Marketing and growth this is the hard part. Currently all word of mouth, blog, links, etc. I haven't really tried ad spending, because I feel like it would be a money pit, and hard to see a ROI. However, I am open to trying a Google AdWords campaign. Any advise?
Here goes my two cents, but I don't think that advertising is necessarily the correct way to increase revenue -- at least on a long term. As far as I have understood traditional offline companies use advertising to sustain and defend their position from their competitors in the market.
I personally recognize your project's name and remember what it does just by its name, but lately all the Docker orchestration tools seem to do pretty much the same thing. Maybe create a blog post explaining the difference and pros and cons of each one? Case studies maybe?
Absolutely content marketing is the best, it is just very time consuming and soul crushing. I'm thinking of trying to hire some people to write articles about infrastructure, orchestration, deployments, server security, etc.
(I'm a PM for AdWords, sharing my personal opinion based on experience and not speaking on behalf of Google)
If you want to avoid a money pit, I think you can. The trick is to pipe conversion data back to AdWords. This is pretty easy with Google Analytics but also not too bad to set up with any analytics provider.
If you're starting fresh, you will need to spend some money blindly (without the benefit of historic conversion data). But, once you start seeing some conversions, you can use our automated bidding strategies to say "only advertise when you are confident you can drive new users to sign up for less than $X."
My other tip would be to spend some time writing good ads (clear articulation of benefits, use all of the space provided to you, and make at least 5 that can be rotated against each other) and picking good keywords (multi-word as a general rule, and specifically related to your business, not too general and not too competitive).
Finally, call support and say you're new and you'd like help. We have big teams of specialists ready to get new advertisers off on the right foot, because we know that your first couple of weeks are crucial to keeping you. They're actually really good.
Cool. Although the site breaks my back button on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36
Same here on Safari Version 9.1.2 (11601.7.7). Just adding some data points to help you fix :). Certainly not meaning to pile on.
I like it and I have subscribed.
Very useful to see practical working examples of options for passive income in the field. I say passive because I could see myself doing something as a side business.
I spent a lot of time scouring "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts to find people who were running revenue-generating businesses. I think I compiled a list of over 140 people. I was able to track down about half of their email addresses and Twitter accounts. From there, I got in contact with everyone I could, and told them about the site. If they wanted to share and were comfortable revealing revenue (lots of people weren't), I sent them a Wufoo form I made. Then I edited their answers into the format you see on the site. There are still 20+ people who were interested in being included but haven't gotten me their info yet.
EDIT: A few people have submitted their businesses since I posted this Show HN, too.
I'm the founder of Complice, one of the sites featured. It took me a bit under 2 years to reach my "poverty threshold" target, working an estimate of 20h/week on average. To break it down further, it was more like 5-15 hours/week for the first 7 months, then 30-50h/week that summer when I was off from school, and other similar fluctuations.
These are all total ballpark estimates that I made a couple weeks ago: I've used various time-tracking systems but none that give accurate overall time spent. Based on my within-Complice stats though, I can tell you that I've done 2800 tasks towards Complice. That's not very specific, but still kind of a neat figure.
I don't have a good breakdown between programming and marketing time, but I would estimate that 80-90% of my time was spent on things more product-development related. Only 75% of Complice tasks, but the programming tasks are more likely to have been eg 8h working on a single feature.
I (Apex Ping) went down the road of playing with newer more hyped tech like React etc, not really necessary for the project, and I can't say it saved any time (if anything wasted time) but still interesting.
AWS Lambda on the other hand has been a nice time saver aside from the fact that there weren't any good frameworks available really (with Go support) so I wrote https://github.com/apex/apex.
Founder of HR Partner here. I wrote the entire site from start to finish in about 3 months (from Nov/Dec 2015 to Feb/Mar 2016). Mainly working in the evenings (from 6pm to around 1-2am), after my usual consulting work during the day.
The site is around 22,000 lines of Ruby code, and has around 80 database tables. Not sure whether that is a normal rate of productivity for most devs, but as my interview explains, I am pushing 50 years old now, so my speed of development and my endurance is nowhere near what it was decades ago.
