Why was this down-voted? a request was made for people with successful/profitable passive income sources to chime in. I believe the author responded to that.
While the answer is technically correct, its not very useful.
If this entire thread just consisted of just Yes and No answers there would not be much value in it.
I see your point.
I was keeping in mind this comment - "Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so? Don't worry, your silence is totally understandable :)" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358309
After reading that comment, I felt a simple yes/no answer seemed a viable answer (at least to me). I agree though, that this response would detract from the general trend and usefulness. (Although getting a neg score seems a bit harsh). Thanks for the response.
The OP added clarification after I posted my answer to the original Yes/No question. I was the first to comment so it now looks as if I didn't read the full question. That said, my reply hardly added to the conversation and I regret it.
Yes, but it's not yet up and running. It's on its prototype stage. I'm planning too to deploy it as a free service. Don't know yet if I'm gonna monetize it or not.
A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service.
The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP.
I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.
I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.
The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of chargebacks common to such services.
Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex, nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the service's success.
It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
So you sold the original site on Flippa and then also sold essentially the same code again to other people? Wasn't that against the terms of sale to the Flippa buyer?
No, the buyer didn't mind. He was buying the site more for the revenue/traction rather than te technology. It's actually very common to create a script and sell both developed sites based on it as well as the script itself.
Friendly French note: "coup de grace" actually means the last blow that achieved to kill something. From your story, it sounds more like it was the cherry on top.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
Note to self, if I ever buy a site on Flippa, make sure to get a con-compete too.
Even if they sign it, I wouldn't expect most sellers there to honor it. When I last looked at flippa many of the sites were obvious clones of each other.
1. Build a template of a simple site
2. Create 10000 instances of it & SEO them one at a time
I finally jumped into ios development. Not really on the side since it's been my main focus lately. I went from not knowing any ios stuff to launching my first app in a week. I'm about to put my third app on the app store. I'm not making much money but there's a ton of potential.
Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe 3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.
Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of the webapp stuff that others are producing.
If you're using Wordpress, try one of the Twitter integration plugins. You can choose hashtags when creating a new blog entry and it will be auto-posted to a Twitter account. You should see a bump in traffic after each post.
I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?
> Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?
No reason not to. :)
I had a few blogs (well, "autoblogs") go from $5-6/day on 400-500 unique visitors to $10-12 after installing and configuring Twitter Tools. A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.
> A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.
Do you think that's because readers recognize it as being "more human" and are more interested, or because humans are better at making copy than automation, or a combination of the two?
Probably more of a combination of the two. Automated posts are pretty obvious, even to the less technically inclined. Lots of people will use something like "spyntax" (stuff like "This is {awesome|cool}, {take a look|check it out}!") to generate reusable copy, but it still generally feels fake. That's about the extent of human touch most people will give things if their goal is complete automation.
If you're writing posts/excerpts/replies manually, it's way more authentic and believable. Language is obviously super important in marketing (especially online), and it's one area where computers still have lots of improvement to make.
I published an ebook (http://www.branchrock.com) and it's been selling. Since I'll never run out of stock and it's priced as an impulse buy, I expect that it'll continue to earn passively. I got my first dollar on the first day I started selling.
I plan to continue writing books, both non-fiction and fiction, and I expect that they'll all help bring in passive income.
Just a suggestion - perhaps you place a sample of the book on your page? A paragraph or two, just so people can see what they are getting. Also it would be good to know how long it is.
Thanks! I'll think about how to integrate everything nicely during the blackout. Not going to change anything now since I don't want to get caught with my pants down.
Edit: I put a one-page sample on Lulu if you're curious.
How do you advertise? This sounds like a great idea but I'd be interested what your strategy is to get eyes on the books, since this can often be so much effort as to not be a passive income anymore.
Word-of-mouth, Facebook page, Twitter, various online communities I'm a part of. Part of the challenge is being "always on" and believing in my product (my book) and passing that belief on to other people. The way to look at it, I think, is that every person I don't mention it to ends up being a potentially lost sale.
I'm also looking into advertising on Something Awful. I'm exploring Facebook ads, but I'm not sure how good they would be. Google Adsense would be nice, but I was banned from the Adsense/Adwords service some time ago for some reason and Google has been especially unhelpful about responding to anything about any of their services.
Am I the only one to be offended by someone blatantly trying to profit from this unfortunate disaster while bodies are still being pulled from the ruins?
If the revenue was being donated, I'd understand, but to do it for profit, and to brag about it here...
I've had an application running in Second Life for the last 5-6 years to facilitate people making machinima. I haven't changed the price since it launched, at around $6 USD. When it first launched (also when SL was much more popular), I was selling several hundred dollars a month.
