Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8629919

by djshah • 12 years ago

293 335 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The same thread was started 2 years ago with a follow up last year. I think it's time for a refresh and updates from those who answered before. Previous threads: Last Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603 Year Before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487

sdernley3• 12 years ago

I have a small iPhone app that generates around 200 a month. Nothing spectacular but not bad for a bit extra.

afoot• 12 years ago

I always thought that building something like this might generate an initial income (and potentially a profit) but that consistent, longer-term revenue was much harder to come by. Any chance you'd expand on what your app does and what the revenue generation/ongoing promotion model is?

joshvm• 12 years ago

You can do reasonably well (if you're just after pocket change) with a decent utility app - let's be honest, most of them have shockingly bad UX, and reap ad revenue.

sdernley3• 12 years ago

It's a utility app. I think that if you build something people will get some use out of, and make it look (and be) easy to use then you should get a fairly recurring revenue. A lot of the smaller apps look bad, so i just tried to make mine look a little more like something i'd want to use.

I think it depends on store positioning too, once i got into the top charts for my section then I got more downloads (or maybe i got there because i got more downloads, i guess it's a rolling ball effect).

I plan to do some more utility ones soon, and i'm working on a bit of a bigger one (health based) now that will hopefully provide more value to people.

I'd be happy to tell you more about it and what i did if you want. My email is in my profile.

wwarren• 12 years ago

I have a little Android app that makes about $60/mo. It's my burrito money for the month :)

drsintoma2• 12 years ago

My German job board https://englishjobs.de started generating around $50 per month on some link referrals, but the site is still on dippers.

s3nnyy• 12 years ago

Do you scrape the jobs from somewhere else or from where do you get the content from?

drsintoma2• 12 years ago

Everything, I get proper referral feeds, RSS feeds, some scrapping and on-site posting. Everything that is not posted on-site is a just link to the original source.

https://englishjobs.de/faq#sources

waterside81• 12 years ago

Personalized kids books on the iPad (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-heroes/id477247738?ls...) ~ 2K / month

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

This is awesome.

tristanlabbe• 12 years ago

Very nice indeed

johntdyer• 12 years ago

I am a Google apps reseller and have a few customers. My customers get the accounts for a small discount then what they would direct and I make a small margin. Right now the total on that is about 1200 a year. I pretty much use that as a "toy slush fund" and use it to buy geeky stuff without getting in trouble from the boss ( wife ).

dalanmiller• 12 years ago

Do you provide just customer service? Or do you also manage the accounts for them as well?

zo1• 12 years ago

Would you mind telling us how you got into such an area?

yitchelle3• 12 years ago

Would love to hear the detail about Google Apps reseller? What is it exactly?

xerophyte12932• 12 years ago

You mean apart from the day job?

tthrowaaa__dddd4• 12 years ago

You mean your day job isn't sitting around reading HN? ;-)

zrail4• 12 years ago

I wrote and self-publish a book named Mastering Modern Payments[1], with a fairly recent second edition. It's making about $2k/mo.

I am also selling paid support and add ons for my open-source Rails engine for Stripe named Payola[2][3], which very recently gained support for subscriptions[4].

[1] https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com

[2] https://www.payola.io

[3] https://www.payola.io/pro

[4] https://www.petekeen.net/payola-subscriptions

Edit: You can read a free preview here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read

ivan_ah3• 12 years ago

https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com

Very cool. if you're helping people earn money, they will pay :)

Is the high-end team options selling? Also what it the split between the mid-price and the lowest price?

I'm trying to figure out the pricing for my book[1] so it (a) is dont-need-to-think-about-it-cheap, (b) doesn't devalue the book (if too cheap readers won't trust), and (c) interacts nicely with Amazon who are undercutting me on price. Any tips?

[1] http://minireference.com/static/newsite/ cf. http://minireference.com

zrail4• 12 years ago

The team option sells occasionally, mostly to agencies.

Low and mid tiers have sold approximately the same number of copies, which means the mid tier brings in about double the revenue.

Not sure what to tell you about Amazon. I don't sell there because I like taking 97% of my revenue instead of 30%, but for a math textbook maybe it would make sense. Do you market to math tutors? It seems like if you could get tutors on board they would be able to easily sell to their students.

raphar• 12 years ago

@zrail and just for anyone out there who wants a product idea. I really would pay for a book on the same subject but for ppl outside US and the first world.

To setup and collect payments world wide outside those countries is a pain in the ass. Any book on that (or good services) deserve money & success.

zrail4• 12 years ago

One option is Boku[1]. Several companies I know use it to great success for non-credit-card, non-paypal payments.

[1] http://www.boku.com

vram223• 12 years ago

@raphar: Great idea. Me too. I've been checking various online payment options for a while now, but all of them seem to have some issue or the other. I don't mean Stripe, since that is only available in the US and a few other countries, and I'm not in those.

stevenmays6• 12 years ago

Stocks, depends on the month: 1000-2000 on average. Link: http://mays.co/i-made-6k-this-month-doing-nothing/

Webhosting: $20 (Mainly just pays for my VPS)

Launching soon: http://gymbrew.com (Subscription box service for protein goodies)

phreeza4• 12 years ago

By stocks, do you mean dividends? Or do you cash out the gains you make periodically? Otherwise, I don't think I would count that as 'income'.

stevenmays6• 12 years ago

Dividends and gains. I do not cash out and "realize" the gains, but my net worth increases. Net worth increases I count as income as it decreases my time to reach financial independence.

tvanantwerp• 12 years ago

This blog post is highly misleading. The only reason you made $6k in a month with index funds is A) because you would have already had about $60k in the account and B) because indexes were recovering from a large drop just before that one-month time horizon. To give more perspective, the 3-month return for your most heavily weighted fund is about half of the current 1-month average. To make $6k/month assuming average annual growth (not something you can always count on, but let's keep it simple), you'd need closer to $900k already in your account.

Should people invest? Yes. Should they invest in index funds instead of day-trading? Almost certainly. Should they expect $6k/month returns from whatever change they scraped from underneath the sofa cushions? No.

stevenmays6• 12 years ago

I have more then 60k in the account. Yes, results are atypical. I said that in the blog post. I also said assume 8% a year returns on average.

Edit: Btw, everything you said is true. And great advice for those trying to follow a similar path. I rarely even check my on my stocks, it's mostly set it and forget it. I simplified this for family members and friends who I think would benefit greatly from investing.

tthrowaaa__dddd4• 12 years ago

Probably also good to point newbies at the chart from late 2008.

k__• 12 years ago

But the other tips on this blog post are right.

stygiansonic• 12 years ago

While I agree with an indexing approach and follow one myself, classifying this in the same vein as income is a bit misleading, as another reply pointed out.

While income from side jobs can be irregular, returns from investments mainly concentrated in equities can be more volatile.

Volatility in the S&P 500 (as measured by the VIX) has been relatively quite low for the past few years, other than a few marked events. (US debt ceiling crisis, etc.) A chart of the S&P 500 shows more-or-less an upward trend over the past five years; certainly since the beginning of 2013 there have hardly been any wild swings.

This can lull investors into a false sense of security about the distributions of returns; just because returns have been steady (i.e. low volatility) over the past few years does not mean things will remain this way.

I don't dispute the long-term average yearly return of ~8%. What I am saying is that, as with many other things, averages don't tell the true story. One year, you could be down 30-40% in equities and another you could be up 30%. Getting a constant 8% return every year is unlikely.

For some long-term investors, they aren't concerned about the volatility and this is a perfectly rational thing. However, there are some people who cannot bear the volatility of such investments and will be in constant worry. Such individuals would likely have to apportion a higher percentage of their to less risky assets and perhaps miss out on some overall return.

I heard of many people freaking out just because the mini-correction that happened in mid-October. These sorts of people aren't cut out to be investing like this as they will panic and sell during downswings.

gravitronic2• 12 years ago

100-200 a month from having an android app.

The free version has had 483k downloads, makes ~5$/day advertising (admob/adsense). ~250 downloads a day, been on the market since 2011.

The paid version ($2.99) has had <2000 downloads over the ~3 years it's been on the market.

Unfortunately I've no time to keep it updated so last update was in 2012.

Ologn• 12 years ago

I've made $1500 in the past month on my Android apps. I also did some additional Android stuff with a partner, so that would be another couple of hundred dollars on top of that.

