Startups Open Sourced, 1 Week Later: $10,000+ in Revenue

http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/05/01/startups-open-sourced-1-week-later-10000-in-revenue/

by siong1987 • 15 years ago

127 47 15 years ago

jmtame6• 15 years ago

i hope my linode doesn't crash again...

edit: reboot #1. this is like monday all over again. i'm resizing my linode to 4gb now, then will install wpcache. will be back up in 4 min.

edit: wow, that was like 20 minutes of downtime. it should be working now.

jazzychad• 15 years ago

This advice may or may not be helpful, but I have survived plenty of traffic spikes from HN etc on low RAM machines by turning Keepalive Off in the apache config file. It is on by default with a long timeout, which will tie up all the resources during heavy traffic. Lots of people don't even know about it, so hopefully this will be helpful. (this assumes, of course, you are using apache, but other http servers have similar settings)

jmtame6• 15 years ago

i changed it to that, although my apache log files aren't really giving me anything helpful. where are the cloudkick guys when you need them? ;)

mootothemax3• 15 years ago

A tip for when you have a spare half hour - switch from Apache to nginx :)

Let me convince you as to why: I have a 1GB VPS with prgmr.com, and it's comfortably survived being top story on the Hacker News homepage, all whilst running my regular web apps running in the background.

Edit: If you're feeling really brave (or foolish - always a thin line), you could try setting up nginx now on a random port (e.g. 8080), and if it looks OK, kill Apache and move nginx to port 80. All depends on how much your server is struggling - would it be worth 20 mins downtime now if you don't have to worry about it again?

Edit 2: Looks like you're using Wordpress - are you using a cache plugin as well? If not, install W3 Total Cache right this very instant :) If you'd like any help with this, I'll be around for the next couple of hours, email is in my profile :)

jmtame6• 15 years ago

i noticed phusion passenger is supported on nginx as well, i'll look into doing this. thanks, hopefully this will work nicely on the 512 that i had with linode.

also, i'm installing w3 cache right now. you'll probably hear from me.

petercooper3• 15 years ago

Good advice but still not entirely necessary. I run several VMs and dedicated servers and have had numerous HN front pages and other high traffic leads to 1GB VMs running Apache (WordPress without caching, even). The issue here seems to be a less than optimal Apache configuration and not having just enough memory to handle the requests properly (but 1GB seems to be a sweet spot for a regular Apache setup nowadays).

Soupy• 15 years ago

cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wHndBgg...

Congratulations to the author, I would love to hear some reviews from those of you who have already read this.

DomesticMouse• 15 years ago

I'm enjoying reading it. =)

daeken3• 15 years ago

> If you’re feeling really bold, try out Evan Reas’ hack: tell them you want them in your book so badly, you’ll e-mail them every day for the next 30 days with a good reason why they should do it.

If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.

mootothemax3• 15 years ago

If someone were to do this to me, it would bring me from on-the-fence firmly into the "no" camp. It shows a blatant lack of respect, IMO.

That was my initial reaction as well. But after thinking about it - if the guy emailed me every day with a good reason, I think I'd start to be gently amused. Could work. Irritatingly ;)

daeken3• 15 years ago

I think that may be the part that bothers me more -- this could well be beneficial to me, but by showing me a complete lack of respect, he's ensuring that it never happens. If, instead, he provided me a couple good reasons upfront, we'd probably make things work, without emails badgering me.

njl• 15 years ago

I wouldn't read the emails after day three, I'd probably have them automatically filtered by day five.

stef25• 15 years ago

It worked for Andy Dufresne ...

gsivil• 15 years ago

This was exactly my thought, but Andy was handwriting his letters and this maybe happened 50 years ago(in the mythical world). I would always value somebody that is persistent but only if he was demonstrating his persistence in a non-trivial way.

daeken3• 15 years ago

Whether it works or not is tangential to whether or not it's a good thing to do.

emreas• 15 years ago

One of the people I most admire is Vinod Khosla. He got Sun Microsystems one of their first contracts by camping out in the lobby of a customer (they wouldn't take his meeting) and meeting them on their way out daily to tell them why they should do business with him. He did the same thing to get into Business School at Stanford. He was rejected but just came anyway and after hanging around for two weeks, somebody dropped out and they let him in. Persistence pays.. but yes, the trick is to do it in a respectful manner.

braindead_in• 15 years ago

Shameless plug. For an free Skype recorder for Windows and a painless audio transcription outsourcing service check http://scribie.com.

mdolon• 15 years ago

> AppSumo.com 24-hour special: $8,120 (keep $2,436)

So AppSumo made $5684 in profits by promoting and selling your book? What a sweet business model..

guynamedloren3• 15 years ago

Sweet indeed... would love to hear more about this.

swanson• 15 years ago

It's the same model as Groupon.

The article mentions that the author only requested a 30% share - to ensure that it was featured on AppSumo from what I understood. I'd imagine the normal cut is closer to 50-50.

imagetic• 15 years ago

I feel like I'm reading the contents of a self-help infomercial.

guynamedloren3• 15 years ago

Congrats on your success! It seems like your hard work has definitely paid off.

Just a few nit-picky things: Not sure if you are a native English speaker or not, but your analysis was somewhat difficult to follow. Spelling was okay, but there were just weird little things here and there that were confusing. Also, please link images such that they open in a new window/tab. I can't even tell you how many times I opened an image, then Xed out thinking it was in it's own window.

peng• 15 years ago

> $15 per audio hour may seem low, especially considering that one hour of audio may take up to 4 hours to transcribe. But when you look at the conversion rate, it’s not that bad. $1 USD converts to 83 Kenyan Shillings. I paid around $800 total for the transcribing, which converts to 66,400 Shillings. That’s about a month’s worth of rent in Nairobi, the largest city and capital of Kenya.

