let's re-open this topic to see how things are going on this front :)
It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue
I have a project making $200/month, 100% passively (I just renew the domain every couple of years). But I think it would be so dumb to just tell what it is here. Why would you invite more competition to your niche?
For smaller SaaS companies I think this approach is best.
If you have a stable passive income, whether you rely on or not. Why post about in an arena where people have the ability to copy and undercut you easily and threaten your income.
I sometimes find posts like these slightly disingenuous.
Sometimes competitors can be inspirational; they might attack the problem in a way that you don't consider, or they might push out features that suggest to you other things you could offer.
Me? I just wrap Amazon's route53 DNS with some git-magic, so you can host your DNS records in a git repository and make changes via `git push`. It's a simple idea, and yet it is surprisingly popular. https://dns-api.com/
I think it's helpful to know others are having success, even without the details.
That said, I'd love a high-level overview without knowing the niche GP is in. "It's a content site" or "It's a blog reviewing popular products in an Amazon niche" would be helpful without exposing them to undue risk.
Anyone who visits your site (who are more likely to be interested in and knowledgeable about your niche than random people here) could copy it if they wanted to.
By posting here you may increase your traffic/ad revenue, now and/or in the future (not everyone cares about or has the time to rip off every site they see), and you may get some constructive, helpful comments or advice.
Totally your choice, just giving possible benefits.
True, though you don't know if it's worth it anyway until you spend the time to do it. Just because you make $200 with your (established and known) site doesn't guarantee someone else would just by copying it.
I do get your point of view though, and it's fair enough, I just think the risk of someone copying a site they see here (and hurting that site's bottom line) is minimal.
I doubt you're going to copy every site on this page and I know I'm not, and yet they collectively bring in several thousand dollars a month.
Anyway, good luck with your site, whatever it is. :) And to everyone else who posted.
I think these kind of threads are really interesting, mainly just to see the different kinds of sites or apps people are making, but I think they serve as an inspiration for people to create something themselves (not just copy), and I'm glad people are not shy about posting what they're doing.
I saw the previous post as well. I know how it feels having a good idea is not easy. Even people say talk to people and find pain points in their work is easier said than done.
I guess it's partly because we are used to these pain points for a long period of time we don't feel it as a pain point anymore or even though we have a good idea it's not easy to build it as we need lot of capital to do so.
Also even if we have a good idea monetizing is a whole new ball game altogether. Like the chrome extension I'm hacking together on weekends which allows people to search for restaurants around them. I have no idea how I can monetize it and just build it for the challenge of making it.
I think one option is to keep on making cool things. Do something challenging and keep pushing out new things whenever you can. And finally one will stick. I don't think it's easy but if one keep persistent in shipping new things definitely one will become a success.
Like in a similar post I have made like this in the past I remember one commenting, we as HN users believe that everything that we make should be like Airbnb or Uber due to the illusion of success in many startups. But that is not the case and it all comes down to being persistent and enjoying the journey along the way.
> Like the chrome extension I'm hacking together on weekends which allows people to search for restaurants around them. I have no idea how I can monetize it
Have you considered paid promotion by restaurants to be at the top of the list?
Mmm nice idea. I'm wasn't thinking whether restaurants would be willing to pay for something like that. Maybe I should give more thought to it. At the moment I am pulling data from public apis. Maybe I should think more about making a db of my own :)
Digital magazine company. I have thousands of subscribers that pay me $2 / month. I pay royalties to content providers. I work about 10 hours a month on the project.
I run https://uimovement.com/ and it makes just over $1,000 a month from sponsorships and ads most months.
The majority of that is from sponsorships for the weekly newsletter, which has almost 13,000 subscribers now. Currently doing cust dev and what not to see if there are income opportunities that don't involve ads.
I emailed people from companies that I saw had previously sponsored other, similar newsletters (like hacker newseltter) - I'm also making progress by emailing subscribers who work for companies that could be good fits as sponsors. I do need to spend more time finding sponsors though.
