organic traffic to JobBoards, so make sure you take SEO into consideration when posting.
I also started with a much lower rate to post on the JobBoard, never free, but as low as $29 at one point. As the traffic grew, so did the price. Now a JobPost costs $349.
Most companies are very familiar with this type of contract.
It's free to download and try it out, but then I charge for additional puzzles.
I was keen to give a complete version of the app for free (without ads) so that people understand clearly what I'm offering. This strategy seems to be working with good and returning custom. Not $1k yet but some reason for optimism ;)
I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern.
This is the latest I can find: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern.
This is the latest I can find regarding Lodsys/in-app purchase patent: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
I didn't take this into a great deal of consideration - I haven't seen any press or heard anything about it since 2013, and I felt that publishing something good would have value beyond this concern.
This is the latest I can find regarding Lodsys/in-app purchase patent: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/01/03/ding-dong-patent-tro...
Anyway "The last Lodsys patent technically expired in 2012 - the LLC had been suing based on past infringement"
Point is, it's not without some heavy risks, and regular attention.
Also care to share any pitfalls you fell into at the start? Right now I am working on building modules with the purpose of collecting data for training.
Forex is a tricky space, volatility and fees can really funk you up. I do a little there because the returns tend to justify it. Be wary of smaller and or unknown names. Manually check out anything you allow your algos to trade... at least till you come up with a comprehensive set of rules you can trust.
I tend to stick to US equities. Just because my risk tolerance is low for what amounts to a side project using my personal funds. Which I'm often not looking at until all the trading is done for the day.
Also follow up question, what sort of inputs are you using for training. Are you using mainly sentiment and price history or mostly technical indicators?
Yes to sentiment, yes to history (though I keep my own history for the sake of granularity and not paying twice for data), and sort of for technical indicators... technical indicators are helpful for humans, but if your ML algo is using a data set that spans a multi-day window already a technical indicator of the direction of movement in the last few days is just telling your algo something it already knows.
My thought process is that the more indicators i can feed in with some history the higher the possibility that unique patterns are discovered. I originally thought that sentiment and news would be to complex to break down into a simple input for the network. I want to include them but i was going to place allot less emphasis on them.
Are you simply breaking down sentiment as good vs bad by analyzing text or are you doing something more complex?
I am sorry to be asking so many questions, but i have literally just started working on this for less then a week and I find your success very interesting. At this stage i am treating this as a long experiment.
Would you mind putting an email in your profile? I'd like to contact you privately.
While I've done consistently well so far, I've only been at it full force a few years, and I started with my own cash which isn't nearly that much.
The followup is usually turning this into a business and getting investors... if you looked at my resume not much would make you think I have the skill set for this (though I've spent 3 years building this on my spare time). I'm also not sure I'm really up for the whole start-up thing, I enjoy my somewhat relaxed work schedule/hours. I value my personal life more than this stuff.
I'm open to suggestion on that last one but it's not something I've done before.
My method is simple and has only four steps. 1. Write something cool and put it online for free. 2. Wait 4 to 5 years. 3. Gather all the emails asking if they can license it or pay you to adapt it. 4. Then slap on a price/marketing page emphasizing what everybody asked for.
http://websequencediagrams.com is my SAAS business. When I was working on 3GPP at RIM we had to spend hours in Visio moving boxes around, and pasting the results into word documents. It was a challenging layout problem. By 2007 I made a python script that did sequence diagrams automatically and put it online. I began to get emails from companies saying they wanted to license it, so I obliged. After I left RIM, I converted it into a freemium product. I have about 400 users paying $9 to $15/month.
http://zwibbler.com gets about 70 visits a day. It's a javascript drawing library with full-service from me. Again, it started as a free HTML demo, and I began to get emails requesting me to adapt it for pay. Instead, I created the front page that offers a complete solution for $1500. By answering emails and talking on the phone, I can get 3 or 4 clients a month without even trying. I figure out what they want and reposition the buttons to do it.
My favourite is http://rhymebrain.com because I don't have to do anything. Google just transfers $1-2K into my account every month for Adsense.
My theory was that those people are looking to buy something. Also I hated ads. But I'm going to enable them universally soon, if only to stop the constant emails from ad companies.