I still pull in $30-$50 a month on it, but I don't do much to promote it anymore. Linden Lab has really fucked up over the years and the quality of their software (the environment my app runs in) has gotten considerably worse. Its sad to say that my machinima app ran better 5 years ago than it does today, and multiple re-writes over the years has proven it impossible to go any further with the it.
Alternatively, I just put my first app up in the App Store last night. Its waiting for approval. I'm going to keep launching small utility apps and see where it goes.
I also did a stint in SecondLife, trying to build web-enabled in-world products and/or build web services that would take Linden dollars for payment. Probably made $600 in revenue.
I was surprised that just putting an adsense unit on the side of my personal blog (4k hits/month) manages to generate $25/month.
It's a highly technical blog, mainly documenting my personal electronics projects, but covers pretty much anything I want it to, which rather limits my readership. Having a more cohesive, single subject would certainly raise the glass ceiling on readership.
I don't know about you, but I don't think $25/mo is worth cheapening my blog by plastering tasteless ads on it. I'd have to be pulling significant income from it before I would even consider putting ads on my blog.
TL;DR: the cost of that extra 82 cents a day is having your site cheapened by advertising that you don't necessarily control and that negatively impacts your credibility. If the spare change isn't going to make a big difference, the perception that you don't need the money is of more value.
The C tips site was a half-finished project. There was a lot more work to be done and I never promoted it.
And yes, all of them are very stale unformatted html pages. Web development isn't my interest or skill, and plain pages like those have never bothered me. Most of it is useful notes to myself, which I think others will find useful.
The Duct Tape site actually pays much better than my blog per page view, bringing in 2-3 cents per 1k, where the blog almost never brings in anything per 1k, but the blog pays $0.30-$1.50 per click, where the tape site only brings in 5-15 cents per click, so the blog brings in about 95%, the tape site the next 5%, and the C site brings in 2 cents on a good month.
I never understood this, what sort of "alpha" male goes on the internet and looks for advice from other people on how to be a man?
The first step in being a real man is not looking to others on how to be a man. (Or at least finding a mentor with true character, not Maxim magazine articles and other garbage)
I still think your site has a great potential for an audience though, I fell for the same sort of BS when I was a freshman in college. Took me a couple years to undo the stupidity I had come to believe about what being a "man" really meant.
Look bro, quit being so sensitive. This isnt blog spam. That said, I stand by my first assessment. I suck at photoshop, but it appears to me and I bet everyone else, that you fit right in. Nothing to be ashamed about bro. You need to OWN your identity. Just Be you bro:
I started by buying a few samples to sell on e-bay to see if there was a market. So I guess you could say I started making money right away. The problem with trying to replicate my business, is finding the right product to sell. I was lucky that I saw they had this item, and I figured that there would be a market online for it. Trying to find a new product to sell and establishing links with the manufacturer would take some time. You would also need to contend with issues of minimum order size.
I guess you could call it a partial success. Currently its bringing in about $300 per month. I want to increase my revenue, but it hard to know what to focus on. The other problem is it has somewhat of a high overhead - we need to spend time shipping products, etc.
For my new side projects, I'm thinking of doing something digital, that can be handled entirely online.
I have tried selling photos to a stock photo service. I spent many hours tagging photos, waiting for them to work through the approval process, etc. After many months of letting my photos sit, I have yet to sell one.
Next I am looking at writing some Smartphone apps. We will see how that goes ...
There was an Eastern European dude that used to submit his monthly sales reports to HN. He made quite a bit of money from stock photography. The catch ? Most of his stock photos were not still life, but people in different life settings - this must be the kind that sells the best. I'm sure it helped that his young blond girlfriend was a frequent subject :)
Yeah, I read his posts - its what inspired me to have give it a try. That and somebody who posted on HN, saying they had a passive income stream from selling their holiday photos as stock.
'Staged' photos of people in various situations do sell better. People are always looking for photos that illustrate different abstract concepts, such as "income protection" or "brown nosing with the boss".
In my case though, I was looking to make some money of the photos I already had, which apparently were not that suited for stock. I don't doubt that if I invested time taking photos that were betters suited, I could make a little money. But from my early experience it would seem that too much effort was required for too little pay off.
To throw out some totally made up numbers, it was like; for every hour of effort invested in my grafting tool site, I could increase my monthly income by $2. For every hour invested in stock I could increase my monthly income by $0.10 . It quickly became obvious where I should spend my time :-)
I would guess that for anybody who can code, the numbers would likely prove similar. Therefore I would not recommend stock photography to the HN crowd.
I've been on that site a few times looking for grafting tools for a permaculture hobby project. Does your wife's family have any mechanized grafting (for bench grafting) or expanded product line? Nice Magento work, by the way!