All from ads. Mostly Admob, but also Millennial Media and Inmobi.

jonahx• 12 years ago

thank for sharing. it's surprising that nearly half a million downloads translates into such a small amount of revenue. is this the nature of in-app advertising, or is this because the number of active users of the app is much smaller than the number of downloads?

gravitronic2• 12 years ago

my app's a bit special - it's purely SDL / opengl / C with a tiny java wrapper just to get going. TBH, there's some key technical problems with it with respect to onboarding, and because of those problems and likely technical problems there's <20k installed users.

It's DJPad, feel free to try it - the library functionality is embarrassingly bad but the audio engine and UI's half decent.

Probably the biggest feature is that it's lower latency than the competitors written in java. It doesn't hold a candle to any of the DJ apps on iOS whatsoever though.

I started a new job/career 2 years ago, and now I'm a dad - suffice to say my free time is gone. If I had stuck with this project I would have rebuilt the library and built a dedicated onboarding walkthrough.

jjp2• 12 years ago

About 10K per annum from www.rssweather.com. Been a reasonably consistent source of money for ten years.

WallyL• 12 years ago

Just with the ads? What are your revenue channels?

jjp2• 12 years ago

Yes just with ads.

tthrowaaa__dddd4• 12 years ago

$3,400 this year, from dividends and bond interest.

vbsteven2• 12 years ago

I currently make about 1000EUR/month consistently from an Android app I sell for 9.99EUR.

It's a tasks app that syncs with OmniFocus. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.app...

phreeza4• 12 years ago

That is quite remarkable, do you think the OmniFocus integration is the killer feature that gets most people to pay?

vbsteven2• 12 years ago

I think so, the app is purely focussed on OmniFocus integration and reuses their backend.

Most of my customers pay for the app because they are heavy OmniFocus users on the Mac and recently switched to Android.

pknerd• 12 years ago

Do people _buy_ Android apps?

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

I generate about $1750 USD per month producing training videos for Pluralsight, most recently on how developers can make sense of agile. http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell

The $1750 month is the current rolling average. It can be much more when a new course is launching.

quickpost• 12 years ago

From only two courses? That seems pretty darn good!

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

Thanks! Believe it or not about 70% of the revenue comes from the Creating Effective User Stories course. I have another course in the same vein, Agile in the Real World, coming out in a few weeks that I hope will do as well.

The trick seems to be to find a niche that people are interested in and that will continue to be interested in for some time, since the course revenue will decay over time.

For me, agile seemed to be that niche...groovy, not so much :)

It also helps if you already have a brand going in. For example, if you're already well known from books or a popular blog you'll have name recognition and some of your audience will follow you. This wasn't the case with me, but I've seen it happen several times with more well known authors.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

Same question as to the other Pluralsight creator. What tools do you use to create these courses?

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

Hey Nico!

Regarding hardware I record with a Blue Snowball cardoid mic and a pop filter. The entire setup including mic, stand, and pop filter cost me a little over $100 on Amazon. Pluralsight also reimbursed the majority of that after my first course was delivered. (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Microphone-A...)

Regarding software I record and edit with Camtasia for Mac ($99) on a MacBook Pro. I've used Camtasia for my last three courses and while the Windows version is quite nice the Mac version is...painful. I'll be starting a new course in January and plan to record with Screenflow (http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm) and edit with Adobe Premiere. Screenflow and Premiere are more expensive options and, as painful as Camtasia was to work with, it was more than adequate to get me started.

I also use a bevy of other free tools to support the production process. For example, I do all scripting, outlining, etc in Google Docs and track the entire production process in Trello. Each course is a fairly large undertaking (the course I'm wrapping up now will have about 135 hours into it by the time its done) so being able to keep track of where you are and how you're pacing for the deadline is critical.

I also have a full time job, am married, and have two young kids (a 3 year old and a 3 month old) so I have to make time for production at odd hours of the week. This makes trello all the even more important for helping me manage the process ;)

Let me know if I can give you any more information.

zura2• 12 years ago

Interesting, how is pricing decided?

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

Good question, Pluralsight uses a subscription model so the courses aren't actually priced individually. For example, at the lowest tier a subscriber can pay $29/month and get access to the entire catalog (which is several thousand courses).

When an author produces a course Pluralsight actually acquires the copyright and therefore exclusive distribution rights for the course as part of the transaction. In return authors negotiate a royalty rate for each course which is a function of how much that course was watched per month versus total viewing of the catalog by paid subscribers. These royalties are where your revenue as an author actually comes from.

If you distribute your course through a subscription company like Pluralsight this is pretty much the standard model across the industry. As a matter of fact, it's actually pretty similar to how artist royalties work in the music industry.

jeremyjarrell8• 12 years ago

Just a note, I got a lot of great questions about how producing training videos works.

If you have any questions later, or are curious about things you don't want to ask in public, don't hesitate to hit me up directly either on twitter at @jeremyjarrell or by email jeremy AT jeremyjarrell DOT com. I'm happy to answer anything.

I also have a contact page on my site that I monitor: http://www.jeremyjarrell.com/contact/

andrewtbham2• 12 years ago

i make about $2k per year with my location aware time tracker app. iOs only. I spent about 100 hours to write it, spend about 40 hours per year on updates and support emails.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time-tracker/id470803...

consta• 12 years ago

how many total downloads do you have if I may ask?

andrewtbham2• 12 years ago

I offered it for free for a while and it got picked up on app advice... so when that happened I got 10k downloads in one day.

but paid downloads... about 100 per month.

bengarvey• 12 years ago

http://kidsdungeonadventure.com

http://kidsmorningadventure.com

Usually around $50/month. A little more lately since I launched the new gamified getting ready for school project.

carloscm• 12 years ago

~150USD / month from http://thespatials.com/ with a jump to 1000 USD in October after we announced our successful Greenlight. Launching in Steam in early 2015 and expect to shake things up.

moron4hire2• 12 years ago

I didn't answer last year, but last year would have been $0/mo. Today, it's $800/mo from two subcontractors I have on a project I run for a client. They each only put a few hours in a week, so I don't really have a lot of time spent on management.

breitling2• 12 years ago

Real Estate - Thanks to the financial crisis, I've been able to pick up some cheap real estate that generates cash flow. Currently, I'm making about $50k/year.

cylinder• 12 years ago

I've always wondered, when you try to vulture on cheap property during a crisis, are you able to secure financing at all or do you have to buy all-cash?

breitling2• 12 years ago

I'm not an American, so financing is a little more difficult but if you are willing to put down 25%, it's doable. With 50% down, almost anyone will give you financing. This is institutional financing...there's always private money with higher interest rates...they are much more flexible with the terms.

Cash is king. You can get better deals if you have all-cash and can close quickly.

websitescenes3• 12 years ago

I make a nice chunk of money every two weeks working full time at a steady Rails job. I'm sure that's not what you meant but to be fair your question is very ambiguous.

moron4hire2• 12 years ago

It's not really ambiguous at all. Between the general entrepreneurial nature of this site, the phrasing of the question, and certainly the backlinks, OP clearly means passive income streams.

raphinou2• 12 years ago

I think he is absolutely right in that the question is ambiguous. The linked questions are phrased exactly the same and don't mention passive income. It is not because everybody, myself included, interpreted that passive income is meant without it being mentioned that the question is not ambiguous. It is just our interpretation due to what we expect to see on this site.

websitescenes3• 12 years ago

He clearly meant that and I knew it; just didn't actually mention that anywhere. I was literally answering his question. Can't help it, I'm a smart ass.

arsenide• 12 years ago

If you're sure it's not what he meant, it's not an ambiguous question.

websitescenes3• 12 years ago

Those are not mutually exclusive things. You can have an ambiguous question but be sure of the intent because of the context.

phreeza4• 12 years ago

Crappy t-shirt designs. I have a bunch of random shirt designs (I am no designer, just made some mediocre SVGs with funny ideas I had in Inkscape), and sell them on the German spreadshirt marketplace, makes about 20 Euros/month.