Just a small note: I tried http://rhymebrain.com/en/What_rhymes_with_peace.html
And it gives things like: recognise, harmonise
I know it's tough, so don't worry too much, but if it can be fixed the better :)
Among that, I started selling Prestashop modules on May 14, and now I get around 800/1000 € per month from this.
Getting money on your side project is (imho) the best feeling in the world. You get notifications (email for Prestashop, SMS that I configured for VoilaNorbert) at every sales, and when you receive them, oh that feels great! :)
This lead me to learn something very important : you have to finish what you start. It's my big default, I always stop in the middle. Norbert and the modules for Prestashop was an exception, and now they make money!
VoilaNorbert helps you find the email of a specific person in a company.
Say for example you have the full name of a person (the CEO) and his company's website. You can use Norbert to try and find his email. Using his personal email, you will have more chances to reach him than just using contact@... .
Norbert simply try and check the existence of general combinations of emails (firstname.lastname, f.lastname, etc) until one is found.
http://blog.idonethis.com/how-we-got-to-1-000-in-recurring-r...
Im working on a similar service using SMS.
This is the quick (1 min video) version of how I did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0y28HmcqUo&feature=youtu.be
This is the longer version: http://blog.quickmail.io/category/journey-to-1k-paying-custo...
It is called LeadFuze (www.leadfuze.com) and it's an email prospecting and outreach service that generates leads via email. Good for B2B businesses and startups, or even companies looking to validate ideas.
I've managed to hit $1k/mo ($1,100) in recurring revenue within 30 days. Going to be a much bigger focus of mine now that it is gaining traction.
It's not passive income, but I only use ~ 1 hour a day on it (packaging etc.)
Just curious. Not trying to put you down.
http://www.shitexpress.com/blog/how-we-earned-10120-usd-in-3...
I'm not making anything close to that but I've worked on a side project of mine for months with no gain. At this point I'm debating if I should just move on. It's not revolutionary but but any advice would be beneficial.
I'm guessing you could see a nice improvement in your conversion funnel if you fix these two issues.
Next, my wife and I started CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net, launched December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales). Since it's transaction-based it's a lot less consistent monthly, but growing faster. A typical month is $300-$400 in revenue, but it's been a lot higher (and a lot lower) here and there.
Currently the videos generate about $3,500/month in revenue. There's little out of pocket expense for the initial production of each video (stock imagery, reference books, etc) and no ongoing expenses after production is complete.
I started out just focusing on topics that I was interested in but didn't have a lot of success. Once I started approaching things as a business my return improved dramatically.
In my experience, it's much easier to have a stable recurring revenue from a SaaS app than a book. Books go out of date much faster.
I owe a lot to Feedback Army. It was the first thing I made where I made money without putting an hourly value on a unit of my time. I learned to think of my business as a system for fulfilling what I promised and collecting money from customers. This side project was a great way to cut my teeth on some business and service fundamentals.
It's got a standard F2P model for the collectibles aspect: you can get everything for free by playing the games / posting in the forums, or you can pay for it. It probably doesn't make as much as it could as I refuse to employ "dirty F2P Tricks", but that's a personal choice.
Check it out if you care to :)
http://undupe.com was something I spun up one day, it gained a little interest and now it runs around $400+ a month(with under 10 users). Not very much, but a nice start.
I'm working on moving this one up a notch past $1,000/mo while adding other small products to my portfolio.
$1k/mo is still a milestone I've been working on reaching. Up until now, I've been an active contract developer.
Still have lots of product tests running and seeing what will be next. Eventually, this will turn into a nice portfolio of digital assets and income.
Neither app has any server-side components, so they don't cost me anything but squarespace fees for my website and my iOS dev program membership.
Edit: Oh yeah, they're both paid apps and I don't fiddle with the pricing
Growth was slow but steady, and the site now receives ~1.4M pageviews per month. The money to keep things up and running comes through banner ads - it's not a huge amount (have only started hitting just about $1000/mo in recent months, and don't know how long that'll last for), but it's still a nice revenue stream to have.
It's an inventory/career management platform for working Artists. Slow but steady growth, mostly word of mouth and recommendations by influencers in the space. Me and one other business partner. We had our first $1k month in our 4th month of operation. We are well over that now and with current growth it should match the income of my full time job in the next year or so.