Wow, it’s a small world! I've tried to convince them to make bench grafters, but unfortunately they feel the market is too small and won’t pay for their R&D costs. They are more interested in making tools where they can get an order of 1 million pieces, to sell at Wallmart.
In case anyone is reading this thread and becoming pessimistic about their chances of achieving passive income, I'd like to note that there is a clear sampling bias: folks that have found profitable niches are less likely to share their projects for fear of attracting competition. I suspect that choosing a good niche is pretty important when it comes to passive-income type projects. It looks like the most profitable project so far in the thread is il's, and he sold his site on flippa, so competition is now someone else's problem.
Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so? Don't worry, your silence is totally understandable :)
(The sampling bias will probably still remain somewhat due to folks have their projects linked to from their profiles and not wanting to remove them.)
My most profitable side project actually plays in an extremely competitive space but I usually stay quiet about it because it's boring, extremely uncool, and borders on sleazy. Anyways, I wrote it in a weekend and it makes me about $400/month.
Almost always based on either affiliate marketing or just sourced content. Source is cheap and common, and the same, tired adult content model still works: Horny guy, cock in hand, still whips out credit card. It's an aging model, but there's always margin on the dance floor.
> Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so?
Um, now that you've asked, the most important part of any secret is knowing the existence of a secret (or phrased otherwise: you don't ask questions about stuff you don't know the existence of).
So: no, you can't really control for this sampling bias.
Not typical HN fare, but the wife and I started a business together that has (almost) nothing to do with the interwebs. It's a photography business.. We started it about 3+ years ago, and in most senses it's done quite well. She's been able to quit her day-job. It's what HN folks would call a 'lifestyle' business, I guess. You know, cause we're not rich.
I have to say, it's pretty rad. Software startups don't have a monopoly on giving you experience in doing branding, marketing, sales, running ad-campaigns, taxes, and just all manner of things that go into running a business.
I agree! I work at a finance startup (sadly no equity) and went from learning accounts from scratch, to financial models to handling Biz Dev, sales, hiring, corp communication, and on and on. Its great fun!
S/W startups definitely don't have a monopoly on it, plus other types of startups make you face very different sets of problems than the ones generally/commonly discussed on HN.
I'd like to hear more about this. I've been thinking of getting more into photography myself. It seems like wedding photography is a bad idea as it's way overdone. I was thinking architecture or portrait photography. What did you all end up doing?
I think an avatar photo business would be a good idea. Think of all the twitter users with resized photos of themselves that are unflattering, cryptic, or just plain bad.
When I travel to SF (where the startup I work for is based), I often end up shooting headshots for folks who have talks to give, or need bio photos, etc. Someone could definitely corner the PA/SF entrepreneur headshot market, without much trouble I think.
The trick with headshots is enough finding people (close to you) willing to pay enough money to make it worthwhile. That usually means actors, authors, or executives.. but I'm sure increasingly wide-eyed young startup kids and software developers make the Bay Area an interesting target.
There was a story a while back about two guys who set up a badge printing service at SF trade shows. Something similar could be done for the headshot biz.
Hey, my friend sent me this. I have such a business. Actually, I'm a photographer and I ran a special for the month of March, $100 "blogger headshots". It's a quick 20 or so minute session. I narrow down my picks to four images. I present them to the client sized at 1000 px. Folks then had the option to buy high resolution photos for $25 each if they wanted them for something else.
Normally a headshot session with me costs $250, lasts an hour, and includes multiple locations and clothing changes. A client would receive a few dozen shots, high resolution, on a disk. This is appropriate for actors and authors picking a photo, but unnecessary for bloggers or people who just want decent avatars for linkedin, facebook, twitter, etc.
OH! You can also market this to people who need photos for online dating.
It was stunningly successful. I was able to take a slow time of year and churn out a lot of business. Because it is a special, it got written up in blogs and people Twittered it a lot.
So I say go for it! Just make sure you can deliver with quality headshots.
Wedding. Yeah, it's totally overdone.. but there's a ton of opportunity there. Tens of thousands of weddings every year in a major metro area, and as a wedfog depending on how you price yourself you're usually looking for around 30 (we try not to shoot more than 24 or so).
Another huge advantage wedfog has over commercial if you're getting into it while you've got a 9-5 is the hours. You shoot on Saturdays, and edit at nights. It's still grueling to do while you've got another gig (the year before my wife quit we shot about 20 weddings, which each take 6-8hrs to shoot and 20-40 hours to edit)... but it can be done.
