I co-founded a childcare management software business here in Canada. We now have customers in both US and Canada. We were on IndieHackers a few months ago.[0]
Our main product is KidGenius[1] that helps childcare centres run their day to day operations as well as connect with parents. Becoming a bit of a crowded space but we are doing what we can to rise to the top.
Have you been worried about taxation? I've always been reluctant to purchase bitcoins, because exchanges don't send 1099s... so I'm wondering how everyone is doing this so frequently. Any advice?
Started https://dotlayer.com like 2 years ago, it was initially called wpzoan, I started it when my friends would message me about issues they were facing with WordPress, at that time I totally hated WordPress, I guess that was the developer in me. But I later saw all the issues people were facing and it's worked out well.
So how does this work. Do I give your anonymous "expert" access to my server for them to do the fix? Or do I provide database and codebase dumps? Where is the security in your service to not have my code stolen along the way?
Also, using Brave browser on Android, I get a stack of Zeroes on your landing page for "Tasks Completed"... Pretty sure that's a bug or a fail as a selling point. Glad you got a project going and generating revenue!
I can see this being a nice little side project. I work with a bunch of people that camp and in my province (Alberta) we have a rolling reserve window. People will book a campsite for a week prior to their intended trip just so they can get a spot. Provincial parks have since put an end to it by forcing someone to occupy the site within the first 24hrs or they cancel your entire reservation. It's cut throat here.
I'm really surprised how popular it has become. Reserving 11 months in advance leads to a lot of plans being canceled and sites popping up at random times.
True. In AB it's a 3 month rolling window I believe. People will sell their reservation online if they can't make it rather than outright cancel it. Perhaps a new feature for your site? Rental sales (?)...or sub-rentals? Not sure what you would call that :)
Awesome tool. But I wish your site monitored Zion NP. One of the busiest parks in the US. I can never score a campsite, and the first-come ones fill up by 7am.
Just throwing this out that you should definitely include the park name in the search. I would have never thought of that. I just checked recreation.gov API and it has all that info there. Moreover, if a park has multiple campsites you could include all monitoring in that search.
Well done. I was talking to a colleague earlier this week about creating something similar for WA. We have the exact same problem with reservation windows being several months in advance and cancellations popping up.
I wasn't aware of ReserveAmerica. I always go straight to state or national parks sites to reserve.
What's the differentiator between what wanderinglabs offers vs. reserve america - pull checks & notifications?
Interesting premium payment options. Can you share a rough breakdown of what people have paid? Do you think if you made the low end $5/$15 it would change revenue much?
I'd say 90+% of the people pay the lowest option of $10. I doubt lower would bring in many more people. I have a rewrite about ready with the amounts being radio button with the non lowest amount selected. I be this brings in a little more per person without a big drop of in count.
I made ~500 euro a month by running ads on my a visualization website[1] I made a few years back (in a weekend). I've earned that until a month ago, when I changed the Google AdSense ads to a static ad (which I don't get commission for).
I offer web publishers a stack that enables client-side removal of programmatic ads when users pay a small subscription fee. Lots of law blogs, economics blogs, etc., are using this now. [1]
This is an awesome project, nice job! If you don't mind sharing, how did you land your first few law/economics blog customers? Seems like they might be a tough market to get into. Do you run into onboarding issues with them around the script setup?
One small nitpick - your three section links in the header ("How it Works", "Analytics", "Why Publir") need a "cursor: pointer;" rule on them.
To be honest, my partner and I just made a Sheets doc of all the blogs we read, and emailed the writers (usually professors) letting them know that they can give their readers a fair way "out" of the ad ecosystem. They loved it.
Figuring out how to remove ads client-side while not getting the site "charged" for policy violations by the ad networks was tough, though.
I've cut my expenses and invested the extra in index funds. Currently at a nest egg of around $300k which spews off dividends of around $500/month and is currently appreciating a bit faster than that.
30, ~125k household income for two adults no kids, IT and teacher. Our income made it a little easier to get here but the $200k hole of combined student loans we started with (now fully paid off) probably counters that pretty evenly.
I'll be honest I'm glossing over some details about house refinancing and sales etc. About 40k of it was gains from a house. I'll give you that. About 75k of the 300k is investment gains. Income has remained pretty stable over that time (when I got a raise, my wife worked less or went back to school etc) and we started at that income level right out of college at 22 years old. So of the 500k, 115k is gains, so $375k is contributions/debt payment. In the 8 years since graduating that would be ~$45k/year. $125k-45k= $80k in taxes and spending per year for two people which isn't hard at all. Lived in DC for a year then moved to Denver.