I started basically when I stumbled upon a problem myself. https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/
TL;DR: Google disabled my account. So, built an email backup app to not get into this situation again.
I started building the app 4 years ago. I put it on Hacker News and it blew up a tiny bit. That was enough to keep it going until now.
There is still a lot of work I can put into it marketing or coding wise. So far, it's been going well ($800ish). I recently rolled out a UI/UX improvement.
Gotcha. But I must say that not all are savvy enough, a lot of new people are coming to linux fleeing windows. They will need different solutions on linux soon, though there are bigger problems on linux than not having a mail archive browser.
This is brilliant. May I ask you a question? I assume you are not using real team names or real players. If you are using real names, how do you handle the licenses? Sorry, not a baseball enthusiast hence could not figure if your team / player names are real.
This seems like a good idea. Surely you can't be sued for user generated content which uses licensed team/player names.
I had previously mulled over trying to make a fantasy sports site using bitcoin, but since I am based in the US, the gambling laws are too prohibitive, even just using bitcoin.
No, but it runs in Firefox and Chrome on Android, and it'll run on iOS too once Apple releases a good version of Safari or allows competent browser devs to publish better browsers :)
Ah this is cool. I'm thinking about making a passive income sim game for the web. Didn't think of it as a monetizable thing but your experience is changing my mind.
It's a collection of code samples, art and digital book that shows the reader how to make an old-school, Japanese-style RPG. So, it's super niche! I wrote a little about my process here:
There was supposed to be a second part to this article but I haven't written it yet.
It's been over $1000/month very comfortably so far but it is trending down. This isn't uncommon for this type of project - there's often a spike followed by a slow decline.
Still, for the last three months I haven't actively worked on it and it's still sold well. I've moved country and been finding a job (all sorted now), so I haven't had much free time.
I'm not really sure where is good to go after this project. For now I'm building on the base the book introduces, just for fun.
That's really cool. I wonder if you could make some money by doing actual in-person classes. It obviously wouldn't scale as well as a book you write once and release, but you might be able to charge a lot more for in-person education.
This is a good idea, and then potentially classes can be recorded and that would be another product (or special tier). I think this applies equally to other similar products.
I'm using Gumtree for payment and distribution, it's worked very well for me.
As for marketing, I've just replied earlier in the thread with a little more detail.
For a site with tutorials on game development, most of your readers will be using adblocking software. Therefore most popular monetization methods are: selling a book, a course or locking off content behind a paywall.
This blog is about all sorts of tech stuff but he sells his book "Game Programming Patterns" (which is very good!) in the side bar.
http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/
Ah :) I did initially think it might be Gumroad, since Gumtree shows as a free classified ads site. But then thought Gumtree may have a payment and distribution feature too.
I quite enjoy writing them. The ones with a more technical bent get a lot more traffic than the others. 50% of my traffic is organic SEO. I haven't tried ads yet, but it's on my list.
More recently I commissioned some new art that I give away as a mailing list sign-up incentive. This hasn't worked very well so far :) I have to work on the messaging.
Tracking time spent is something I want to do but don't - each article at the very least takes a couple of hours. So there's 100+ hours, done in a very incremental way.
Any interest in doing an interview for https://IndieHackers.com? I'd love to feature your story on the site! I spent many many hours as a kid trying to make my own RPGs, and IH could really use more indie game dev related stuff!
I wonder if there's enough interest to run a webinar on the topic? Or offer a higher tier that gives access to one-on-one with you if they get stuck during the course?
I started Hacker Paradise as a side project in 2014, and now we're a full-time team of 3.
We organize trips around the world for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs who want to work remotely while traveling. People pay us to organize housing, accommodations, and community events wherever we go (past speakers have been CIO of Estonia in Tallin, Matz in Tokyo, etc.).
Happy; to answer questions about running more of an ops business that still is related to tech.
How feasible would it be to do this year round? eg, do the trip schedules always overlap?
At $500-600 per week, one could put their stuff in storage, skip their lease renewal, and put a couple grand a month of rental expense towards this to reduce the overall cost.
