I made my side project profitable quickly with a relentless focus on costs. The only fees I have are to Apple (dev license) and Delaware (for the LLC). Any service I wanted, I found an open source project and figured it out. I use the free tier at red hat open shift for hosting. If you let yourself get nickel and dimed by layering on SaaS products, you won't get anywhere.
Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.
This is where business sense comes in. If you want to make money, your number one goal isn't to have fun and learn something. If you want to work on something fun, then build what you want to build but don't expect to make any money. If you want to make money, you need to build what the market needs. If your enjoyment and the market intersects, that's amazing, congratulations. However, this is unlikely.
Once you accept that you are building a business, not a fun side project, you can start to think about how one lonely developer can make money. Preferably with spending as little money as possible to reduce risk. So to answer your question specifically - you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available. You will then immediately rank #1 or close to it, users will find you, and you will dominate without spending anything on marketing.
How do you find a niche like this? I could keep writing, but really this needs to be in a long blog post to summarize all of the different pieces of the "successful one-man side software business" puzzle. It isn't impossible but it's much harder than you wish it would be. No one pays money for something that is easy.
You want to build something that people find and continuously use. So even if you only get 5 new users a day, after a few years you have many thousands of users. What do people continuously use over years? Think tools, things that improve their productivity, things that help them. Monetization is pretty easy, as mobile ads pay well, and you can charge an SaaS subscription to remove ads, or consumables to get extra features. A free install is critical or no one will use it, charge on upsells within a free app.
This is an inexact science. This is inherently a risky endeavor, with a high probability of failure. You need to be mentally prepared to fail. Good luck
My interpretation of a business is a repeatable mechanism for generating profit. Starting a business takes lots of effort and time. Once you have it running, a good software side business should take very little time. You put the time in at the beginning. Once it's working, you should be able to make money without trying.
By using pay-for SaaS companies, you might save time, but as a one-man developer, I'm not in a race for success. I want to build something that lasts ideally for years if not decades that sends cash directly into my bank account. If you rely on an SaaS product, you will be paying them money for decades. And if they go out of business, you need to put more effort into finding a replacement.
By building everything myself, I pay nobody anything, and the only risk is that I go out of business. And if I build more side businesses, I can reuse my existing infrastructure and reduce their costs as well.
For many things building it yourself doesn't take that much longer than doing an integration with a SaaS product. Usually I need 1 or 2 features that are a small piece of a much larger product.
server monitoring to ensure that it responds and is running. I solved it with a cron job. Lots of other server monitoring software with bells and whistles, didn't need it
New relic sever monitoring my friend. It's free (emphasis because I was shocked when I looked up pricing) and takes all of 5 minutes to setup (no exaggeration, it uses yum for 99% of setup).
Hmm, it looks like they have changed their pricing strategy. When I first signed up it was no strings attached free as a loss-leader to move you towards using their application monitoring products.
There are a fair amount of pingdom clones out there with free trials. Throw a few of them at a webpage that does select count(*) from users query, and you can get notified within a minute or two of a failure (for free).
Are you including your opportunity cost in that assessment of profitability though?
That's by far the bigger expense and dominates the nominal cost of any SaaS or licenses.
It's also what holds me back from developing any side projects: if it takes me 100 hours to build a project, it could take years to earn the $15k of my time I spent building it.
As of writing this, the main site is down, and the blog has missing image links.
Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive.
Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.
I always wonder why it is so difficult to find good markets. Sometimes, it seems that coming up with a good product-idea is harder than building the actual product. Why does it work that way? Is this a flaw in how the free market works? Or is this just me - a developer - not knowing what other people need from me.
The market itself doesn't know what it actually wants.
Generally its a case of throwing ideas out there and watching what people nibble on, or stumbling across something that everyone has trouble with that you can easily solve.
> If a soldier deployed in Iraq has the time to code...
LOL. True. I was running night raids in 2004 and coding during the day on an app for a commercial real estate company. If anything it was a way to cope, but hey I found the time.
Wow! We built an open source app for holiday management [1] (with a very close UI to this one) and I always thought it would make sense to sell it as a SaaS. I'm glad to see someone actually did it!
I'm trying to see how this particular service improves on having a shared outlook calendar where everyone reflects their vacation. Can someone point out the benefits? (This is not a criticism, I am trying to understand the service)
Congratulation on shipping. I'd love to hear about what you mean by 'profitable'. I don't want to be too nosey, but people mean all sorts of things from covering your hosting with a bit of beer money, to quitting your job and working an hour per week.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 88.8 ms ] threadIf so, congrats!
Heh.
Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.
Once you accept that you are building a business, not a fun side project, you can start to think about how one lonely developer can make money. Preferably with spending as little money as possible to reduce risk. So to answer your question specifically - you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available. You will then immediately rank #1 or close to it, users will find you, and you will dominate without spending anything on marketing.
How do you find a niche like this? I could keep writing, but really this needs to be in a long blog post to summarize all of the different pieces of the "successful one-man side software business" puzzle. It isn't impossible but it's much harder than you wish it would be. No one pays money for something that is easy.
How did you go about finding such markets?
This is an inexact science. This is inherently a risky endeavor, with a high probability of failure. You need to be mentally prepared to fail. Good luck
Similar app B saved 80 hours using more popular SAAS apps but has a SAAS bill of $100 a month. But he had a full 2 week headstart in development.
You don't think app B could end up getting more money?
That doesn't mean you should spend $600 hosting on Heroku. But swearing off all costs may be a bit much...
(And I don't think my point really changes if it is 20, 40, 80, or 160 total hours).
By using pay-for SaaS companies, you might save time, but as a one-man developer, I'm not in a race for success. I want to build something that lasts ideally for years if not decades that sends cash directly into my bank account. If you rely on an SaaS product, you will be paying them money for decades. And if they go out of business, you need to put more effort into finding a replacement.
By building everything myself, I pay nobody anything, and the only risk is that I go out of business. And if I build more side businesses, I can reuse my existing infrastructure and reduce their costs as well.
https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/servers/new-relic-servers-lin...
https://blog.newrelic.com/2011/11/08/server-monitoring-is-he...
So far I appear to still be grandfathered into the the free server plan?
Anyways, I guess you can disregard my original comment.
That's by far the bigger expense and dominates the nominal cost of any SaaS or licenses.
It's also what holds me back from developing any side projects: if it takes me 100 hours to build a project, it could take years to earn the $15k of my time I spent building it.
Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive.
Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.
Generally its a case of throwing ideas out there and watching what people nibble on, or stumbling across something that everyone has trouble with that you can easily solve.
LOL. True. I was running night raids in 2004 and coding during the day on an app for a commercial real estate company. If anything it was a way to cope, but hey I found the time.
[1] https://github.com/diacode/holidays
"Rated 4.2/5 based on 144 reviews"
Anyone has any metric that something like this helps?