I did all the front end stuff as well for the public site, and the documentation site and the blog, status page site etc. About the only help I got was my wife to do the voiceover on the explainer video on the web site. (I had to learn After Effects to do the explainer video too).
I'm not featured on the site but I am a dev starting a company (http://www.askinline.com). I worked solo for ~2 months then asked a friend who I had been keeping updated on progress to join me as a co-founder. All up we've been going for just shy of 6 months and I believe we're just reaching the point where the product makes sense as a purchase decision for our target market. I say this based on continual discussions with early customers (in-network, pay nominal fee) and the fact that we're starting to land out-of-network customers.
You seem interested in the tech stacks. I have to say that when people have asked me what they should use I just tell them to go with whatever they are most productive in. Unless you're doing something to try out a tech or you're dependent on an outside system that demands a specific stack I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to learn too many new things while also starting a company. It's hard enough without adding tech concerns.
Very cool, but also a bit misleading.. I was wondering how the hell wub machine actually makes 900$/month, so I read it.
> Record high was $850/mo, record low was $40, with the average month bringing in around $300. Certainly not quit-my-job money, but it helps.
Posting the all-time high instead of the average is a bit off-putting imho, considering it's supposed to represent "paychecks." This is more like getting lucky once. Anyways, haven't read the rest of the stories, and I think it's pretty inspirational. I'd just appreciate more honest revenue reporting on the front page. (It actually says $900/mo, not just $900, so it's not like I'm reading this ambiguously..)
Edit: On second thought, it's not clear to me from the description whether he means that it made $900/mo for some kind of long streak or just one month.
Sorry, I'm rounding peak monthly revenue to the nearest $100, which works well for dollar amounts in the thousands (e.g. $2.2k) but not in the hundreds. Also, in the future, I'll definitely include both peak and average revenue numbers.
Edit: I'll just note that considering the presence of peaks, probably median would be a better indicator than average. Hell, a whole distribution would be pretty informative lol, but that's probably too much info..
I mean, mean is better than median in that if you multiply it by time then it gives you the sum.
But mean over what period? It's a bit complex.
I think that probably @csallen was using "peak" because some of the projects had since gone defunct and he wanted to count them. Although I think in such cases it would make sense to do an average of the best year or something like that.
For projects like mine (https://complice.co/) which are still growing, "peak" is also weird, because it suggests that... I'm not still growing? I'm not even sure. At any rate, it doesn't make sense to use my average over the last year if my average over the next year is going to be twice as much. Better is probably just the total of my active subscriptions.
I came here just to post the same comment. I hate to be negative because this site seems very interesting and I love the content, but what I would say is that I don't think there is any need to embellish the numbers for the audience this content will attract. I would have read the article had it said $300/month or $900/month all the same, except now I trust the overall site less than I would have had it been honest.
Thanks for questioning the honesty of the site. Your comment is truly productive and, sadly, at home against all the jaded (and envious) comments here on HN.
Similar thoughts here. However, the one project Apex Ping, says he's making $600/m but not cash flow positive yet. I'm confused as to how that's even possible. I can run that service on a handful of VM's for ~$60/m.
He says he's using Lamda, perhaps he should rethink that decision if his overhead is really that high.
And yes, that's obviously a concern, but you can design for profit first and refine for scale. It wouldn't be very difficult to put some of those things in a VM to start and then move them to lambda once breaking even is no longer an issue.
There's a lot more to it than that, and I'm currently supporting ~2000 users on the free plan as well (though I'm phasing that plan out).
Ping is running in 7 regions, has an Elasticsearch cluster for logging, another for the check data itself, thousands of checks running each minute and thousands of alerts running each minute. RDS for the primary store, SES for emails, EC2 for hosting the app itself. Add on extra services such as Baremetrics and these things add up quickly. Run 7 EC2 nodes and you're already well over $250, not to mention the loads in each region are different.