My concern with that approach is that I would need to manage any intermediary periods where there was no trip. Shopping for short term housing is kind of annoying, and can be expensive without proper planning. eg, I wouldn't want to go live in a hotel from December 18th to January 7th, the time between the Bali and Argentina trips. I mean, I guess I could arrange to stay with family elsewhere, or grab an airbnb somewhere, but it'd be cool if that was handled too.
I also wouldn't mind seeing a program that stays within the continental US, with easy access to airports. I'm considering a couple of positions, and the more attractive one will require some occasional travel, which is easier to manage if it's not international.
It would be very interesting if they could also exchange teaching/workshops (Scrum/TDD/Cloud etc) for benefits.. ( a night out, dinner, surfing lessons etc.. )
In my experience local (Here in Peru) shops are very interested on learning from foreign developers.
It's been very good to me, but also trending down as people seem to be diversifying from Meteor. Certainly not what I expected when I got into it.
The story for it is a simple one: I solved some of the annoyances during development for myself with by making a devtool, and then open sourced it.
The reaction was very positive and encouraging. Between the opportunity to make more tools, and the downside of having to maintain them, I decided to create paid tier for the tools.
Website background becomes black as soon as I scroll down, making all the text unreadable and the entire site unusable. Chrome 53.0.2785.143 on OS-X 10.11.6
I just updated to 10.11.6 like the original reporter (thanks for that, Apple stopped nagging me I guess?) and still can't reproduce it on my end. Does it do it for either of you in incognito?
Hey thanks for the heads up! This seems to be a bug with the latest version of Chrome. Until I figure it out, please try on an older version or Safari/Firefox.
I clicked the link and it was definitely not obvious how much it cost. I even clicked to add it to Slack and it didn't mention cost or anything. Pretty reasonable question.
cool, id actually been thinking of looking for something like this as we do standups but now with an international team spread across timezones a phone based one isnt really practical
http://getlivead.com and http://chattorney.com. They're different front ends to the same backend. Makes everything from aubscriptions. Not enough to live on as primary income but not shabby either. It has been a long four year road, with a couple of pivots and rewrites, 3 years of attorney's fees for patents but hugely personally rewarding and self-sufficient now.
I liked the idea of getlivead.com and went to the pricing page.
149 for what time period? Hard to sign up like that.
For most people, that is way too much for a tool that only does one niche thing. The thing is, everyone could use that one niche thing every once in a while. You should have a casuals tier with limited use/time for people who have some stuff to sell because they are moving or whatever. Bigger clients could give it a test run and upgrade if they want.
Thanks for the feedback. If you're interested in some of the thought pattern I can give you an abbreviated history. Also, if you're interested I can give you a code to sign up for free.
We started to service attorneys only, but as a clearing house of sorts. Attorney signs up, registers practices and regions, and when a user sends a message in that region/practice, all subscribed attorneys are notified and chat begins. That is challenging from a marketing perspective. So we pivoted to a more simple embeddable chat box, with the core still being web to SMS.
We then tried to expand to include the casual user, hence texttheweb.com and getlivead.com. At the same time, the prices dropped to $5/week or $10/month - thinking craigslist seller.
Fast forward to now and we have resellers - some targeting attorneys, others targeting local professionals (plumbers, electricians, etc). They get funny about pricing and undercutting, so we've basically jacked up the 'published' pricing so the resellers can make some money. It has effectively ended passive web sales, with all sales coming through resellers.
Probably more than you asked for, but figured I'd offer some insight.
I made http://feeder.co, a Chrome extension to simulate Firefox's RSS live bookmarks back in 2010. Now it has 500,000 active installs on Chrome and our cloud hosted service is netting around 1500 USD each month after costs (1700 subscriptions).
Me and my twin brother have had it as a passive income thingie for years. After a failed attempt at selling it (SaaS metrics are NOT easy) we met a guy who saw some potential and we're finalizing paperwork with our lawyer to create a Swedish limited company right now with him as co-founder. We will try to take the plunge and get it running as a full time company within a couple of years!