Interesting off-topic: considering your current income (salary), do you think $200K college was worth it? I believe you could command same amount with a degree from free/state/cheap university, no?
At this point, of the 300k, about 225k is from contributions (savings) and 75k is from gains. The bigger the account gets though, the bigger a percentage the gains will be as the account grows faster than my annual income does.
You aren't investing it well then. This year S&P has gone up something like 20% (thank you, Donald). From 300k that would net you 60k which is 5K/mo. All you'd need to do is rebalance into VOO.
it's not possible to decide if something was a good decision or not by looking at realised performance over a short time scale.
having a portfolio that is entirely concentrated in the S&P will have less risk adjusted expected reward than one that allocates a bit in some other buckets as well (e.g. international shares). c.f. the book "random walk down wall street".
It's very hard to outdo index funds. Even Warren Buffet said as much. My personal observation over the last decade confirms it. I also trade individual stocks in industries where I understand the underlying trends, and those do outperform s&p, but I'm very much aware that betting the wrong way could instantly undo those gains. Index funds are much safer.
It makes money from domain name registrations it refers via affiliate links.
I've been playing with the idea of adding "pro" features for a couple of years now but I worry anything that detracts from its simplicity may hurt sales.
I didn't know of your site. Very cool and useful idea. I just tried it for 'boxing' and your suggestion engine came up with quite a few .com name that are still available!
The domain suggestion engine was a fun component. It's not all that complicated... it really just tries a bunch of prefixes and suffixes on your keyword (plus some geo suggestions, if it can "find" you) and shows you what is (probably) available.
Planning a 'Show HN' on this as we get closer to the season, but I built a model for Fantasy Football that works pretty well and has done over $500 this month. Takes into account correlations across same-opposing team players to give a slight edge.
Ha, I think it's a really good pick axe though. That is a good analogy for Daily Fantasy Sports though, where you do weekly games and tournaments ect to win real money. My model has some very useful features that might make it valuable there, but the sites take anywhere from 6-8% off the top, so yeah, on average when it comes to Daily Fantasy, selling pick axes certainly has a higher EV than actually playing yourself.
I built https://www.parrotqa.com/ because overseeing non-deterministic selenium tests at my day job was such a hassle. It turned into a small (around $1k/mo) side project.
How did the rights for that work out? If I were an employee when I built a tool to solve a problem like that I would expect the employer to own it. Can you talk to how that conversation went?
It's been a very interesting process dealing with building the app, marketing it, and dealing with support. The app is $19/mo for regular Shopify stores, and we have about 700+ total customers (only some are paying). We get A LOT of support requests for misc things and have been trying to build up a knowledge base of articles and help guides in our ZenDesk.
We have recently been running into an issue with file hosting storage fees (we allow people to upload files, no additional charge). We have a couple of Shopify stores that are costing us about $70/mo each in file hosting fees (we don't charge them extra).
I absolutely LOVE building apps for 3rd party providers. We don't really market the app, it's found organically in Shopify's app store. The first 8 months were filled with lots of little bugs needing fixing, but that has since slowed down as I've fixed things. At this point, it's a pretty stable application that doesn't require much maintenance, mostly just user support.
Well done! A few years ago I assumed it was way too late to get into selling Shopify apps. I am glad to have been proved wrong, and you have me re-evaluating some newer marketplaces I presume to be mature.
Shopify seems to be booming.. I hope they do, I have some stock in them, and of course, the app. I may end up doing more apps in the future, but their app store is just going to get more flooded, more competition, etc. Sooner the better, gotta get your foot in the door.
We probably get like 20-30 support tickets per month now (we used to get about 50 per month). It can be a drain as neither I, nor my business partner really want to deal with it. We haven't hired anyone to deal with it yet... The issues we get requests on now are more like really technical issues that take a while to debug and write up the solution.
I think it's the easiest way. Creating your own app or service from scratch, marketing it, and retaining users long-term is nearly impossible (seems like). All of those problems are solved by integrating with a 3rd party.. Granted, that has it's own risks and limitations, but seems worth it for small side projects.
Aside from building out new features, which I'm not in the middle of, I don't spend time on the app. My business partner handles support which is currently around 20-30 tickets per month. This is a side thing for us, we try to just let the app run without playing around with it too much.