Lambda's pricing is indeed not competitive with VMs right now, but that will go down with FaaS becoming wildly available from other providers. The more important thing to me is that it's close to zero maintenance, no bastions, no AMIs, no provisioning, no third-party monitoring, etc.
If you've ever worked with Elasticsearch you'd also know that it requires a pretty substantial set of resources to function well. I'm happy to over-provision for the beginning if it means providing a better experience. Nothing would be worse than under-provisioning IMO.
From successful bootstrappers in B2B, nearly 100% of the advice that I've gotten is to start without free and add it later as a lead-gen mechanism if it fits your business. Early on customer acquisition is a slog and generally relies on 1:1 conversations often with a pre-existing relationship (in-network). Hopefully feedback from these people help you get close enough to product market fit that outsiders will consider using the product. From there it's a marketing and lead nurturing game where freemium may make sense.
I think it depends greatly on the cost of supporting the free plans, mine just went a little out of control, I was getting ~100 or more users per day. If it was really cheap to support them it might be worth the marketing side of things. And of course for VC backed companies this still looks more attractive than not having the free users at all.
Techcrunch article you refered to, mentioned Instapainting is YC Backed company. Quick look at CrunchBase says "The company is backed by Y Combinator and Start Fund (SV Angel and Yuri Milner)."
I thought the site was about self funded single developers? I am missing something?
There's no rule on the site against having external funding of some sort. It really depends on the circumstances. I wouldn't accept a company that has raised enough money to hire a bunch of people or to spend months building out a complex product full-time, because most indie hackers can't do that.
Chris, however, was working alone when he started Instapainting. His funding had dried up and he was in significant debt. And it only took him 2 days to build and launch his product. So there's a lot there that we can all learn from, and nothing that none of us could do without relying on personal savings and a lot of creativity and hustle.
I am merely asking whether Instapainting was YC Backed company as mentioned in TC Article as reading TC and looking at CrunchBase gives different picture from whats mentioned on Indie Hackers.
Well, some of the ones making that kind of money probably started out as side projects. Obviously once you're making $8.5k/month, you can probably afford to focus on it full-time.
If you're making $8.5k/mo on something without focusing on it full-time, why would you give it more of your time? Just quit your job and enjoy only having to do a "side-project" amount of work to live comfortably.
Granted. It depends on the project though, I think - If you think that by working on it full time, you could get it to a point where you could have to do no work to live comfortably (either by hiring people to do it for you, or by selling it for enough cash to live off for the rest of your life) I'd say do that.
If it's not that kind of business though, I definitely agree - go the Pinboard route and blog about your trips to Antarctica or whatever while doing a minimum of work.
Business is very much a timing/market thing. The money faucet could turn off any day. If you come across easy money you generally want to see if you can turn it in to not so easy but still efficient use of time money in exchange for getting a lot more of it while you can.
If you're comfortable living at a middle class level or just want to travel the world for a couple of years, then this is perfect for you. Do the Tim Ferris thing and just devote the bare minimum of time to it so that it keeps running and generating money - until it doesn't.
If you hope to become rich, then you would be better off either focusing your time into this business so you can grow it 100x+ or use it to cover your bills and to stack some savings while you try to build whatever business you are really passionate about.
If you instead want to get your education (like pursuing advanced degrees) then you can use this to cover your tuition and living expenses while you do so.
Just know that whatever makes you $8500/mo today will probably not keep doing so without some type of conscious effort to acquire new customers, to support current customers, and to either buy out or otherwise stave off competition. All of these require dedicated focus to do correctly. You can either do these yourself or you can hire help to do them for you but someone has to do them if you want your money to keep flowing in.
I'd be interested in learning from founders of full-time businesses that started as side projects, how they made that transition from side project to full-time.
The amount of time you need to spend on a side project to grow probably increases faster than revenue. So inevitably there will be some point in time where your level of effort is much more than what you'd call a side project, yet your revenue is much less than what you'd call a business. I bet that's a frustrating point for many, as you can't just quit your job and stop paying your bills. I'd love to hear creative ways people have gotten past that hump that don't involve mortgaging the house, selling all your possessions and depleting your life savings.