Achieving a lifestyle passive income project is surprisingly hard...
I doubt the value of feeder today is such that it's worth selling off... We're trying to grow everything, user-base, product, revenue, and are still figuring a lot of things out. If you wanna talk about it some more, my email is erik@feeder.co
I just want to let you know that I've been a feeder user for maybe 3 years now, and I've really enjoyed it. The new Android beta app is pretty sweet so far.
Thanks for giving me a simple place to go after Google Reader shutdown!
You can either sell your users data (we get a lot offers for that...). It is not scalable and does not feel good in the tummy. We've been approached by fairly large reputable companies wanting click stream data, and smaller companies wanting everything from DNS misses to adding affiliate links in webpages. These are not good for your users and will not scale. Also Google is constantly cracking down on these schemes and rightfully banning extensions that do this. It hurts the rest of us.
We're focusing on building a great product and a scalable business. Making money from our users should be off something that benefits them as well, like a pro service with more features.
Our servers are costing us around 600 usd per month, Linode and AWS. Here is a screenshot of Linode manager and AWS billing console: http://imgur.com/a/UUQ65. The names of the servers perhaps give it away, but we use redis for message passing, 4 servers that crawl around 100 000 feeds every 10 minutes, 2 cassandra databases storing posts, 1 mega MySQL database for metadata and users (post lists, unread post lists, etc). AWS for SES (e-mail notifications) and S3 (extremely cheap key value store for large items, post contents).
Edit: Oh, and after a really bad downtime we're paying for pingdom and statuspage.io. So our total expenses are now probably around 1000 USD per month. Braintree and PayPal also take around 5%-19% of each payment.
Wow didn't expect to see you here! I've been a paying customer for years (though I had a paying hiatus when a iOS app update left many of my blogs poorly rendered). I had no idea it was just a side project. Keep up the good work.
Wow! Thanks, cool to hear. We're really trying to improve our communication and get our shit together. If you're still a user, or want to talk, we're listening at support@feeder.co.
I've launched Sentopia (https://www.sentopia.net) as a side project and it is still easily making over 1K with just 2 medium sized clients but it is not passive income, requires some maintenance & customer support but still very much worth it.
I built my side project "Documentation Hub for Developers" DocsApp.io (https://www.docsapp.io/). I spent 1 year+ to build it. Current revenue around $800 per month. Now I still spending night time and weekends to enhance it. HTTPS for custom domain powered by LetsEncrypt is on roadmap.
The project started because there is always need for documentation for software projects (in my career), and a lot companies are not used to have one. At the same time, I want to learn Scala so I pick up Play! framework to play and build real world app.
I'm one of the cocreators of readthedocs.org, in the interests of improving this free platform, what features does docsapp provide that aren't available on rtd?
One of the features I think RTD missing is DocsApp support upload swagger.yml file and auto generate API browser (https://demo.docsapp.io/docs/swagger-api) as well as API Tester (soon).
Another one is DocsApp is using markdown editor instead of pulling docs from SCM (git). Which good for users that do not know to use git.
I created pro version of my ruby gem for test suite parallelisation https://knapsackpro.com I released it last year but started validating it by charging users since July this year. $1K/month is my goal by the end of this year, so far I'm halfway there.
I made two TypeScript videos for Pluralsight ("ES6 with TypeScript" and "Practical TypeScript Migration"). I put them together in the evenings and weekends using the knowledge I got at my day job and from working on TypeScript open source projects like grunt-ts (and a lot of research).
It was a lot of work, but it's a great passive income now that they're done, and I'm quite proud of how they turned out. The Pluralsight authors are a great professional network to be plugged-in with, and being an author is a pretty unique differentiator on your resume.