Shopify Apps can be largely just API calls using any language/framework you'd like, or you can use their Embedded App SDK which is more JS-heavy. I built the Custom Fields app with Drupal 8 and PHP 7. I chose that stack because that's what we work with on a daily basis as a web-dev agency.
Nice! I have a similar but much younger / smaller site for comic books. I would love to hear what you did to pay your early contributors, as right now it's just me, and I think that's the next step. I have no issue finding writers, but I'm not sure what I should pay them, how I should structure that relationship, or if there's any legal stuff I should look out for.
My main startup [1] launched a side project called Read Across The Aisle [2] earlier this year. Even though the iOS app and Chrome extension app are free, we've actually seen several thousand come in through donations and whatnot.
Lots of traffic comes from Google, since we are apparently the first result for "read WSJ free" (we have a partnership with the WSJ that gives free access through our tools).
I wrote an in-browser CAD tool for theater lighting and sound design: https://drafty-app.com/. I have a partner who does that for a living. We've just hired (part time, 5-10h/wk) a tester and a salesperson.
StatusGator aggregates the public service status pages for all the cloud services you use. You can get automatic notifications when services go down and up, and you can query the service status from things like Slack.
Out of interest, what made you choose the fixed-price tiers? $80/mo is a big jump to go from 30 to 31 services. What made you rule out pricing per service?
I'd recommend you create a blog where you write interesting posts on different trends, analysis, etc. from all the data you're collecting. I'd be interested to know if current events drive the frequency of certain book recommendations in different forums. This will help bring people to the site, build links to improve SEO, etc. Also, make the email capture more prominent.
Thank you so much for your advise, this is a great idea! we are currently busy on cleaning up the data.(comics books) we want to keep our focus on tech related books. After that we will be creating more analysis to the community. stay tuned.
I've been working on https://kernl.us for a little over 2 years now.
It's currently making $650 / month and growing.
Something I "knew" but never really understood about growing a business is how long it can take. Granted this is completely on the side, but it still takes a long time to find your market, grow, get customers, etc. Learning that this is actually a marathon was valuable.
The other thing I have to actively manage is building things that are valuable -vs- things that I find interesting. As a developer I LOVE tinkering with new technology, but when I'm wearing my business hat upgrading to the new hot frontend framework doesn't make that much sense.
I make over 700$ per month through patreon for my open source work, primarily https://github.com/ory/hydra . Hydra started as a side project for a work-for-hire project. After getting bashed by people for it being trash (it was, mostly due to bad dependencies but also due to bad architecture), I rewrote it (and the libraries enabling it) and now it's one of the go-to services for getting an OAuth2 server up and running. I am very stubborn and spent a ton of time on auth* questions while building other projects, and it seems like people like my approaches to it! :)
It's come so far now that I'm starting to consider this my full-time thing (I'm in the final stages of completing my MSc computer science) and I'm currently running evaluation on an API security platform based on that technology. Basically, I spend most of my time on it and I even got a small team helping me - but it's not what earns my living at the moment.
Before that I gathered a lot of experience from running and building https://en.serlo.org/ which is basically a Wikipedia for learning (I built the whole CMS from scratch) that serves over 1m MAUs in Germany (the english page is very sparse, most of it is on https://de.serlo.org ) and is thus on the most popular learning platforms in Germany. The company behind it is an NGO (= no profits) I cofounded and the platform is ad-free and doesn't cost anything. We get money through donations and other funds.
It's an exciting journey, I'm now at a point where I need to figure out how to actually make money on the web that doesn't come through donations and goodwill, but I think I can do it - why not, right?
By the way, you may also like the WYSIWYG editor I wrote - I also plan a static site generator based on it with a themeforest-y market place. Feel free to check those out:
ps: It took me almost 2 years to get to 700$ at patreon and most of it comes from one sponsorship I'm very glad of. Their CTO texted me one day because he saw hydra on HN frontpage and he works in the identity space.
Working on https://apibot.co, a testing and monitoring tool for REST APIs.
Many of our customers come from word of mouth plus talking to people. Its been very interesting to see the kind of tests that people built with our tool.
We're still technically in BETA although sales are going slow but smoothly. Send me a message if you are interested (fernandohur at apibot.co).
Soaring (gliding) weather forecasts for EU/NA/SA/AU. My side project has now become my main gig. Took approximately 3 years to build, 2 before I started making any money from it.