+ pc builder site http://assembleyourpc.net (I created ~1.7 years ago, generates revenue from Adsense and few affiliate programs, 2-6 hours of work (per month))
+ other niche tools : http://portchecker.co and http://signature-maker.net (weekend side projects, 0-2 hours of work(per month))
It's doing about 1.5k/mth. Launched it 2 months ago. Took me 6 months to create it. Still adding content to it though, will probably take about 1 year more before I complete it.
The site that hosted the course did most of the marketing for me so I just focused on the product. Startup cost was about $150. Spent it on microphone and digital writing pad.
I've been running it for the last 5 years. The first 2 years, it was just a blog that I maintained for free. 3 years ago, I started selling access to audio recordings of the lessons as a subscription.
The site generates about $2K per month off of around 300K monthly visitors. It continues to grow but very slowly.
I wrote a site creator for non-profits that allows them to create customized fundraising sites.
Source Code: https://github.com/rainmaker7/locator
I got into this stuff because I am very interested in domains - especially .io domains
At first domains were just a fun hobby - to collect for future projects. But then I sold a few and bought a few more and scaled it out.
I created park.io to automate things.
Also, do you plan to extend to more TLDs?
(I mean the content, not the selling of it.)
I'd be happy to chat further. Hit me up on my website or on Twitter: @clintfix
This is an awesome project and it looks like the content you are providing is high quality and impactful! I would love to hear more about how you started gaining the initial content and how/why you structured the Courses (1&2) in the ways that you did.
Thanks,
I recorded what it looked like. You can see it here:
Today it has 1mio pageviews/month, PREMIUM Membership, Photoshop Plugin, AdSense and some "30-days" ads.
And photos are still FREE :)
Although I haven't spent a single penny on promotion and selling it for less than I should I guess.
www.humblepen.com
edit: Could you also talk about SEO and how you market your site?
I'm used to building pretty simple webapps, so doing something like this is really interesting to me from a learning perspective.
In addition to the technical tasks, how did you go about marketing your site?
Thanks!
So what I would do was check TPB every hour, and get the links through the API. If I didn't have them in my DB, I added them. If I had them I updated the seeder / tracker info.
Once I have that info, I scan the DB for magnet links that haven't yet been thumbnailed. I use the transmission-daemon to manage the torrent downloads, and keep a handful of them going at all times. Getting that working properly was kind of a pain in the neck.
Once a torrent is downloaded, I use ffmpeg to scan it and make 10 thumbnails of every movie file in it. The torrents are deleted after they're thumbnailed.
Not much marketing, I just post about it here and there in places where people would be interested in hearing about it.
I'm hoping TPB comes back up soon so I can refresh my data. It's way out of date.
As for ffmpeg, is that automated or do you have to do some manual work every time a torrent is finished?
Where do you host your site and how do you get paid? Systems like Google AdSense and payment gateways run from anything related to porn like it's the devil.
It's a SaaS app and a Chrome Extension. It has tens of thousands of monthly active users and makes $x,xxx per month.
Will complete it by next weekend.
Why?
200,000 searches per month on goggle UK + moz keyword difficulty of 31% = opportunity
www.lyfts.com
1. Your video mentions you 'buy the SSL certificate' for users. How does that work? Are you a CA or do you resell another CA?
2. Your video mentions latest security practices - are you selling EV certificates? Or just 'encryption to someone who owns this domain' certificates?
3. If you resell another CA, how can the identity verification process be 20 minutes?
Pardon all the questions, but I'm currently waiting on godaddy, who take 15 days, so I'm interested in this stuff.
Again, sorry for all the questions and thanks for answering!
Has heroku providing free shared SSL impacted your numbers at all?
It's a lot harder than you might think.
My clients give pretty reliable recurring revenue, so much so that it's gone from a side project to a full time gig for me.
Sounds like those spam emails for Viagra
Currently I'm working on scaling very hard.
It was a good year, and it feels good that 15 years of insanely hard learning have paid off... It feels surreal, like I'm dreaming and I'm going to wake up.