I record on Windows using Visual Studio and Atom with the atom-typescript extension. I recorded the video using Camtasia and bought a nice mic with a pop-screen and boom arm (Rhode podcaster USB). It was about $600 for the Mic and Camtasia. (Note I made this investment back easily and I have it forever now). Camtasia includes all of the video and audio editing capabilities required for Pluralsight, but I also used Audacity to do some of the audio editing because there was a nice compressor plugin that another author recommended. PowerPoint is required for the slides. Many authors use Macs and Keynote and similar software is fine - they just take mp4 files as the final deliverable.
I prefer not to say exactly, but it's enough to post on this thread and also enough that I'm considering making another one. Their top authors make serious money.
They're interlinked. I've found that when I make more sales on my project, I'm motivated to do more work. Then when there's a lull, I think "I need to give up and start a new project". Money's a powerful motivator - if anything because it proves people really want your work.
Being able to successfully ship things is a useful muscle to develop. People who can program radically overestimate where the bar is for being able to charge money for things. (And underestimate how much money businesses pay for just about everything.)
If you haven't heard, patio11 is the original creator of Bingo Card Creator [1], which is both an excellent example for your purposes, and as a bonus he's helpfully shared many useful lessons from it on his blog [2].
People who can program radically overestimate where the bar is for being able to charge
Very late response here just to second what Patrick said, but...
My latest anecdote to reinforce this is the person who wanted to pay me for the Arduino software I wrote for him in about 5 minutes, but I declined (that's on the order of the amount of help I give out on the internets for free). Not kidding: being generous, it took a grand total of 5 minutes including firing up the editor, while grumbling about how much overkill an Arduino was for the task...
It really is about providing value. He has a $250,000 machine sitting idle a lot of the time and that 10 minutes of code reduced the idle time so he could get more utilization out of it.
Phase 2 is figuring out how many other people have a similar problem and finding them...
I've started to create a side project with the sole purpose of generating extra revenue. Why do you see it as a sin? If you make just enough with your day job I would understand but just leave alone those who are savvy enough to grab some extra cash.
I don't see it as a sin, or anything. It just kind of never occurred to me to do it. I mean, I've never made a side project worth anything, but if I did, I wouldn't have sold it. Not because of principles, just because I didn't think of doing it.
Sorry then, your comment sounded like it :) I have only built one service like that, a torrent meta search engine. I haven't made any serious money, but it did buy me a nice laptop in 2009.
Now, after two failed startups I scaled back my ambitions/expectations. Best way to happiness :)
You might be surprised. I put together a tool to help my kids design an art project one weekend 4 years ago, and google indexed it, traffic came, I added Amazon links, and it has brought in just under 100 a month for a few years now. Nothing major, but sometimes the little things add up.
What do side projects that make income tend to have in common? When I hear about people's side projects or read them here, I'm not certain what the lessons are. I personally do side projects just for fun but heck if interest/passion could somehow be directed toward money making side projects that were good for the world then i'd direct my energy toward those. Possibly. It's a good thought exercise everyone should at least consider, can a hobby be monetized without fucking up the reason you loved it in the first place? Can it be done in a way that makes it less like your day job, so to speak?
They solve a small problem most startuppers / entrepreneurs would not jump on because the market is so small (or at least they think it's too small).
They don't want to change the world, just make it a tiny bit better.
> Can it be done in a way that makes it less like your day job, so to speak?
Of course, just do things when you feel like it to do, no stress, no pressure.
If you haven't already seen IndieHackers, it's worth taking a look -- lots of stories about side projects and their associated incomes: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
I tried releasing an iOS sticker pack app that had an actual use case (allowing you to markup and annotate iMessage conversations). I was hoping would give some passive income. Had a good first day and then dropped off a cliff.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadIf you have a stable passive income, whether you rely on or not. Why post about in an arena where people have the ability to copy and undercut you easily and threaten your income.
I sometimes find posts like these slightly disingenuous.
Me? I just wrap Amazon's route53 DNS with some git-magic, so you can host your DNS records in a git repository and make changes via `git push`. It's a simple idea, and yet it is surprisingly popular. https://dns-api.com/
But for people with many domains there are deals to be had so haggling is always an option ;)
That said, I'd love a high-level overview without knowing the niche GP is in. "It's a content site" or "It's a blog reviewing popular products in an Amazon niche" would be helpful without exposing them to undue risk.