Basically a one-stop shop for fall festivals, Oktoberfest, haunted houses, pumpkin patches, etc. Still have a long way to go to make it what I would like but traffic last year was roughly 1 million in the month of October. Anticipate it will double to 2 million/October this year. Still working on the right revenue model.
There's something to be said for seasonal niches. It seems to me there's a bit of a reset in terms of search rankings that can mitigate the authority bigger players may have. Do you find that be true?
I could talk about the SEO behind it for days but:
We did use the reset to our advantage to pick up rankings, but I don't think it mitigates the authority of bigger players much. The reset tends to wash out small-time players in the space and bigger players who can't niche effectively more so than it does committed players. Now that I have traffic, I don't worry too much that we are going to get bounced in the reset. I am much more worried that someone will beat us with better content for the next year. Everfest is another startup that I have seen that appears to have pretty much conquered the reset at this point.
Funtober had a very hard time displacing a couple mid-sized players in some of our seasonal niches that were established. Even with the reset, it can take years for their information to become truly out of date and people to look for alternatives. There are also a few things that they can do to keep their information current with little effort. We're just about even now with two in particular that I have in mind, but it took 5 years to get there.
Black Friday would be an obvious example of an area where the reset should be biggest if your theory is true. I think the players there have been pretty consistent and my internal estimate is that even with the reset it will take 5+ years to crack it.
251 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadOur main product is KidGenius[1] that helps childcare centres run their day to day operations as well as connect with parents. Becoming a bit of a crowded space but we are doing what we can to rise to the top.
0 - https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/kidgenius
1 - https://kidgenius.daycareiq.com/
http://reserve.wanderinglabs.com/
Currently working on integrating the new CA reserve website. It is a shit show.
Currently available in B.C., Ontario, and Washington State. Now adding national parks in Canada.
I wasn't aware of ReserveAmerica. I always go straight to state or national parks sites to reserve.
What's the differentiator between what wanderinglabs offers vs. reserve america - pull checks & notifications?
[1] https://blocks.wizb.it/
Strong network effect so far, about 65k users
[1] https://subscriptions.publir.com/
One small nitpick - your three section links in the header ("How it Works", "Analytics", "Why Publir") need a "cursor: pointer;" rule on them.
Figuring out how to remove ads client-side while not getting the site "charged" for policy violations by the ad networks was tough, though.
having a portfolio that is entirely concentrated in the S&P will have less risk adjusted expected reward than one that allocates a bit in some other buckets as well (e.g. international shares). c.f. the book "random walk down wall street".
https://namevine.com/
It makes money from domain name registrations it refers via affiliate links.
I've been playing with the idea of adding "pro" features for a couple of years now but I worry anything that detracts from its simplicity may hurt sales.
As for a pro feature - I think that notification when something becomes available or a domain/account marketplace might be useful.
What would be an example of the notification you're thinking of here? Like domains matching a keyword? Or a specific one?
The idea of a marketplace definitely does make sense. Were you thinking as a buyer or seller?
The domain suggestion engine was a fun component. It's not all that complicated... it really just tries a bunch of prefixes and suffixes on your keyword (plus some geo suggestions, if it can "find" you) and shows you what is (probably) available.
I've also found some gems using it as well.
There isn't an (obvious) account with that name, but twitter doesn't let me register it. I don't know if it is a blocked keyword or private or what.
I've been maintaining a manual list (thanks for the @wood addition) but otherwise haven't really figured out a way to definitively sort through these.
Question: Have you thought about on-boarding LinkedIn vanities? Ex. linkedin.com/in/[vanity_name]?
I'll take a stab at in when I've got some spare cycles, thanks.
https://fantasymath.com
Modeler by trade, had to learn all the back and frontend stuff myself, been really fun so far.
Currently it's making about $5,000 / month.
It's been a very interesting process dealing with building the app, marketing it, and dealing with support. The app is $19/mo for regular Shopify stores, and we have about 700+ total customers (only some are paying). We get A LOT of support requests for misc things and have been trying to build up a knowledge base of articles and help guides in our ZenDesk.
We have recently been running into an issue with file hosting storage fees (we allow people to upload files, no additional charge). We have a couple of Shopify stores that are costing us about $70/mo each in file hosting fees (we don't charge them extra).
I absolutely LOVE building apps for 3rd party providers. We don't really market the app, it's found organically in Shopify's app store. The first 8 months were filled with lots of little bugs needing fixing, but that has since slowed down as I've fixed things. At this point, it's a pretty stable application that doesn't require much maintenance, mostly just user support.