> I'd love to hear creative ways people have gotten past that hump that don't involve mortgaging the house, selling all your possessions and depleting your life savings.
Work as a contractor, rather than full time. That gives you some flexibility in how much time to devote to your side project as it grows.
My upvote won't be visible to others, so I'm also posting to second the above explicitly.
Working independently usually means you have more flexibility in both time and money than you typically get as a regular hours, salaried employee. You can balance how much contract work you take on against what you need to do for your side project. There may well still be a point where you have to give up a relatively large amount of immediate revenue from the (absence of) contract work in return for much less immediate extra revenue for your side business. However, if you think the side business will grow in the future based on that work, you might consider that a worthwhile investment.
Another advantage is that operating independently also usually means you have a contract to work on one specific project. That contract would normally be explicit that things like the IP rights transferred to the client are only those relating to that specific project. In contrast, an employment contract is usually broader, and shady employers often try to include clauses that claim IP rights to pretty much anything the employee ever does, out of hours or otherwise. This is a legal minefield and the effect of those clauses depends on where you are, but in any case the last thing you need if your side project starts to become successful is a dispute with a past employer's lawyers.
So I went to the site in Chrome and tried to back arrow to HN and the site cleaned out the history queue in Chrome. I stopped there. This is bad form in opinion.
Same here. Wasn't sure exactly how (or more importantly, why) it was doing this. Some lame attempt to keep me on the site? Or some misconfigured / misunderstood / improperly-used feature of a web app framework?
Yes, I noticed that as well. Hijacking the back button just makes it look more like a scam than it already appears... Write your own paycheck with this one weird trick! Maybe I'm all wet and this is totally legit, but that's not the experience I've had with people that make sites that do this. Huge red flag.
Sorry! It was a bug due to redirecting from / to /businesses. Therefore clicking the back button would take you to / again, which would automatically redirect to /businesses. I just fixed it by using replaceState. I hadn't tested this before, because I just launched the site and therefore hadn't previously linked to it -- I'd always visited directly.
As a quick tip, I don't think any modern browsers allow a site to wipe out history from previously visited sites. In this case for example two quick hits to the back button should have worked.
You can click and hold the back button to move backward more than one history instance.
Cool project! One forward-looking idea for your site: You could start to incorporate a community platform where people can post side-project ideas, skills they're willing to contribute, skills they're looking for, etc..
I really like this idea, and even signed up for the mailing list. I've been scratching my head for years trying to crack income diversification without a lot of money to begin with. It's good to see some success stories.
193 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadI personally recognize your project's name and remember what it does just by its name, but lately all the Docker orchestration tools seem to do pretty much the same thing. Maybe create a blog post explaining the difference and pros and cons of each one? Case studies maybe?
Best of luck with the project!
If you want to avoid a money pit, I think you can. The trick is to pipe conversion data back to AdWords. This is pretty easy with Google Analytics but also not too bad to set up with any analytics provider.
If you're starting fresh, you will need to spend some money blindly (without the benefit of historic conversion data). But, once you start seeing some conversions, you can use our automated bidding strategies to say "only advertise when you are confident you can drive new users to sign up for less than $X."
My other tip would be to spend some time writing good ads (clear articulation of benefits, use all of the space provided to you, and make at least 5 that can be rotated against each other) and picking good keywords (multi-word as a general rule, and specifically related to your business, not too general and not too competitive).
Finally, call support and say you're new and you'd like help. We have big teams of specialists ready to get new advertisers off on the right foot, because we know that your first couple of weeks are crucial to keeping you. They're actually really good.
- How long did it take to build it?
- How many hours do you put in every week to keep it up?
- How much time do you spend improving it?
- How much time on marketing?
I like it and I have subscribed.
Very useful to see practical working examples of options for passive income in the field. I say passive because I could see myself doing something as a side business.
EDIT: A few people have submitted their businesses since I posted this Show HN, too.