By posting here you may increase your traffic/ad revenue, now and/or in the future (not everyone cares about or has the time to rip off every site they see), and you may get some constructive, helpful comments or advice.
Totally your choice, just giving possible benefits.
I do get your point of view though, and it's fair enough, I just think the risk of someone copying a site they see here (and hurting that site's bottom line) is minimal.
I doubt you're going to copy every site on this page and I know I'm not, and yet they collectively bring in several thousand dollars a month.
Anyway, good luck with your site, whatever it is. :) And to everyone else who posted.
I think these kind of threads are really interesting, mainly just to see the different kinds of sites or apps people are making, but I think they serve as an inspiration for people to create something themselves (not just copy), and I'm glad people are not shy about posting what they're doing.
I guess it's partly because we are used to these pain points for a long period of time we don't feel it as a pain point anymore or even though we have a good idea it's not easy to build it as we need lot of capital to do so.
Also even if we have a good idea monetizing is a whole new ball game altogether. Like the chrome extension I'm hacking together on weekends which allows people to search for restaurants around them. I have no idea how I can monetize it and just build it for the challenge of making it.
I think one option is to keep on making cool things. Do something challenging and keep pushing out new things whenever you can. And finally one will stick. I don't think it's easy but if one keep persistent in shipping new things definitely one will become a success.
Like in a similar post I have made like this in the past I remember one commenting, we as HN users believe that everything that we make should be like Airbnb or Uber due to the illusion of success in many startups. But that is not the case and it all comes down to being persistent and enjoying the journey along the way.
Have you considered paid promotion by restaurants to be at the top of the list?
I would look into something like the OpenTable affiliate program.
I'm wondering how you can find good content cheap enough to be profitable at $2/month.
The majority of that is from sponsorships for the weekly newsletter, which has almost 13,000 subscribers now. Currently doing cust dev and what not to see if there are income opportunities that don't involve ads.
How did you determine the pricing for sponsorships? Is there a good guide out there?
We're looking at possibly adding sponsorships to the https://rubythursday.com/ newsletter next year.
I started building the app 4 years ago. I put it on Hacker News and it blew up a tiny bit. That was enough to keep it going until now.
There is still a lot of work I can put into it marketing or coding wise. So far, it's been going well ($800ish). I recently rolled out a UI/UX improvement.
Its 4 year anniversary is in 2 days. :)
I feel like Linux users are tech savvy enough to use open source scripts like Gmvault etc.
I must think about Windows however.
A lot of similar games simply ignore the law and pray they don't get sued (or that the publicity from a lawsuit would actually be good).
But I do have support for uploading custom leagues, and people have made them with various real leagues like the NBA https://github.com/alexnoob/BasketBall-GM-Rosters/releases/t... and the Philippine Basketball Association http://www.mediafire.com/file/1e8cq2l3rrndln5/PBA-GM-2016.tx...
I had previously mulled over trying to make a fantasy sports site using bitcoin, but since I am based in the US, the gambling laws are too prohibitive, even just using bitcoin.
Probably not but I think they might be able to send a DMCA notice.
My side project is: "How to Make an RPG" (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/) which I released in June.
It's a collection of code samples, art and digital book that shows the reader how to make an old-school, Japanese-style RPG. So, it's super niche! I wrote a little about my process here:
https://medium.com/@DanSchuller/my-first-side-project-part-1...
There was supposed to be a second part to this article but I haven't written it yet.
It's been over $1000/month very comfortably so far but it is trending down. This isn't uncommon for this type of project - there's often a spike followed by a slow decline.
Still, for the last three months I haven't actively worked on it and it's still sold well. I've moved country and been finding a job (all sorted now), so I haven't had much free time.
I'm not really sure where is good to go after this project. For now I'm building on the base the book introduces, just for fun.
How did you market your site
I have also gaming how to site that I plan to monotize but not sure how
Www.gamedevcraft.com
Any tips ?