This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an iPad will cost the same. There's a good chance it'll be costlier because of import taxes.

Of course, this is a unique case where transcriber had no feedback. In general though, you shouldn't be paying someone based on your opinion of their cost of living. It demonstrates a lack of respect, and shows that you don't treat them as an equal human being.

Maybe it's idealistic nonsense.

seabee• 15 years ago

Isn't this concept the whole rationale towards foreign outsourcing?

CoachRufus87• 15 years ago

> It demonstrates a lack of respect, and shows that you don't treat them as an equal human being.

He paid the transcriber at a rate that the transcriber was willing to be paid at. If the transcriber didn't want to get paid $15 / audio hour, he could've simply walked away. Smart? Yes. Disrespectful? No.

jibjab• 15 years ago

> This bothers me. Yeah, rent and food is going to be cheap in Kenya, but an iPad will cost the same.

You do realise where iPads are built and how much those people make? :-)

Outsourcing work to cheaper places is part of this world, and sites like eLance bring the power to outsource to people like you and me instead of just letting large companies enjoy it.

Also, you don't know what job that Kenyan would have had to accept if it wasn't for eLance.

walkers• 15 years ago

What's more, his figures work out to 5.3 weeks of work at 40hrs/week, for the equivalent of one month's rent (not one month's living expenses). Be a shrewd manipulator of globalization if you want, but don't try and justify away the raw deal you're giving someone to save a few bucks, especially considering those bucks would be far more valuable to the guy doing the work than the guy who is saving them.

Retric• 15 years ago

A relative used to do transcription so while in the worst case it may take 4x as long (bad audio + intelligible speaker) he often worked at about twice real time. So that 15$ / could be anywhere from 4$/hour to 30$ an hour.

PS: At those exchange rates 66,400 Shillings = 800$/month rent which seem really high. I know people in the US paying under 600$ / month rent for fairly reasonable apartments near major city's.

biot2• 15 years ago

$10,000 per week sounds like a good haul, but his personal share was closer to $3000. If the initial rush of sales dies down, he'll be making less than he would at a job... and that's excluding the opportunity cost from all the unpaid time it took to write the book. I guess what they say about writing a book being a labor of love is true.

guynamedloren3• 15 years ago

Not sure I follow your argument here. The thing about selling an ebook is that it's all passive income from here on out. Assuming he set everything up correctly, which it appears he has, the author has to do almost nothing to propagate the sales of his book. Sure, he could put in an hour or two a week for advertising, emailing, etc, but that's negligible. The ball is already rolling, so there's nothing stopping him from collecting money week after week while he works a real job, writes another ebook, or runs a startup.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

Look at the sales spike, there's no way that's a sustainable income. 80% of the sales was from one 24 hour period where he gets only 30% of those sales.

From scanning the article he didn't really say how long it took to write. There's 32 founders on the 'founders' page, sounds like he put well over 3 or 4 hours per founder. Quite a lot of transcribing and interviewing by the look of it so I'd guess at least a month.

Kudos for him for making a couple of weeks salary in a week, but put it into that context. He still only made $3,000 in a week after already putting the unknown time into the book.

Ignore the $10k claim, $7k effectively went on advertising (appsumo).

imho, the real winners in the story were appsumo.

biot2• 15 years ago

I look at it like buying a hybrid vehicle. I haven't checked lately, but when they first came out the hybrid model of a particular vehicle was often $10K more than the non-hybrid model. So there's a $10K opportunity cost in order to realize passive gas savings from then on. However, even the way gas prices are now you'd have to own the vehicle for 10 years just to recover your $10K investment. On top of that, in 10 years time you could have turned that $10K investment into $20K if you were able to average about 7% interest.

Writing a book full-time seems to follow the same pattern. I'm not seeing how the investment ever pays itself off. Now, if he wrote the book by spending a few hours on evenings and weekends where his time was otherwise worth nothing then any money made is all profit. In that case the passive income, even if it's only a few hundred here and there, is all good.

davidw• 15 years ago

I'm not sure it's as effective for 'big bang' types of things like this where you want to sell as much as possible in a brief period, but to me, starting with a Kindle version only makes a lot of sense:

http://blog.liberwriter.com/2011/04/22/self-publishing-the-i...

That way you don't have all the typesetting and print on demand overhead; you just get it out there and see how it goes before investing in that stuff.

hvass• 15 years ago

The first thing that struck me was the amount of money AppSumo was keeping.

omouse• 15 years ago

The title demonstrates why "open source" is a bad term to use. It's been loaded with multiple meanings. I thought the book was about startups that created free/open source software.

patio11• 15 years ago

I read most of this. It was worth the $20. (Wufoo: "We're a fan of [ad retargetting] because it works." is probably worth $20.)

paraschopra• 15 years ago

Yep, I am a fan of retargeting as well (if done within limits so as to not spook your users). So many users congratulate us for advertising Visual Website Optimizer every where on the web: Youtube, CNN, Digg, etc. They think we have big advertising budget. But we really have $500 budget per month. Retargeting works wonderfully as far as brand recall is concerned!

I recommend AdRoll and Retargeter for the same.

jmtame6• 15 years ago

for anyone interested, i wrote about how i dealt with the traffic here: http://jmtame.posterous.com/startups-open-sourced-is-out-go-...

the story was down for the first 20 minutes. i was trying to call siong to delete the story but he didn't have his phone on him, so i was pretty much stuck with fixing it on the spot.

jayliew• 15 years ago

For people doing consumer internet startups, learning how the average normal person thinks, what makes them tick, is something I'd pay for. All of you reading this here are by definition, not normal ;)

Startups Open Sourced, 1 Week Later: $10,000+ in Revenue

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