> We don't really market the app
Well, what you did _is_ marketing (via integration), it's a great strategy when done well and looks like you did an awesome job.
I've heard it said that marketing is basically doing anything that exposes your product to more people.
Curious though how much support do you provide for $19/mo? Do you get a lot of support requests / emails?
At that price point one customer interaction is more than most tech workers rate for the time spent interacting with it.
but can't find how revenue works on there.
https://nugget.one
Within the next few months I'll be pivoting to The Nugget Startup Academy and will focus on training entrepreneurs instead of sending out ideas.
I enjoy your podcast Justin. I'd keep swinging for the fences unless you just have a passion to teach.
Since I've done it three times I wanted to see if I could help switch up things for them.
Basically, I do have a passion to teach right now, because it's annoying the hell out of me! ;)
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Lots of traffic comes from Google, since we are apparently the first result for "read WSJ free" (we have a partnership with the WSJ that gives free access through our tools).
1: http://www.BeeLineReader.com
2: http://www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com
StatusGator aggregates the public service status pages for all the cloud services you use. You can get automatic notifications when services go down and up, and you can query the service status from things like Slack.
It makes about $1,000 month right now.
we are still struggling on marketing, no revenue yet.
It's currently making $650 / month and growing.
Something I "knew" but never really understood about growing a business is how long it can take. Granted this is completely on the side, but it still takes a long time to find your market, grow, get customers, etc. Learning that this is actually a marathon was valuable.
The other thing I have to actively manage is building things that are valuable -vs- things that I find interesting. As a developer I LOVE tinkering with new technology, but when I'm wearing my business hat upgrading to the new hot frontend framework doesn't make that much sense.
It's come so far now that I'm starting to consider this my full-time thing (I'm in the final stages of completing my MSc computer science) and I'm currently running evaluation on an API security platform based on that technology. Basically, I spend most of my time on it and I even got a small team helping me - but it's not what earns my living at the moment.
Before that I gathered a lot of experience from running and building https://en.serlo.org/ which is basically a Wikipedia for learning (I built the whole CMS from scratch) that serves over 1m MAUs in Germany (the english page is very sparse, most of it is on https://de.serlo.org ) and is thus on the most popular learning platforms in Germany. The company behind it is an NGO (= no profits) I cofounded and the platform is ad-free and doesn't cost anything. We get money through donations and other funds.
It's an exciting journey, I'm now at a point where I need to figure out how to actually make money on the web that doesn't come through donations and goodwill, but I think I can do it - why not, right?
By the way, you may also like the WYSIWYG editor I wrote - I also plan a static site generator based on it with a themeforest-y market place. Feel free to check those out:
* https://www.ory.am/sites/ * https://github.com/ory/editor
ps: It took me almost 2 years to get to 700$ at patreon and most of it comes from one sponsorship I'm very glad of. Their CTO texted me one day because he saw hydra on HN frontpage and he works in the identity space.
Many of our customers come from word of mouth plus talking to people. Its been very interesting to see the kind of tests that people built with our tool.
We're still technically in BETA although sales are going slow but smoothly. Send me a message if you are interested (fernandohur at apibot.co).
Soaring (gliding) weather forecasts for EU/NA/SA/AU. My side project has now become my main gig. Took approximately 3 years to build, 2 before I started making any money from it.
Basically a one-stop shop for fall festivals, Oktoberfest, haunted houses, pumpkin patches, etc. Still have a long way to go to make it what I would like but traffic last year was roughly 1 million in the month of October. Anticipate it will double to 2 million/October this year. Still working on the right revenue model.
We did use the reset to our advantage to pick up rankings, but I don't think it mitigates the authority of bigger players much. The reset tends to wash out small-time players in the space and bigger players who can't niche effectively more so than it does committed players. Now that I have traffic, I don't worry too much that we are going to get bounced in the reset. I am much more worried that someone will beat us with better content for the next year. Everfest is another startup that I have seen that appears to have pretty much conquered the reset at this point.
Funtober had a very hard time displacing a couple mid-sized players in some of our seasonal niches that were established. Even with the reset, it can take years for their information to become truly out of date and people to look for alternatives. There are also a few things that they can do to keep their information current with little effort. We're just about even now with two in particular that I have in mind, but it took 5 years to get there.
Black Friday would be an obvious example of an area where the reset should be biggest if your theory is true. I think the players there have been pretty consistent and my internal estimate is that even with the reset it will take 5+ years to crack it.