As for marketing, I've just replied earlier in the thread with a little more detail.
For a site with tutorials on game development, most of your readers will be using adblocking software. Therefore most popular monetization methods are: selling a book, a course or locking off content behind a paywall.
Here's an example of premium content: http://aigamedev.com/premium/interview/dying-light/
Here's an example where the author sells the source code for his articles http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/
This blog is about all sorts of tech stuff but he sells his book "Game Programming Patterns" (which is very good!) in the side bar. http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/
Congrats on your work.
http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-build-a-...
I wrote it before starting the book (to test the waters) and had a link to sign-up to the mailing list. I used mailchimp for email collection.
I have ~50 articles related to gamedev on the same domain, so these get organic SEO and backlinks:
http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/
I quite enjoy writing them. The ones with a more technical bent get a lot more traffic than the others. 50% of my traffic is organic SEO. I haven't tried ads yet, but it's on my list.
More recently I commissioned some new art that I give away as a mailing list sign-up incentive. This hasn't worked very well so far :) I have to work on the messaging.
Tracking time spent is something I want to do but don't - each article at the very least takes a couple of hours. So there's 100+ hours, done in a very incremental way.
Why you didn't go with eBooks publishers ?
Also how long it take you to write the book ?
In the payments can you tell how much percentage are using payapl ?
Thanks!
We organize trips around the world for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs who want to work remotely while traveling. People pay us to organize housing, accommodations, and community events wherever we go (past speakers have been CIO of Estonia in Tallin, Matz in Tokyo, etc.).
Happy; to answer questions about running more of an ops business that still is related to tech.
Here's our main site: www.hackerparadise.org
Here's a blog post with some of our marketing experiments: http://www.hackerparadise.org/blog/2015/05/06/marketing-less...
What would you like to know more about?
At $500-600 per week, one could put their stuff in storage, skip their lease renewal, and put a couple grand a month of rental expense towards this to reduce the overall cost.
My concern with that approach is that I would need to manage any intermediary periods where there was no trip. Shopping for short term housing is kind of annoying, and can be expensive without proper planning. eg, I wouldn't want to go live in a hotel from December 18th to January 7th, the time between the Bali and Argentina trips. I mean, I guess I could arrange to stay with family elsewhere, or grab an airbnb somewhere, but it'd be cool if that was handled too.
I also wouldn't mind seeing a program that stays within the continental US, with easy access to airports. I'm considering a couple of positions, and the more attractive one will require some occasional travel, which is easier to manage if it's not international.
See this page from a Heli ski operator which specifically markets trips to doctors: http://www.canadianmountainholidays.com/heli-skiing/special-...
Basically throw in some education or networking and your trip is all the sudden 50% off!
In my experience local (Here in Peru) shops are very interested on learning from foreign developers.
It's been very good to me, but also trending down as people seem to be diversifying from Meteor. Certainly not what I expected when I got into it.
The story for it is a simple one: I solved some of the annoyances during development for myself with by making a devtool, and then open sourced it.
The reaction was very positive and encouraging. Between the opportunity to make more tools, and the downside of having to maintain them, I decided to create paid tier for the tools.
Made a quick screencast showing the problem:
http://ded.ninja/meteortoys/meteor_toys-website_problem1.mp4
(and yeah, I haven't bothered to set up https on that box ;>)
Update - Same problem happens with all 3 browser extensions disabled. (https everywhere, ublock origin, privacy badger)
I migrated my side project away from Meteor and write about why and how: http://stories.remotebase.io/post/rewriting-without-meteor/
How does it make money?
Curious if they've tried other pricing models. Beyond, say, 10 or 20 users the value proposition shifts against that pricing model IMO.
FYI, you have a typo in the FAQ: "Can I change the time I get asked for an update?". I think "change my time" should be "change my settings".
How did you promote your bot? Just through the Slack store?
149 for what time period? Hard to sign up like that.