I run a membership site called travelblogsuccess.com. My full-time job is at WooThemes for WooCommerce. I'm a firm believer of "eating your own dog food" thus we use WooCoommerce and several other plugins on my own side project. This has given me a better understanding of the products we sell at WooThemes as an actual customer on a live site. I learned more about our own products using it for my side project than learning and testing our plugins on a local development server.
As for the site itself it does require maintenance so not quite passive. It's important that we communicate with our community and update our lessons and courses often. We just introduced a public Slack community yesterday for example. We're now a team of four and could easily need more help. 2014 saw huge growth.
Initially I was concerned that my side project was going to take up too much of my time resulting in having two full-time positions. It did take some lifestyle changes in the beginning to free more time like spending less time messing around Facebook or Twitter and optimizing my time spent on my side project. In the end everything has worked very well. I spend on average an hour or two each day on my side project. Sometimes more if I'm simply watching TV while working on a few tasks during my downtime.
Sorry for the initial vague comment. Please do feel free to ask me any questions.
I am, today, skeptical that it's worth anyone's while to try to make money from ads published alongside one's articles. At one time that was widely accepted as the very best way to make money online, but no more.
I'm getting ready to do a KickStarter project so I can devote myself full time to this:
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/
So far I have some remote employers and clients, and some employers in a few large US cities. After I have lots more remote employers, as well as some in a few other countries, I'll do the kickstarter.
Someone managed to make fifty-six grand from a KickStarter in which he said "I'm making potato salad". Not that he was going to sell it commercially, or had come up with a killer potato salad recipe. I mean like he was fixing his lunch for the day.
Just a couple days ago, I read that three times as much money is raised from crowdfunding than from VC.
Consider that with crowdfunding, you don't lose any equity. You also don't have the problem with a bad VC giving you bad advice, or even demanding you do stupid things.
There are some VCs who are very, very good. Despite having to fork over lots of equity, the good VCs are very worthwhile, but IMHO a bad VC is far worse than not getting funding at all.
A golden rule I try to live by is try many different things. Try every single avenue you can. When one avenue burns out, go down another one.
I'm not running ads anymore. Some of my articles still have affiliate ads for books, but I placed those ads years ago. My new material doesn't have any ads.
I figure that if my writing is well-received, something good is bound to happen to me. Other than my plan for the KickStarter - which I am not dead certain I will actually pursue - I don't have any specific plans for monetizing my site.
I think there are two spectrums to successful Kickstarter videos: Over the top really well done quality videos, and super low budget (read: $0) iMovie videos that show sincerity.
Anywhere in between that and you come off looking like a scam.
(Luckily it didn't hurt us too badly, we raised $180K.)
I met Ted in high school, when he and I both played Roman Soldiers in Jesus Christ Superstar.
However I plan to make most of the video myself, but then to have Ted edit it. Real Soon Now I'm going to make a storyboard from digital still shots, then an improvised voice track, then I'll transcribe the voice track into text and edit it down to where I think Ted could get it to fit into three minutes.
My plan is to produce a quality video but with some very humbling imagery. Consider that a homeless fellow here in Portland, not long ago said to me "Some of they people I find sleeping on the street, they tell me they used to make six figures".
I find lots of software engineers eating at soup kitchens and sleeping in homeless shelters.
It's not exactly like my computer employer index is going to find them jobs, but that if I can make it easier for most people to find jobs, then everyone will benefit.
Consider that a homeless fellow here in Portland, not long ago said to me
"Some of they people I find sleeping on the street, they tell me they used
to make six figures".
I find lots of software engineers eating at soup kitchens and sleeping in
homeless shelters.
Yes. He really either used to be a programmer or was faking it extremely well!
Edit: Apparently I've backed 59 projects, 10 didn't reach their funding goal.
We're both HN posters, which puts us in a pretty small demographic. :)
Citation required. That doesn't sound possible.
I'll post it for you but not just now as it will take me a while to dig up my bookmark, also I need to get some sleep.
I'm skeptical too, but that's what the VC did claim.
Conversely, there was nearly $30B in VC money committed in 2013 alone: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/press-releases/2014/annual-venture-...
So it's not even close to being close. Maybe there's 3x more crowdsourced projects funded than companies backed, but most KS projects are funded for a few thousand dollars.
I also operate some "for fun sites", which are all small projects for example a video-game discount aggregator (just scapes sites for discounts) all together ~$200/mo.