Most of them trivially translate to the English-speaking market, I should really do that. Does anyone have a hint where the best place to sell 'low-end' t-shirt designs in the US is?

rawrnosaur• 12 years ago

I think that you can start on threadless.com

phreeza4• 12 years ago

I believe threadless designs are much more refined that what I have produced.

yaph• 12 years ago

Don't know if they are the best, but I used zazzle.com and redbubble.com. One argument for zazzle is, that you create a product once and it is available in all countries where zazzle is present, e. g. UK, Germany, Spain etc.

psobot2• 12 years ago

On average, $400/month from https://the.wubmachine.com, an online music remixing app. Split pretty much evenly between Google AdSense and Android/iOS In-App Purchases for the Android/iOS native clients.

joeframbach• 12 years ago

That's pretty neat. Although it took me a while to think of a good song to use. If you have insights on "popular tracks" or "recently used tracks", how about a quickstart link on the wubmachine? That would be handy.

psobot2• 12 years ago

I might be able to do that for popular tracks fetched from SoundCloud, but I take special care not to keep any of the data people upload to the site due to copyright worries.

mokkol3• 12 years ago

$800/month with an online proposal software app: http://nusii.com We are open for 2 months now.

eweise• 12 years ago

Nice looking site!

mokkol3• 12 years ago

Thanks!

notdarkyet3• 12 years ago

Site looks nice, did you use a specific frontend/css framework for the design?

mokkol3• 12 years ago

Thanks! Mostly it is all from scratched. I used bootstrap for the grid. Here a little article about the process: https://medium.com/sketch-tricks/how-i-used-sketch-to-design...

nojvek• 12 years ago

That's super awesome looking. I signed up just to use the interface.

bennesvig• 12 years ago

$200-$600 a month from a book I wrote 2 years ago: http://www.amazon.com/First-World-Problems-Reasons-Terrorist...

AwesomeMan• 12 years ago

I currently generate a couple hundred a year from http://www.randomamazonproduct.com/

I made it in a couple of hours one weekend as a way to show a friend how to build a website.

pankajdeoria• 12 years ago

Using adsense and Affiliate, http://www.cricketwa.com and http://couponcodewa.com , avg $1000/m overall

razyshah• 12 years ago

Hi Pankaj, when did you get your Adsense account approved? Would you be able to share the process? I understand that it is quite a challenge to get Google Adsense approval in recent times.

twelvenmonkeys4• 12 years ago

$190 / month (net profit, after tax, fees, everything) from my cheap-as-hell VPS company (http://kihi.io). Helps little-businesses get off the ground for only a $2 VPS. Fortunately it hasn't had many orders as of late since everything is quite full.

Largest customer base has been China & Indonesia which brings in a lot of happy faces and awesome customers, so I got that going for me at least, which is nice.

Been looking at alternative plans (disposable VPS' maybe?) and other ways of profit.

I've done enough Android development to warrant a decent app, so maybe I should create a few more in the horizon.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

That is "cheap-as-hell."

People who have ran other hosting companies have claimed that "the lower the price the more support you have to provide" (because in the low end many users won't have dedicated technical personnel or are just penny pinching and will shift problems to you when possible).

Has that been your experience? How do you cover the cost of support time in general at $2/month. Also is there a language issue as your customers are Chinese and Indonesian?

twelvenmonkeys4• 12 years ago

Yeah, that is one issue that I did encounter at first. Supporting users.

Luckily, since most of the marketing comes from word-of-mouth, a lot of users have a decent knowledge of Linux / VPS'.

I also make Ruby scripts as well as using a crap-ton of custom shortcuts in Mutt (terminal-based email) so answer support tickets quickly and without a ton of effort.

The occasional ticket I usually get involves some form of client-side/user issue such as a borked Linux package install. Usually I bite-the-bullet and say "We don't usually provide support.. but I would suggest having a look at X or Y on your VPS." 90% of the time the customer fixes it with my guidance and they learn what do to next time it happens. The other 10% I unfortunately say tough luck to and suggest to hire a Sysadmin or I link them to someone who can provide support for cheap setting things up.

Funny enough, most Chinese / Indonesian customers rarely ask questions! Even if they don't speak English well, we can still understand each-other in Linux terms. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but most Eastern clients countries try and figure the issue out themselves first. Western clients usually open a ticket first, then figure the issue out.

okramcivokram• 12 years ago

The link for "Pricing" in the footer is 404.

twelvenmonkeys4• 12 years ago

Fixed! Thanks!

sumedh• 12 years ago

$2 per month sounds too good to be true. What is the catch?

twelvenmonkeys4• 12 years ago

Low I/O speed in comparison to other VPS' companies.

RTigger2• 12 years ago

I net about $1000/mo from one decently-watched pluralsight video I made over a year ago - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/description/building-dotn...

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

What tools did you use to create the video?

RTigger2• 12 years ago

I used (and they recommend) Camtasia Studio. Also picked up a Rode Podcaster microphone for decent audio quality.

chrisdew2• 12 years ago

I wrote virtsync, an alternative to rsync, which performs much better on sparse, GB+ files that don't change much (like VM disk images). http://www.virtsync.com

It's a niche product that makes me $1-2K per year.

More importantly, virtsync customers have hired me for other jobs.

jliptzin5• 12 years ago

Around $2k / month from real estate rentals after expenses. It'd be a little less if I hired a property manager to make it fully passive, but I actually enjoy doing the property management myself as it gets me away from the computer and exposes me to things I would never otherwise be involved with.

mikemac• 12 years ago

how many units do you manage? what would you guess you spend, time wise, managing the property per month?

jliptzin5• 12 years ago

2 properties, currently looking for a third. Probably about 3 hours / month right now max.

Edit: It's so low because I buy properties that are in good shape. I have a full time job so I wouldn't have time to focus on doing repairs and improvements.

scuba7183• 12 years ago

How much would you make if you hired a property manager?

jliptzin5• 12 years ago

That'd probably shave off $200-300 / month

charlesdm4• 12 years ago

What's the yield on those properties, and how much capital did you invest? Did you use any debt? Also, what city/cities are the properties in?

ufmace2• 12 years ago

Do you have a normal full-time job also? I sold my rental property partly because it was taking up too much time on top of mine.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

I have some properties while working a full-time job. If I didn't have a manager, I wouldn't have the time for them, full stop. Sure, hiring someone will eat into your margins. But it's worth it unless you're willing to make real estate your full-time gig. I tried to do it without help once, for about half a year or so. It was painful.

asah2• 12 years ago

Done the same over the years. Although slum lords can do better, I prefer the higher end, where appreciation is part of the equation. Property management headaches typically go down at the high end because there's more $ per unit, and the things that break tend to be per unit/person. You also have more $ to fix things and can do it "right". Finally, you can enjoy the places yourself.

Typically, I shoot for ~5% rent to value ratio, e.g. $100k/yr income on $2mm worth of property. With appreciation, I can see why old people do this.

I used the time to bootstrap a company to 40 employees, and profitability-- boy, that wad hard work.

bbf.io/snacks -- killer food for bay area offices and startups

charlesdm4• 12 years ago

Sort of similar questions I asked the OP:

How much capital did you invest, and how much debt did you use?

marktangotango• 12 years ago

How do you find good tenants? Do your tenants tend to stay for long periods or do you have a lot of turn over? Thanks!

onaclov2000• 12 years ago

I make around $10-$20 a month from my amazon affiliate link generator.

http://blog.onaclovtech.com/2012/12/how-to-quickly-build-ama...

That actually got me work for another app, and I make around $10-$20 off that as well per month.

tjbiddle• 12 years ago

Just wanted to add a note: Most people who aren't making anything won't be posting, so results will be drastically skewed. So for anyone here getting discourage because they think their a minority - think otherwise (And then get back to work on trying to get your own setup ;))

jmnicolas2• 12 years ago

It's been several years now that I'd like to launch a few side projects. But contrary to the crowd here I'm just a normal human : when I come home I'm just exhausted and / or want to do something else than coding.

I could use the extra cash though. This month I even tried placing bets on soccer and tennis and failed miserably.

tmuir2• 12 years ago

I've found that you have to work on something that you're passionate about, something you want to use. I don't have the magic formula for finding these things, but after trying several side projects and having them fizzle out, I've finally found something that I want to spend almost all of my free time on, and I do. I do hope to sell the product, but what keeps me working on it 40 hrs a week, in addition to my full time job, is the promise of actually using the device.

The closest I can get to making the process formulaic is to find a hobby that requires gear of some kind. Before you ever build something to improve that hobby, you need to enjoy the hobby. Then, find some aspect of that hobby that could be improved, most likely through some sort of automation.

Lambdanaut2• 12 years ago

If they're not normal humans, it's only because they have more willpower than you. That's the best news ever, because it's been proven in studies time and time again that willpower can be built up just like muscles through exercise. Conquer your will, and you'll be able to use it to build what you want. Start with meditation if you're not doing it already. Regular physical exercise and meditation are excellent ways to build your willpower, and I guarantee that an inordinately large percentage of HN users meditate compared to the general public.

sdernley3• 12 years ago

In my experience, once you get something out there and see even a small number of people enjoying it, it's pretty hard not to be motivated by it!

bbcbasic2• 12 years ago

It has taken me months to build up will power to the point where I can work on coding projects in my spare time consistently. Fail. And not care and keep carrying on.

