Hacker Monthly: One year old, 5000 subscribers

http://hackermonthly.posterous.com/one-year-old-5000-subscribers

by bearwithclaws • 15 years ago

90 23 15 years ago

hackermonthly.posterous.com

hammerdr• 15 years ago

Because I spend most of my days and half of my nights head down and working hard, I miss many insightful articles that blow through the front page. Hacker Monthly is the reason I feel that I can keep up.

Thanks and congrats to everyone that puts this together!

duck2• 15 years ago

Hacker Monthly is great and sometimes it is just hard to beat the reading experience with paper. If you want another way to keep up you might check out my side project - the weekly Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com). Both projects compliment each other for people that are too busy to visit HN daily.

bearwithclaws3• 15 years ago

Hacker Newsletter is great and I really recommend it.

boyter3• 15 years ago

I will be honest and admit I didn't think that this would take off from the beginning. Some rough calculations show this is now looking at $100,000+ a year in revenue. Pretty impressive and goes to show that there can be a large enough market for anything if you deliver a good product.

alain94040• 15 years ago

Except the subscriber count includes students, so your revenue estimate is probably completely off.

boyter3• 15 years ago

I factored that in somewhat. Going all digital is about 140,000 a year. Dead tree is about double that. Either way I would guess over $100,000.

bearwithclaws3• 15 years ago

This might sound a bit cliche but without the support of the readers and subscribers (especially when we started charging for digital edition), the help of contributors (most notably rdela in early issues), the authors and commenters who graciously granting permission to publish their work, and most of all the HN community, Hacker Monthly wouldn't be possible at all.

Thank you! I will continue to pump out great issue + free special issue (one coming up in May) for a long time to come.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

Hacker Monthly is great. It's a great way to catch up on the gems that I missed even though I read HN daily.

Awesome support too. For some I never received a couple issues and they were able to quickly get MagCloud to send me new copies.

techsupporter• 15 years ago

I keep forgetting to ask anyone about this, but I signed up as a student (which I am) awhile back and never received any issues or a confirmation. (This is one of those "meant to do" tasks.) Should I e-mail the general inquiries address? It looks like the original offer isn't present any more or I'd just try again.

bearwithclaws3• 15 years ago

Drop me an email.

staunch• 15 years ago

If you're willing to talk about number of subscribers you're revealing the rough revenue. You might as well just talk about revenue directly. People love to hear about someone making money, so it's much better link bait.

"Hacker Monthly breaks $100k in revenue!"

The Balsamiq Effect.

jackowayed• 15 years ago

But Balsamiq isn't asking people for free content ...

boyter3• 15 years ago

Thats the exact reason I didn't expect it to work. Looking at the product though, while the content you can get for free, the presentation is excellent. The digital is somewhat lacking though and frankly I find instapaper + kindle works just as well and is free.

sasvari2• 15 years ago

I haven't done enough research about available options, but most probably you could extend your subscriber base quite significantly offering a print edition to old europeans without ridiculously high shipping costs. would be awesome to receive it here on paper ...

zeugma• 15 years ago

Indeed. To ship in the Netherland it would cost me $120 compared to $88 for a subscription. May be finding a printer in Europe would help ?

sasvari2• 15 years ago

May be finding a printer in Europe would help?

it definitely would! I'm not aware of any magcloud for europe, but I would be happy if somebody proofs me wrong and HNM gets a distributor for europe.

antirez• 15 years ago

I love it, fortunately at some point I was asked to contribute an article and I received a free electronic subscription. Then I purchased a Kindle. HM + Kindle = a very cool way to consume interesting articles in a relaxing way (the .mobi is one of the default formats you receive your electronic issues).

Also both the printed edition and the PDF are very well done from the point of view of graphic design IMHO.

dchs• 15 years ago

Congratulations! Just ordered my first one :)

robryan• 15 years ago

The back issue package and having it formatted for kindle is great. Hadn't looked into it much since the first issue but having the 10 of them on the kindle to read on the go or just away from the comp will be great.

crasshopper• 15 years ago

This is beautiful. You should be very proud of yourself.

mhartl• 15 years ago

Hacker Monthly is a great success story and should be more widely emulated. You don't have to start the next Google, Facebook, or recently acquired Company X to have success as an entrepreneur.

Hacker Monthly: One year old, 5000 subscribers

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