The only thing I would add is how many man hours the project took over what period of time.
I have to click on them and sort of guess if that site took 5hr/week for 10 weeks, or if it took 10 people working 10 hour days for 2 years.
Since you already ask for the tech stack, this would also help launch a dozen "which tech stack is more productive?" studies.
On a final note, I appreciate that you also ask about marketing. Maybe the marketing efforts and man hours can be summarized too?
These are all total ballpark estimates that I made a couple weeks ago: I've used various time-tracking systems but none that give accurate overall time spent. Based on my within-Complice stats though, I can tell you that I've done 2800 tasks towards Complice. That's not very specific, but still kind of a neat figure.
I don't have a good breakdown between programming and marketing time, but I would estimate that 80-90% of my time was spent on things more product-development related. Only 75% of Complice tasks, but the programming tasks are more likely to have been eg 8h working on a single feature.
AWS Lambda on the other hand has been a nice time saver aside from the fact that there weren't any good frameworks available really (with Go support) so I wrote https://github.com/apex/apex.
The site is around 22,000 lines of Ruby code, and has around 80 database tables. Not sure whether that is a normal rate of productivity for most devs, but as my interview explains, I am pushing 50 years old now, so my speed of development and my endurance is nowhere near what it was decades ago.
I did all the front end stuff as well for the public site, and the documentation site and the blog, status page site etc. About the only help I got was my wife to do the voiceover on the explainer video on the web site. (I had to learn After Effects to do the explainer video too).
You seem interested in the tech stacks. I have to say that when people have asked me what they should use I just tell them to go with whatever they are most productive in. Unless you're doing something to try out a tech or you're dependent on an outside system that demands a specific stack I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to learn too many new things while also starting a company. It's hard enough without adding tech concerns.
Patrick's thoughts on this resonate with me: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/763650535727648769
> Record high was $850/mo, record low was $40, with the average month bringing in around $300. Certainly not quit-my-job money, but it helps.
Posting the all-time high instead of the average is a bit off-putting imho, considering it's supposed to represent "paychecks." This is more like getting lucky once. Anyways, haven't read the rest of the stories, and I think it's pretty inspirational. I'd just appreciate more honest revenue reporting on the front page. (It actually says $900/mo, not just $900, so it's not like I'm reading this ambiguously..)
Edit: On second thought, it's not clear to me from the description whether he means that it made $900/mo for some kind of long streak or just one month.
Edit: I'll just note that considering the presence of peaks, probably median would be a better indicator than average. Hell, a whole distribution would be pretty informative lol, but that's probably too much info..
But mean over what period? It's a bit complex.
I think that probably @csallen was using "peak" because some of the projects had since gone defunct and he wanted to count them. Although I think in such cases it would make sense to do an average of the best year or something like that.
For projects like mine (https://complice.co/) which are still growing, "peak" is also weird, because it suggests that... I'm not still growing? I'm not even sure. At any rate, it doesn't make sense to use my average over the last year if my average over the next year is going to be twice as much. Better is probably just the total of my active subscriptions.
He says he's using Lamda, perhaps he should rethink that decision if his overhead is really that high.
Typically base costs are higher when you design for scale vs when you don't. And marginal costs are lower when you design for scale vs when you don't.
And yes, that's obviously a concern, but you can design for profit first and refine for scale. It wouldn't be very difficult to put some of those things in a VM to start and then move them to lambda once breaking even is no longer an issue.
Ping is running in 7 regions, has an Elasticsearch cluster for logging, another for the check data itself, thousands of checks running each minute and thousands of alerts running each minute. RDS for the primary store, SES for emails, EC2 for hosting the app itself. Add on extra services such as Baremetrics and these things add up quickly. Run 7 EC2 nodes and you're already well over $250, not to mention the loads in each region are different.
Lambda's pricing is indeed not competitive with VMs right now, but that will go down with FaaS becoming wildly available from other providers. The more important thing to me is that it's close to zero maintenance, no bastions, no AMIs, no provisioning, no third-party monitoring, etc.