Some ideas that may help:

1. Enter a hackathon. Group up with people and you will be compelled to code.

2. Train for a half marathon. Increase your endurance and your ability of will to keep to the training schedule.

3. Have children. Ironically the ridiculous overhaul this has has on my life has increased my resilience. Last night I got woken up 3 or 4 times. That's normal. I feel OK. Also the children will motivate you to the long term goal of having more time with them and not being stuck at work for so many hours.

4. Do the equivalent of having children - maybe take a second job for a while to get used to the extra hours.

5. Give up TV.

6. Give up Caffeine.

7. Give up Alcohol

8. Give up Socializing

9. Learn to get an itchy feeling on any day you haven't taken action. It's a horrible feeling that keeps me glued to the laptop.

10. Therapy. This should be for everyone not for just the very depressed etc.

goshx7• 12 years ago

People on H1B, like me, simply can't. It is ilegal to have any income coming anywhere else other than the employer associated to the H1B...

It is ilegal to even make money on ads on a blog... this completely sucks and is very frustrating.

13hours• 12 years ago

How about if the income is in your country of origin? Can't your side project just pay out where ever you're from? It's the Internet, websites aren't really located anywhere.

mox12• 12 years ago

Ask your mom,brother,uncle,etc to open a Google / iTunes developer account, get a little creative here :)

putlake• 12 years ago

That is not true. You can be on H1B and not work for a business as an employee but can own a business. Making money on ads on a blog is perfectly legal.

gamblor9563• 12 years ago

People on an H1B can own a non-US business that does not make US-source income. The tricky bit is that there are two major considerations to avoid having the business' income sourced to the US: (1) permanent establishment, and (2) the IRC 861-863 income sourcing rules.

Without going into much detail, permanent establishment generally defines when a business is treated as operating in a country. The specific conditions are set forth in various tax treaties between the US and other countries. Generally, having an employee residing in the US and working for the business (whether or not as owner) is usually treated as resulting in a US permanent establishment, meaning the business is treated as operating in the US. If you are from a country which does not have a tax treaty with the US, the issue is generally much simpler: does the business have any income-generating operations in the US?

The second consideration is sourcing of income. IRC 861 and 862 define what income is US-sourced and what income is foreign-sourced. Generally, income from US customers or US payors is US-sourced income, and the same income from foreigners is foreign-sourced. For income taxation purposes, this distinction doesn't matter but it does matter for non-tax purposes. The H1B restricts the employee from engaging in US employment or business activities, but does not restrict their non-US employment or business activities.

A blog hosted on a foreign host, targeting a foreign audience, and earning foreign ad dollars is not a US business and generally should not violate the H1B rules, however you need to talk to an immigration attorney to make sure the analysis applies to the specific blogging activities you would be engaging it.

akg_67• 12 years ago

IANL, but at one time I was on H-1B and now US citizen. It is not illegal to own a US business on H-1B. Also, there is no issue with business owned by H-1B having revenue, for example from ads on a blog. If you own a business, you can issue dividend to owners even on H-1B without any issue.

What you can't have on H-1B is the wage from 'unapproved' sources. You will need to get H-1B for every wage source. But there is no restriction on you receiving dividends, capital gains, etc.

Don't confuse "revenue" with income and "wage" with income. Income can be wage, dividend, capital gains, etc. H-1B only restricts 'wage'.

graeme• 12 years ago

The flip side is that a lot of people with highly successful recurring revenue streams don't post at all, because it would invite competition into their niche.

ams61102• 12 years ago

It's almost a certainty that every idea for a website or app that is highly successful at generating recurring revenue already has multiple competitors. A lot of recurring revenue tends to mean a lot of users which tends to mean it's not a secret.

spyder• 12 years ago

What "results"? This isn't a poll. But i agree with the second-half of your comment.

gedrap• 12 years ago

I really like this thread because it reminds me (and others) that creating a product is not only about leaving full time job, doing crazy hours and trying to raise money, like it's often portrayed. You can simply create a product with reasonable cash flow as a side project.

Thank you all for contributing to this thread.

jasonkester• 12 years ago

I wonder if it skews both ways. I tend not to post on these threads because a.) they come up so frequently and b.) it sometimes files like it's just bragging to keep telling everybody that my business stuff is successful.

I definitely agree on not getting discouraged. It's not in any way as hard as you think it is before trying. And you get better at it the more times you try.

My history of products looks like:

  - Hey, I built this cool piece of technology.  Maybe I should try to turn it into a product.  
    (... but never finished it) (X3)

  - Hey, Google Maps is cool and I like travelling.  Maybe I should launch a Travel Blog host.
    (... without any fathomable way to monetize it)

  - Hey, look at this cool one-day hack that got tons of Reddit love.
    We should totally start a company!
    (... with a flaky co-founder who never got around to doing any of the "business" stuff 
     before bailing for the next shiny thing)

  - Hey, I bet you could transform Amazon's cloud storage logs into CLF and
    feed them into Webalizer.  I should totally sell this for like $1/month!
    (... which actually turned out to be a good idea, but for $10-$300/month)

After all that, I expect my next product will be something with some form of actual market of people willing to pay money for it before diving in to the IDE. But then you never know...

csallen• 12 years ago

Nice, it's awesome that you've been able to do so well with your Amazon product! What kind of things do you do/have you done to market it? Or did you rely on an "if-you-build-it-they-will-come" strategy?

chrisdew2• 12 years ago

Yes, my first paying side-project (virtsync) was the fourth or fifth thing I'd started. I currently have three other ideas I'm working on, but I find it difficult to focus on one.

helen842000• 12 years ago

FYI I find these threads really inspiring so please do keep reminding those of us not there yet that it is possible.

patio11• 12 years ago

Bingo Card Creator is pretty firmly EOLed. Sales YTD this year are about $30k, probably $35k all-in for the year. Profits are stable at about 60% unless I miss my guess. This is down substantially from previous years, partly as a result of Google changes which I haven't made the least bit of effort into looking into. Also have ~$1k a month from books/courses, and hoping to get out another course before the end of the year, if life cooperates.

My main gig these days is Appointment Reminder. I'd describe it as "modestly successful." (A single signup for the largest publicly available plan is, probabilistically, worth more than BCC made in its best months. Historically, that has only received about as much sales effort as BCC clients got -- i.e. nil -- but I'm experimenting with having active inside sales starting this week.)

JasonCEC• 12 years ago

Please share your experience with active inside sales (when you have some anecdata) - I know many of us would find it a valuable read.

chrisan• 12 years ago

partly as a result of Google changes which I haven't made the least bit of effort into looking into

Do you know what google changed at least or simply that google changed _something_ and organic traffic dropped significantly?

gk12• 12 years ago

Moz keeps a record of known Google algorithm updates:

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

In 2014 alone there have been more than a dozen of major updates. Keeping up takes significant effort.

dennisgorelik• 12 years ago

Could it be that decline in Google traffic was caused by your reducing the capabilities of free Bingo plan?

If users are disappointed about how little free product can do - they are less likely to open Bingo Card Creator's page in the future and Google takes that unwillingness into account.

Threep78• 12 years ago

I own and run a website, in the category of special-interest news stories, that's making 10–15k a month consistently for almost 10 years. (Yeah, we got started early, which is probably why I have good search engine rankings.) Google AdSense is the only means of income. We get close to 1 million unique visitors a month. Just me and one other part-time employee running it, so it's been a pretty spectacular (and unexpected! It started as a hobby) success.

gk12• 12 years ago

Can you share a link? I'm curious to see how the AdSense ads are integrated with the content/layout.

scottydelta5• 12 years ago

will Google allow me to display adsense ads on a website like this http://www.mega.pastemehere.com ?

scottydelta5• 12 years ago

http://mega.pastemehere.com/

dfar1• 12 years ago

As cheesy and sketchy as it sounds I make about $600 a year by logging into my "surveys" account once a month (need to login to keep it active). All the money comes from referrals, I no longer take surveys. Every now and then I login to check my balance and to cash in. I used to run a blog where I got all the referrals from, about 2400 people. The blog has been down for a couple of years, but the referral's money continues to come in.

dangrossman4• 12 years ago

$30K per month from https://www.improvely.com

A few thousand per month from https://www.w3counter.com

paromi• 12 years ago

nice stats. i have signed up for w3, proceeded to add a site, noticed i cant make the counter invisible, saw the pro signup page, closed the site. maybe you should consider to let the first site added to be free with pro features and charge for the next sites , or maybe for a 60 day period and then ask for pro.

dangrossman4• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. W3Counter has around 79,000 users despite never being advertised; I don't really care to grow it faster by giving away more. The PRO features cost money because they cost me more money -- they include real-time reports that take more server resources to scale.