For most people, that is way too much for a tool that only does one niche thing. The thing is, everyone could use that one niche thing every once in a while. You should have a casuals tier with limited use/time for people who have some stuff to sell because they are moving or whatever. Bigger clients could give it a test run and upgrade if they want.
We started to service attorneys only, but as a clearing house of sorts. Attorney signs up, registers practices and regions, and when a user sends a message in that region/practice, all subscribed attorneys are notified and chat begins. That is challenging from a marketing perspective. So we pivoted to a more simple embeddable chat box, with the core still being web to SMS.
We then tried to expand to include the casual user, hence texttheweb.com and getlivead.com. At the same time, the prices dropped to $5/week or $10/month - thinking craigslist seller.
Fast forward to now and we have resellers - some targeting attorneys, others targeting local professionals (plumbers, electricians, etc). They get funny about pricing and undercutting, so we've basically jacked up the 'published' pricing so the resellers can make some money. It has effectively ended passive web sales, with all sales coming through resellers.
Probably more than you asked for, but figured I'd offer some insight.
Me and my twin brother have had it as a passive income thingie for years. After a failed attempt at selling it (SaaS metrics are NOT easy) we met a guy who saw some potential and we're finalizing paperwork with our lawyer to create a Swedish limited company right now with him as co-founder. We will try to take the plunge and get it running as a full time company within a couple of years!
Achieving a lifestyle passive income project is surprisingly hard...
Thanks for giving me a simple place to go after Google Reader shutdown!
Then, the user, in fact, pays only for using the back-end API. The front-end, of course, is like a website, """open-source""".
We're focusing on building a great product and a scalable business. Making money from our users should be off something that benefits them as well, like a pro service with more features.
Then we have additional costs of http://chartmogul.com (love. required to know your SaaS metrics) http://intercom.io/ (love love love, awesome product).
Edit: Oh, and after a really bad downtime we're paying for pingdom and statuspage.io. So our total expenses are now probably around 1000 USD per month. Braintree and PayPal also take around 5%-19% of each payment.
This year we're launching new features and a simple API: (https://sentopia.net/apidoc/)
The project started because there is always need for documentation for software projects (in my career), and a lot companies are not used to have one. At the same time, I want to learn Scala so I pick up Play! framework to play and build real world app.
Happy to answer any questions!
Another one is DocsApp is using markdown editor instead of pulling docs from SCM (git). Which good for users that do not know to use git.
DocsApp also support generate Github release page (https://demo.docsapp.io/docs/github-release) so users able to download artifacts without leaving DocsApp.
PS: I never use RTD so I might wrong.
It was a lot of work, but it's a great passive income now that they're done, and I'm quite proud of how they turned out. The Pluralsight authors are a great professional network to be plugged-in with, and being an author is a pretty unique differentiator on your resume.
I'm going to put together a third course soon.
They're always looking for new authors. https://www.pluralsight.com/teach
...Assuming that I ever finish a side project.
...And that I ever come up with a side project somebody would pay for.
Neither is very likely.
I might get sued for selling one, and nobody would pay for either, especially given how many implementations of both are free.
But yes, I should work on shipping code.
[1] https://www.bingocardcreator.com/ [2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
Very late response here just to second what Patrick said, but...
My latest anecdote to reinforce this is the person who wanted to pay me for the Arduino software I wrote for him in about 5 minutes, but I declined (that's on the order of the amount of help I give out on the internets for free). Not kidding: being generous, it took a grand total of 5 minutes including firing up the editor, while grumbling about how much overkill an Arduino was for the task...
It really is about providing value. He has a $250,000 machine sitting idle a lot of the time and that 10 minutes of code reduced the idle time so he could get more utilization out of it.
Phase 2 is figuring out how many other people have a similar problem and finding them...
Now, after two failed startups I scaled back my ambitions/expectations. Best way to happiness :)
They don't want to change the world, just make it a tiny bit better.
> Can it be done in a way that makes it less like your day job, so to speak? Of course, just do things when you feel like it to do, no stress, no pressure.
Link: https://appsto.re/us/zMHnfb.i?app=messages