If you've ever worked with Elasticsearch you'd also know that it requires a pretty substantial set of resources to function well. I'm happy to over-provision for the beginning if it means providing a better experience. Nothing would be worse than under-provisioning IMO.
Would you recomend starting something with a free tier and phasing it out if it's not working over charging up front from the beginning?
I can see pros/cons to both sides.
From successful bootstrappers in B2B, nearly 100% of the advice that I've gotten is to start without free and add it later as a lead-gen mechanism if it fits your business. Early on customer acquisition is a slog and generally relies on 1:1 conversations often with a pre-existing relationship (in-network). Hopefully feedback from these people help you get close enough to product market fit that outsiders will consider using the product. From there it's a marketing and lead nurturing game where freemium may make sense.
Advice for B2C would be quite different.
I thought the site was about self funded single developers? I am missing something?
Either way congrats and best wishes.
Chris, however, was working alone when he started Instapainting. His funding had dried up and he was in significant debt. And it only took him 2 days to build and launch his product. So there's a lot there that we can all learn from, and nothing that none of us could do without relying on personal savings and a lot of creativity and hustle.
I am merely asking whether Instapainting was YC Backed company as mentioned in TC Article as reading TC and looking at CrunchBase gives different picture from whats mentioned on Indie Hackers.
Hope the question is not out of line.
If it's not that kind of business though, I definitely agree - go the Pinboard route and blog about your trips to Antarctica or whatever while doing a minimum of work.
If you're comfortable living at a middle class level or just want to travel the world for a couple of years, then this is perfect for you. Do the Tim Ferris thing and just devote the bare minimum of time to it so that it keeps running and generating money - until it doesn't.
If you hope to become rich, then you would be better off either focusing your time into this business so you can grow it 100x+ or use it to cover your bills and to stack some savings while you try to build whatever business you are really passionate about.
If you instead want to get your education (like pursuing advanced degrees) then you can use this to cover your tuition and living expenses while you do so.
Just know that whatever makes you $8500/mo today will probably not keep doing so without some type of conscious effort to acquire new customers, to support current customers, and to either buy out or otherwise stave off competition. All of these require dedicated focus to do correctly. You can either do these yourself or you can hire help to do them for you but someone has to do them if you want your money to keep flowing in.
sideProject.generate(8500,'USD','monthly');
I like the effect when transitioning from grid view to list view. Is that just CSS or is there some Javascript magic doing that?
The amount of time you need to spend on a side project to grow probably increases faster than revenue. So inevitably there will be some point in time where your level of effort is much more than what you'd call a side project, yet your revenue is much less than what you'd call a business. I bet that's a frustrating point for many, as you can't just quit your job and stop paying your bills. I'd love to hear creative ways people have gotten past that hump that don't involve mortgaging the house, selling all your possessions and depleting your life savings.
Got some bad news for you bub
http://imgur.com/a/WdCwm
1. Work as a contractor, rather than full time. That gives you some flexibility in how much time to devote to your side project as it grows.
2. Compete with a Yahoo! property and wait for them to do something stupid.
My upvote won't be visible to others, so I'm also posting to second the above explicitly.
Working independently usually means you have more flexibility in both time and money than you typically get as a regular hours, salaried employee. You can balance how much contract work you take on against what you need to do for your side project. There may well still be a point where you have to give up a relatively large amount of immediate revenue from the (absence of) contract work in return for much less immediate extra revenue for your side business. However, if you think the side business will grow in the future based on that work, you might consider that a worthwhile investment.
Another advantage is that operating independently also usually means you have a contract to work on one specific project. That contract would normally be explicit that things like the IP rights transferred to the client are only those relating to that specific project. In contrast, an employment contract is usually broader, and shady employers often try to include clauses that claim IP rights to pretty much anything the employee ever does, out of hours or otherwise. This is a legal minefield and the effect of those clauses depends on where you are, but in any case the last thing you need if your side project starts to become successful is a dispute with a past employer's lawyers.
You can click and hold the back button to move backward more than one history instance.