W3Counter's always been a pet project I built for myself, back in the days before Google Analytics existed, that I've just been happy to see pay for itself. The site turned 10 this year.

notdarkyet3• 12 years ago

Wow, so is improvely is run just by you? 30k a month is impressive. I checked out your blog, but have you ever had anyone else working on it or have you always maintained the full stack?

dangrossman4• 12 years ago

It's always just been me. This is a lifestyle business for me, and I don't really feel time-constrained at all. The variety of skills you have to develop to run a software business alone is what makes it interesting to me; I never get bored with the work since there are so many roles I can choose to take on each day. There's always something new to learn on the horizon, and great motivation to do the learning (like ack! you're about to have more traffic than one server can handle, better learn how to handle that!).

The only downside to working alone is being on-call 24/7/365 for the servers. I have a good alert system that will wake me up if anything goes wrong overnight, though most components of the stack can fail without taking down a site. Lots of load balancing and warm failovers at a second host just in case.

obeone• 12 years ago

I notice you have the 4-tier (299/149/79/29) pricing system. I'm curious what percentage of your revenue comes from each tier.

dangrossman4• 12 years ago

It's actually "$299+" which links to a page with even larger plans (299/599/899). I also do custom pricing when that makes sense. There are customers at every price point. Nearly everyone starts at $29/month but as their business grows with Improvely's help, they grow into larger plans as time goes on. That keeps our interests aligned, and also keeps the average customer LTV growing every month without changing prices or upselling other services.

OhHeyItsE• 12 years ago

I'd love to hear more of your story - seems like you have the perfect gig. A lot of your customers seem like small/medium sized businesses. How did you go about acquiring them?

razvanh• 12 years ago

I love reading and I'm a designer so I started http://greatdesignbooks.com/ where I share books that inspired me. I'm using amazon affiliate links which brings in a few dollars a month :)

guiomie• 12 years ago

around 1$ a month from my android game ChubbyFish. It was really just me experimenting with android game developement.

mikelbring2• 12 years ago

My new service has 2 customers at 29$ a month each. https://textfollow.com

othello• 12 years ago

How did you get these first two customers?

mikelbring2• 12 years ago

They are two local businesses that my partner knew the owner of. We tried cold calling a few others and working with local marketing agencies with little luck so far.

plehoux3• 12 years ago

Conferencebadge.com(+Leanticket.com) started in January 2013, generates ~$36k / month and growing. Interesting to note we were reject after interviewing in SF for YC S2013. We are a team of four working on this. Mostly part time, customer support, fulfilment with partners.

The money from this enables us to focus most of our time on a newly not announced projet, which we plan to launch in spring 2015. We plan to apply to YC with this one and are confident it will be a good match. Big vision, big plans.

I personally also have an old flash game portal (jeuxgratuits.net) started 13 years ago still generating ~1.5k / month. All legacy traffic from Google and 10 years of web links. 0 maintenance time.

MrBuddyCasino• 12 years ago

Looks really nice. I'm suprised lanyrd.com and similar didn't get that idea. Charging per badge is a nice business model.

plehoux3• 12 years ago

Lanyrd.com is all about discoverability. Conferencebadge.com is more utility. Really different in my opinion.

I think the success of the plateforme was in our ability to mitigate all the pain points of managing attendees badges, which is not a sexy business.

mastef2• 12 years ago

impressive!

raphinou2• 12 years ago

Conferencebadge.com is very clever!

bernardom• 12 years ago

What really good example of executing very nicely on one thing. Congratulations.

dharma12• 12 years ago

like it. textbook example of great UX

ghobbins• 12 years ago

Really neat idea and well designed. Excited for the upcoming project. Where can we sign up for updates?

plehoux3• 12 years ago

par2• 12 years ago

really awesome, thanks for the inspiration.

scrumper• 12 years ago

About $20-30 a month from an $1.99 iPad synthesizer app. Probably grossed about $2k over its life. It's entirely passive income: I haven't done an update since iOS 6.

Osiris2• 12 years ago

I earn about $1500 a month from a program called BatteryBar, it's a laptop battery meter for Windows laptops. Sales are driven mostly by referrals from web forums and Q&A sites where users recommend it. It's a freemium model with the vast majority using the free version.

klausjensen• 12 years ago

That is an awesome program, I have used it for a while. Good work. :)

Osiris2• 12 years ago

Email me and I'd be happy to send you a free Pro license key.

lovelearning• 12 years ago

I find that both eye opening and inspiring.

Couple of years ago, I developed a battery meter and alerter for windows. I never thought anybody would buy it, much less use it. Never published it anywhere :(

yitchelle3• 12 years ago

Should go the extra step now and publish it..You never know.

bussiere3• 12 years ago

Stocks 300 / month with a custom data analysis (very simple, it's based on event. It analyse stok data and highlit regular period of high on the stocks on the same date each year, and after by hand i try to find why it goes high, and i can put past event also and it told me if theses event have an influence on stocks in the past). http://www.skruge.in/ https://github.com/skruge/skruge.github.io

I'am limited by the amount of cash. I'am in the process of launching a fund.

why-el• 12 years ago

I am fairly clueless about stocks. Would you mind sharing how would one start? How much upfront cost does it require?

bussiere3• 12 years ago

Play only money that you don't need, my program aims to 3% per month.

Choose a sector that you like (biotech , videogames etc ...).

Take care of trading costs.

And if you are a programmer try to find pattern in stocks.

https://www.quantopian.com/home

If you play even with an algorithm or without, write your rules (i play this amount, i go aout at this date or if i loose this percent).

Have a clean head when you play.

By analysing data you can earn a little.

For the upfront it depends of what you aim.

And in the end if someone talk you about technical analisys , run it's bullshit like horoscope for trading -_-

saganus• 12 years ago

I would recommend to head over to investopedia.com and play with fake money first.

Do this for about a year or two before thinking on investing real money. It sounds long and boring but that's because it takes a lot just to understand what's happening, let alone make any money.

Read everything you can on commonly used definitions and get used to reading financial news. This will help you measure how much do you actually understand and get more proficient at it.

Then you can start investing with small amounts and see how it feels. The hardest thing I have experienced while trading is the emotional rush of either losing money or winning money. So getting used to it is pretty useful if you want to follow an strategy, etc.

Quantopian is a good reasource if you have already understood at least some basic stuff. Another good resource is http://www.babypips.com/school

Although it refers to Forex market and not stock market, a lot of the stuff there applies as well.

raivo• 12 years ago

About $15 a month from 3 iOS baby tracking apps. Built to scratch my own itch, so to speak :)

Here's one, and the side bar lists the others.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/napendar-baby-sleep-tracker/...

dotnetkow• 12 years ago

Scratching your own itch is the best way to get started! Congrats, keep it up!

mipapage2• 12 years ago

My wife and I have an old website that makes about 1200 euros/mo from Adsense. No work on it in years.

So many ideas, so little time.

junto• 12 years ago

Whilst I understand you won't want to share what the website is, can you give us an idea of how you went about picking the particular niche you choose, how you built traffic, how you wrote the content? I presume most of this is pure organic search engine traffic that is highly SEO optimised? Those are some nice figures. Have you not though about replicating this x100?

mipapage2• 12 years ago

Thanks for asking!

"Have you not though about replicating this x100?"

My wife's family asks us that at least once a year.

We started the site a looong time ago, back when google dances were all the craze and SEO was just a baby. We worked hard building quality content around our theme in order to get pages indexed and were one of the first to market in this area. We ranked very well rather quickly, and started to get inbound links from university sites and courses where teachers linked to our content. As a result we get huge traffic relative to the work we put in. We were lucky.

Most of the traffic boost happened before AdSense existed. I remember when it came out and we got accepted. Seriously? We can make money off of this website? Advertising was never the intention, it was lead gen. Anyways, on went AdSense and lo and behold we made 80 cents that first week. I forgot about it for a long time until at some point we received a big cheque.

We have tried a lot of other things to monetize the traffic (lead gen no longer being necessary), but AdSense has always won. We have tried to build other sites to replicate this, but we were never able to luck out as we did with this one.

These days I would really like to do something more meaningful as well, rather than try to build an MFA site (not that this first one was, nor were many of the later ones; we always tried to tie the website into lead gen for a local company in some niche - friends, neighbours, family - using adsense in the hopes the site may be successful one way or the other).

WRT some of your comments, we didn't highly optimise the content, wrote most of it ourselves and the niche was our area of work. The main idea behind the content was building out the theme of our site, adding content related to the various aspects and explaining terminology, history and other details.

chaseadam17• 12 years ago

We launched Watsi's Universal Fund [1] (our monthly donation product) a few weeks ago. However, we had people beta testing our previous version of monthly donations for around a year before that.

We've had 671 people join in total. 1 signup today. 8 signups this week. $21,300 in recurring monthly donations. $1,900 in recurring monthly tips (to our operations). The median monthly donation is $20.

Since we launched the Universal Fund we've seen a conversion rate of 2.42% (signups/sessions). I'd be curious to know what conversion rates other recurring revenue products see.

[1] https://watsi.org/universal-fund

embwbam• 12 years ago

About $450 a month from my share of a spanish language bookstore, reader, and audiobook player app. It provides public domain books and Librevox recordings in a nice UI and all cleaned up. Users can buy books for 0.99 or 1.99 or buy the whole library for 4.99

I spent about 4-5 months working on it full time and kind of consider it a failure, but revenue isn't dropping. I don't know how to grow it though because it is search targeted.

markyc2• 12 years ago

link?

abuiles• 12 years ago

I wrote and publish a book through leanpub about Ember.js: ember-cli-101[1]. I started to sell it without finishing it and it was bringing about $500/mo, but now that is completed sells are going up. I hope it would be above $2000/mo for the following months.

[1] https://leanpub.com/ember-cli-101

pedromsantos• 12 years ago

I generate about $500-750 USD per month on a few apps I have published on the app store https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/letsbasket/id409205141 and google play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bytesteam.... Income comes form advertising (admob/adsense), in app purchases and paid versions.

buro9• 12 years ago

A forum I ran which pulled in GBP +30k per year (for 4+ years) in affiliate fees is approaching EOL.

eBay changed their fee structure and cookie policy last November, and this has coincided with a rise in voucher sites and cashback sites which take the prize of the last cookie placed.

At the moment, across multiple side projects, I'm breaking even. I'll look to shutter some of them next year and will try something else.

heliodor3• 12 years ago

One day, I saw opportunity. I called in sick from work the next day (because I just couldn't wait for the weekend!) and hacked out an Android app. Net result after several years: $50,000 in revenue.

The way it happened is that I was already working on my Iridium Flares app, when one day I saw a certain new app launched. I knew I could do it better and I already had some useful code from another project, so I called in sick from work for one day, and hacked out a better version of what this guy had just launched. That app's user reviews told me exactly what to build. It took off from there.

I have built several Android apps in the early days of Android. The just-mentioned app, which was my most profitable one, was selling for $3.95 and netted about $50,000 over the course of its life. Highest monthly income from that was $1500/month for about two months.

I also had an Iridium Flares app for Android. It contributed maybe about 5% of the numbers stated above. This app was priced at $1.95. Both apps had a free version running ads. Most of the revenue came from the paid version of the other app.

In the early days, simply putting an app on the Play Store was enough to have people find you through the search box and the 'new apps' list. I remember I was scanning the list of new apps every few days for neat new things to try on my G1. Making a better mouse trap would ensure your app got installed.

Which brings me to the present: I just launched a cryptocurrency price charts website a few weeks ago with a friend. https://pizzacharts.com Got about $20 in donations at launch. We have a freemium model, $9/month only payable in Bitcoins at the moment, and ads. We'll see what kind of revenue comes out once we scale, fingers crossed.

aembleton2• 12 years ago

https://pizzacharts.com doesn't work for me (get an SSL connection error) and my ISP (Virgin Media in UK) blocks http://pizzacharts.com

heliodor3• 12 years ago

Would you be able to provide more details on that SSL error? The http url should redirect to the https (if your browser doesn't do it for you first).

SandB0x• 12 years ago

Call me old fashioned, but I'm not sure it's a great idea to advertise the fact that you wrote your app on company time.

ta19191823• 12 years ago

This.

ams61102• 12 years ago

He didn't, he was on a sick day. Dishonest about being sick, but still not on company time. And more and more companies just lump sick time and vacation into one pool of "paid time off" so it doesn't really matter what you call it.

Edit: in fact, we don't even know that his company pays him at all if he's on a sick day. Many jobs don't, e.g. if you are paid hourly.

fiatjaf2• 12 years ago

So your money is all the result of a big lie?

mox12• 12 years ago

Roughly $200-400 / month from Admob on a single app that I put out 2 months ago.

App is ranked Top 5-10 on Google Play for a fairly common English keyword. Same app available on iTunes, but little to no traction.

I get 400-800 downloads a day on Google Play. 10-50 a day on iTunes.

Requires $5/ month VM instance for a database and 1 hour a week for updates.

MicroBerto• 12 years ago

We run a network of product microsites that use PricePlow's API to hook users up with good deals and free samples.

The new microsites are actively maintained (blogging, product updates, support questions, security) and definitely not passive, but some of our older ones from 2010-2011, like http://www.coconutwaterlife.com sit around collecting Amazon money for doing next to nothing.

The non-maintained network of sites earns about $500/month.

That sounds great, but honestly, I wasted so much time building so many of them -- scaling business in the wrong direction instead of building a real brand -- that at this point, I believe that had I spent the time working on the main PricePlow setup in those two crucial years, my returns would be far higher than what I'm getting from screwing around with a ton of microsites.

Plus, pareto principle. 10% of the old sites make 90% of the passive revenues. The rest of them were total WOMBATs.

hwswfun2• 12 years ago

$0.00 from my free game "Barnyard Politics" on Android. Immeasurable wealth realizing I could make the game in 4 days with a game sdk verses the whole summer I spent chasing an idea that I never released but used OpenGL, Android NDK, OpenCV. All the technologies I learned led to the next couple years of my work innovating for my employer so it was a good thing. Time well spent.

Long live SDKs, APIs and other ways to get a product out the door without coding every bit myself.

Fun teamwork results from these side projects also. Such as my wife recording her custom mix of "Old McDonald" + "Hail to the Chief" to be used as my background music for the game. She did this at 1AM of election day, 2010 so I could release the app that day.

Can lessons in life be measured as recurring revenue? Maybe not monetarily but certainly in wisdom and the ability to execute better the next time.

ssharp3• 12 years ago

What SDK did you use?

hwswfun2• 12 years ago

For Barnyard Politics, I used AndEngine. Since then, I have used and loved Unity3D for hard core conceptual prototypes and am in love with Construct 2 now for my current side project though. I am walking my kids through developing and I needed something less complicated than Unity3D. Construct 2's dev environment is fairly easy to use and it exports to html,css, js. Better than that is that I can make my own plugins in js and make them available to people that will create content for my future website / app. I have extremely limited non-corporate time so I plan to author the first content to get started but then make tutorials and allow others to create.

Note: My opinions on game SDKs or anything else here are entirely my own and have nothing to do with my role in the corporate world. The experiences I mention here stem from the fact that I cannot stop programming or thinking about apps when I come home. I love this stuff. And yes, I deeply desire to get to MRR at some point.

laurenbee• 12 years ago

$200-$300/month from ebook sales on Amazon. It was more ($600-$700/month) when I was releasing ebooks more frequently, but I haven't written any since July.

edpichler• 12 years ago

I get just $45,00 month with my web app. I have 1800 users.

www.easypnr.com

It's just a few bucks but, at least, pay the server bills.

bdunn6• 12 years ago

I have an email course (autoresponder) -> course sales funnel setup for Double Your Freelancing Rate which nets about $1-1.5k a day in sales, mostly on autopilot. This is by far the most successful funnel I've created for any of my products, and is performing really stinkin' well.

Product: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/

Email course: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/free-pricing-course/

porter4• 12 years ago

What sort of conversion rate do you get on this funnel?

bdunn6• 12 years ago

About 8% right now, with an average sale of a little north of $200 (so it doesn't take many subscribers and sales to hit four-figures a day)

imjk2• 12 years ago

You're making $365K-$500K+ on this annually?

bdunn6• 12 years ago

I just crossed $200k in sales since I (re)launched in May, so yeah - about that.

nekopa• 12 years ago

I have to add that your free material is full of value. I am not affiliated with bdunn in any way, but I have gotten a lot of use just from some of the ideas in his free email stuff. Most recently it was regarding writing proposals, help me up my game in that arena.

So if anyone else is thinking of setting up this kind of autoresponder email course, make it valuable. I've been through a bunch of these kind of deals and there is a lot of crap out there.

jdawg77• 12 years ago

I've never participated in one of these before...deep breath.

* Ebooks - I publish under four different names; the big alias I've been making $100-$400 dollars per month for several years. A few months I made over a thousand, but I haven't published anything new in months, thus the drop. Sales via Amazon (90%), Smashwords, BN, etc - I'm not on Google Play yet but on Apple, which is about 5x bigger than BN now.

* Adsense - back in the day I co-founded a niche social network, peaked at nearly $60K per month in adsense, despite being 11 years old, the site still gets a few hundred thousand visitors per month - I sold my stake in 2012.

* I'd like to add a 3rd here, but there isn't at present. Hopefully soon, keep posting these, they are hugely inspiring for all of us who mostly lurk.

wicker• 12 years ago

I've been kicking around the idea of writing something but I'd like to do it under my real name and so I'm paralyzed by the fear that I'll write something terrible and get bad reviews and it'll show up on my search results forever. Maybe I'm more afraid it'll just languish once it's written. I don't know.

Can you talk a little more about the ebooks? How did you choose a topic and could you point at a useful reference or two for how to market?

mastef2• 12 years ago

we're a team of 4 core ppl ( some part time ) working on http://www.pitchxo.com and have managed to increase revenue since launch ~4 months ago MoM by ~20% - to around 2000$ monthly. ( famous slow SaaS ramp of death )

In that whole time running manual services like http://www.sharkboard.co ( monthly investor updates ) and http://www.stefanxo.com ( cto consulting, PA services & hosting ) kept us afloat while building it with 4-5k$ + shortterm gigs

backstory: i ran a small mvp 1-2 years ago on a blog of a famous european angel investor. we uploaded his next project's pdf behind a social login - 800 people signed up.

few months later we made a similar page for a fintech firm that was raising a round - this time with email notifications about sign ups and adding them to a CRM. they got about 150 investors signed up and raised the money quite quickly

so we started automating the process and building it as SaaS app step by step. at first with a few customers who we set up manually, then end of summer we finally launched the SaaS version

mkertajaya2• 12 years ago

I ran shopebike.com, a dropship of electric bikes and soon electric scooters. I provide customer supports via email and sometimes over the phone.

It has generated around $8000 a year so far, mostly in the warmer months. I tried google ads words in the past, but the cost was too much so I dropped it in the beginning of the year. Maybe I wasn't doing it correctly, but it was almost no conversions.

thisisdallas• 12 years ago

This is really interesting. I have read a lot of articles about dropshipping being extremely hard to get right. Just out of curiosity, how much time on average did you put into marketing/seo in order to start generating income? Do you also blog about electric bikes?

mkertajaya2• 12 years ago

The article is probably correct. I had access to the manufacturer on this one.

I haven't done much advertising this year. Most of my traffic comes directly from the manufacturer's site.

I don't blog directly but I am actively looking and linking to other blogs/article about our e-bikes.

gavinballard• 12 years ago

~$500/m from sales of my Bootstrap framework for Shopify themes (http://www.bootstrapforshopify.com).

selamin2• 12 years ago

I sell a self hosted web app (http://duetapp.com) that generates 3-4k a month. It used to be higher, but I haven't given it the attention it deserves in a couple of months.

foofoobar• 12 years ago

Where do you advertise? Is your web page the only selling channel you are using?

selamin2• 12 years ago

I don't do any paid advertising at the moment. I get a decent amount of leads from two other apps that I distribute for free (http://theanchorapp.com, http://getsoloapp.com), google, and word of mouth.

Yep, the website is the only sales channel...

nick2• 12 years ago

iOS app average less than a hundred dollars a month https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tasq-logger/id877346886?mt=8

yesimahuman2• 12 years ago

A few years back my friend and I had bootstrapped a simple SaaS product to over $30k/mo in recurring revenue with insane margins. We turned it into a bigger business after that, but I sometimes can't believe how much we made with just two people.

softdev122• 12 years ago

that's amazing. was there much of a sales effort involved?

yesimahuman2• 12 years ago

No sales or marketing spend. We built developer tools (still do) and just found really passionate communities that were willing to pay for things. We did spend a good amount of time on "virality" (just making sure we were utilizing organic growth on Twitter), and also tweaking and testing pricing models. We probably tried 5+ pricing models for new customers in a given year.

alokm3• 12 years ago

Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.

aembleton2• 12 years ago

Which apps did you make?

alokm3• 12 years ago

Most of my revenue is from an app called Hindu Calendar. It has loads of features now relating to traditional Indian calendar, and festivals of India. [Edit]: See https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Alok+Mandavg...

softdev122• 12 years ago

did you initially launch the app with ads? does the ad hurt the user experience?

alokm3• 12 years ago

Yes i added ads initially. But I always made sure they did not compromise with user experience. The ad revenue was not significant initially. It has grown steadily over couple of years as the user base has increased.

OutsourceJunkee2• 12 years ago

This is a fun thread I make a Thousand a month by hooking companies up with outstanding off shore employees that I have tried and tested myself. The goal is to focus and become a the best.

scottydelta5• 12 years ago

try me: email me @ contact@pastemehere.com

OutsourceJunkee2• 12 years ago

Email sent

justinmares2• 12 years ago

I'm around $5500 a month total from 2 Udemy courses and a launching Traction book. It breaks down like this (all links below):

My SQL for Marketers course on Udemy does about $1500 a month, and has been pretty steady since launching the course on Udemy in late April. This takes almost no maintenance, though I am starting to work on improving it in response to student feedback.

My other course, Productivity for Mac Users, is a simpler keyboard shortcuts one can use to be more productive on Mac. This one makes $400-800 per month, though average over the lifetime (launched in May) has been around $500.

Lastly, we launched Traction book 3 months ago, and it continues to sell really well. Even after splitting with my co-author, I make about $3500 a month from that. You can see full numbers breakdown in the blog post we wrote summing up our launch.

https://www.udemy.com/sql-for-marketers/#/

https://www.udemy.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts/#/

http://tractionbook.com

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2014/10/getting-traction...

stephancoral2• 12 years ago

How much work went into advertising your Udemy courses? Was it something that took significant advertising / reach to gain students?

justinmares2• 12 years ago

Honestly, no. One post to reddit, one to Growthhackers.com and the rest has all been organic.

tacon• 12 years ago

Udemy offered me the SQL for Marketers course on Black Friday sale for $10 (down from $199?). I couldn't pass that up.

bizocean• 12 years ago

I earn most of money from trading stock and binary options you read my review about binaryoption here http://www.bizocean.org/2014/05/Binary-signals-aka-option-tr...

dharma12• 12 years ago

about $800/year, radio play royalties from music I made about 10 years ago. Pays for a new guitar each year

rk0567• 12 years ago

$100 per month from this little tool [1] I created few months ago (as a fun side project).

[1] http://portchecker.co

mrlebowski• 12 years ago

$100 per month from my Android apps. I have three apps out, and only one is generating most of the money.

$0 from http://favoriteof.com - Site about recommendations by noteworthy people. Currently focusing on books!

edent3• 12 years ago

Solar Panels. I've 4kWp systems on 2 properties in southern England. Making about £3k/year with them. The money comes from the Government and is guaranteed for 20 years. First 8 years will be enough to pay off the cost of installation. Money is tax free, but does depend on the weather (and components breaking). Lots of details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/solar-graphing-faq/

I run a silly little Amazon (UK) referral tumblr - http://fiverfun.tumblr.com Makes about £100 / month - which is enough to keep me in cheap electronics :-)

Tried adverts & paid apps, only ever made ~£10/month.

I rent out a couple of properties - that's ~£1,600/month (before tax, mortgage payments, new carpets, fees, more fee, insurance, more tax, etc).

The key to all of them is to find things that take as little effort as possible. The panels need checking every quarter, the tumblr is a few minutes in the evening, the properties are handled by professional agents. All that leaves me time to work for a living :-)

a89839812983• 12 years ago

About $9000/month. I would say I am very good at what I do, but I am sick and cant be bothered to do business stuff. My nearest competitor just raised $10M. I do comparable stuff, but I am single person.

So I found business guy (marketing cofounder) who takes care of everything and pays me flat fee. I live on tropical island and work in average 2 hours a day.

Next year I will be probably better, so I am going to scale up the business (and income) little bit.

jayd77• 12 years ago

What kind of business are you in?

kalid3• 12 years ago

I sell math books and courses at http://betterexplained.com and on Amazon. It's about 3k/m currently, hoping to improve that with better landing pages, a/b testing, retargeting, drip campaigns, etc. [the patio11 playbook].

More details on how I got started here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870015

porter4• 12 years ago

I bought one of your courses a while ago. nice work!

kalid3• 12 years ago

Awesome, glad to hear!

ivan_ah3• 12 years ago

Hi kalid. That's awesome to hear you're grown the business to 3k/mo. Clearly the model of free content online + sales of curated book-length content works. Imagine now if a bunch of people with tutoring experience in chemistry, biology, economics, etc. write textbooks on their subject. Wouldn't the life of the ugrad student get suddenly better? (Stop the exploitation of ugrads! )

BTW, since you cover a lot of high school topics, you should consider making a textbook that is aligned with the common core math state standards---the big textbook publishers are scrambling to update their books right now...

kalid3• 12 years ago

Hey Ivan! Been meaning to reach out about your mini reference guides, I really like the approach. I agree on aligning with common core, I've been out of school so long I forget what old textbooks are like (the courses I have are more like "enrichment"). Well-written, reasonably-priced books that teach lasting understanding would be awesome for undergrads.

bigmessowires2• 12 years ago

Great topic. I have about $1000/month in revenue from selling floppy disk emulators for classic Macintosh computers. This was originally something I designed myself, just for fun. There's more labor required for order fulfillment and shipping than I'd like, though.

I also earn a tiny $150/year from Amazon affiliate sales on a running/sports web site I built 10 years ago, and has good Google rankings. I used to have Google adSense ads too, but it always showed very generic ads that got very few clicks. Now I hand-select Amazon products I think visitors might be interested in, and include links to those.

appplemac• 12 years ago

$0 at the moment for Honey with a Story[1], but I made it pretty recently, and it did not get any coverage yet outside of my circle. But I hope it will :)

[1] www.honeywithastory.com

chemcoder• 12 years ago

Recurring Income

I run a small firm supplying air freshener services - dispenser along with monthly refilling.

Manufacturing and selling water based air fresheners, car air fresheners, scented wood balls for cupboard.

Recurring is growing fast. First is a service - I make around 3k USD in recurring revenue. Profit margins are good. Another counter sales is also periodic not monthly though unevenly amongst clients however it has been launched two months ago and had 2k in first and 3.5K in second in revenue. Here too i manage good margins because i havent yet made into big retail. Its increasing rapidly and consuming resources and money.

Non recurring but periodic

Also sell air freshener products suitable for larger areas like custom diffusers etc revenue ranges anywhere from 0.5-2.5K USD each month.

scottydelta5• 12 years ago

I am making around $1500/month by freelancing on odesk where I work on max 2 projects per month(I am an undergrad student) and each project takes approx 4 days.

Before that I was hired full time work from home(40 hrs/week) by a swedish company and was making 2500$/month for 3 months.

PS: looking for full time remote work at startups, Pythonista web developer(flask/django)

icpmacdo• 12 years ago

What programming languages are the oDesk job in? I am also a student and need to start making some money freelancing.

scottydelta5• 12 years ago

There are almost all kinds of jobs on odesk. From debugging a c/c++ code to writing algos and doing web developent etc. PHP is in high demand on odesk.

bigmessowires2• 12 years ago

I see many comments about Android apps as money-makers, but only one for iOS. Does that reflect where app sales are in each market, or are Hacker News commenters just much more likely to be Android users?

not_with_retard• 12 years ago

_Much_ more likely to be Android users.

may• 12 years ago

Does anyone have any good books or resources to help someone determine a match between possible niches and their skillset?

par2• 12 years ago

I make about $15 a month from my blog http://devcodehack.com and about $300/month from my Twitter marketing site http://followme.io

fiatjaf2• 12 years ago

$3 a month at http://alimentos.alhur.es/ and http://tabelas.alhur.es/.

bbcbasic2• 12 years ago

I have done too many things in the past (which are now dead) to even remember them all.

My current project is making me a handsome $2-3 a week is an Andriod app for children. Money from admob. I am trying to slowly growth hack it in various ways.

One is to get translations done on fiverr.com to countries where it is popular.

An other is to think about improving my 'asking for ratings' UX so that I can compel people to give feedback and therefore improve the app, reduce the % of uninstalls.

This is based on a simple idea that the number of installs stabilizes:

Let new installs / day = N

Let uninstalls = U

Let % of uninstalls per day = P

Let total current installs = C

Then U = P * C

This is stable when U = N So when N = P * C

Therefore C tends to N/P

So for example 100 new installs per day at 1% uninstall rate = 10000 installs eventually and no more.

But get the % down to 0.1% is the same effect as getting 1000 new installs per day.

So this is part of my plan.

neoterics• 12 years ago

Ha not sure if this counts, but around a year or two ago I found out a cheap source of page rank which I pointed to one of my loans lead gen website which resulted in me ranking for some fairly decent money keywords. I was making few hundred a day for a couple of months before the website was penalized by Google.

I mostly dabble in whiter-hat stuff now but the progress is slow (but hopefully it lasts longer) and make a few hundred per month.

itengelhardt2• 12 years ago

I make about $1,400 MRR from my SaaS app LinksSpy (https://www.linksspy.com).

LinksSpy is a tool for SEO agencies that helps them find better link opportunities for their client's websites. I started it at the end of April 2014 (7 months ago) and it has grown ever since.

Considering that I am moonlighting the app, it has been quite successful so far. AM(A)A

thepredestrian• 12 years ago

What did you do to market your app?

itengelhardt2• 12 years ago

A bit of posting on reddit; spent a few bucks on FB/StumbleUpon/Reddit ads; Retargeting through PerfectAudience; Drip email campaign using GetDrip.com;

Word of mouth plays a huge part as well.

In addition to that I use LinksSpy to build more links to LinksSpy.

malditojavi2• 12 years ago

$1.4k MMR? I though these were real data http://www.it-engelhardt.de/linksspy-com-monthly-income-repo...

eb0la• 12 years ago

About $80 yearly from an affiliate link inside a blog post I made some years ago. I still wonder why it is still geting traffic from google and how I could scale it.

cerberusss• 12 years ago

I bought a floundering app on AppTopia for $4000 and with some solid work and design, I'm getting about $170 per month.

cx42net• 12 years ago

I'm surprised to see that no one talked about money they make by selling themes or modules on sites like ThemeForest.

I personally make around 400/500€ per month by selling a few modules on the Prestashop platform, and this month I'll pass the 1.000€ bar, which feel awesome. I made around 3800€ in 8 month with just a few support, and this feels great !

We also launched the new version of VoilaNorbert (https://www.voilanorbert.com) that aims to find email of people with a slick and easy to use interface. Since the new release (two weeks ago), we made around 250$.

It's not much, but it's amazing :)

Toadsoup• 12 years ago

My friend and I launched our service last night.

We will record a video note to someone you like on your behalf (anonymous if desired). It's a video service for secret admirers.

We built the entire thing last night (11/19/14) in about 5 and a half hours from conception to implementation. If we sell any, we'll go about polishing the page and making it better.

http://lovablenote.com

shanecleveland• 12 years ago

$150-$200/month from ads on a few simple web apps to generate international shipping documents. Needed something better to use at my regular job, so I made my own. Turned out to be a decent demand for them (few hundred visitors each day). Narrow niche targeting businesses, so that helps with search engine rank and per-click Adsense value. Might be the potential to productize it.

malditojavi2• 12 years ago

Mmmm I did my first $49 with an sponsor that I get for http://petithacks.com A website where I curate small hacks & tricks companies do to get more of your time, of your attention, of your money.

Nothing spectacular, I know. I started to get some traffic (28K visits so far) 1 month ago after being featured in ProductHunt, SmashingMagazine, SitePoint, etc.

Still trying to figure it out what I could do with the 1,4k signups I have.

taphangum• 12 years ago

$1,100 per month from a Udemy course - https://www.udemy.com/building-and-selling-a-niche-website-f...

Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?

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