Many other genres are going to be difficult to start doing seriously if you have a 9-5... the business models are all different. Much more to say than fits in a comment. I've been meaning to write some stuff up, but meanwhile feel free to drop me a line and I'm happy to share anything you'd like to know. famousactress [at] gmail
I actually live off the passive income (I've been an affiliate full-time for almost 4 years). While it has been quite a ride and I can't really share my most profitable sites/tools (without my wife - who is also my business partner - getting me back for it), I will say that it can be a good thing. That said, it is also an extremely competitive business. It is very easy to generate $50/month off a little blog, but generating $10,000/month takes a lot more out of you and carries far more risk.
If you've got something that is growing or doing well already, see if you can grow it - when there is little competition in whatever segment it is an opportunity not to be missed. They are rare.
Like someone mentioned, I don't want to increase my competition, so I'm not going to get into the details, but I'll say that I started doing consulting after work in 2007 to bootstrap my own project. I had absolutely no business background.
In 2008 I spent $7000 that I had made off consulting and 8 months of my free time to build my first project. It was a miserable failure. I've made about $80 off of it, so I'm still down about $6920... 3 years later.
In 2009 I built my second attempt. This time I spent about $1000 building it and it took me about 4 months to build it. I've made about $150 off that one, so I still lost money, but much less than the first time.
In 2010 I made my third attempt. This one I built at no cost, and 2 weeks of my free time. To date this one has made over $20,000.
I'm now in the 5th year since I first started on this journey and for the first time, I wrote myself a profit check last month.
Hang in there. You'll figure it out if you keep trying.
I've been programming for a long time, so I don't think it had anything to do with productive programming. In fact, each attempt was less work than the previous.
The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are doing. 99% of successful businesses work this way. This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but I kept spinning my wheels trying to invent something instead of doing market research and building something that I know people need or want.
Just building something people need/want, or improving upon what works, is a deceptively simple generalization. It boils down to execution, and that's where our originality still comes into play.
I agree as well. I wasn't suggesting that's all it takes, but rather, that was the missing ingredient for me. I think different people are missing different ingredients to success, and that was the one that I was missing.
So I assume that your third attempt based on "becoming their competitor or improving upon" strategy.
If so, how difficult was it (or how long did it take) to get organic traffic/customers through google, etc. Since I would think your competitors were more "established" in the pagerank, seo etc.
Basically, I'm just wondering how hard is it to get traction against entrenched players. Even if your product were superior, you still need to draw traffic to sell and prove it.
It actually happened immediately. I only have one real competitor, and my product is superior, and I still haven't overtaken them. That's part of what I learned from this. They were making enough that if I just took 5% of their income I could still make a lot of money. Sometimes being #2 is OK.
First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.
Few more in between all not generating much interest.
One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.
The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.
I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.
Yes I did outsource. It was a huge website with a lot of bells and whistles (this was my first mistake)... At the time, I was a C++ guy trying to get into the web, so I hired an outsourced designer and then hired a php guy in India to implement it.
What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.
If you consider blogging to be a side project, I do make a small amount as passive income. It definitely doesn't compare with web apps or services in terms of coolness, but money is money, right?
In addition to money, it's also likely a focused audience that could be diverted into other potential monetisation vectors you come up with. Ideas are the easy part, getting traffic to them is the hard part.
My side project involves recognition of captchas; it is a pretty tough one-time time investment to create a recognizer, involving machine learning, image manipulation and statistics, but as payment is on a per-captcha basis, the income after that is passive income. I started with this a few years ago, and after two weeks of obsessive-compulsive hacking, my first dollars started flowing in. All in all it now gets me something like $2000 per month.
Nope, they are not spammers, the captchas are not for creating accounts; it has another use. But obviously I cannot go into details about my customers here.
I have some trading models and financial tools that I license. They're currently generating about $200/month, but I'm expecting that to increase within a year. I'm also working on an iPhone game with two of my roommates right now that I'm hoping will bring in a couple hundred a month, but that's just a dream at the moment.
The tools probably took around 80 hours. The models probably are hard to say because a lot of discovery was done over time; actually implementing them only took a weekend. The iPhone app is probably going to take around 40 hours, but it's as much a learning experience and labor of love as it is an effort to make serious money.
I'm starting to focus on looking for passive income, though. I am entering a PhD program in the Fall, so an extra ~$1000/mo will make a huge difference in standard of living.
I started a company this January based of a product I saw in a book that I knew would become incredibly popular. It brought it in quite substantial income for the following 2 months, and I sold it in the third :-).
Cool. Could you give more details? Not about the particular site(though that helps), but how do you sell sites often? Do you sell it in places like flippa?
I find Flippa and similar sites to be much too much hassle. I just work my network and ask if anyone would be interested / if they would know anyone that might e interested. Theres usually a match :)
As my Android apps started becoming more popular, I started seeing piracy of my apps skyrocket. At the time, Google didn't have their application licensing system in place, so I built my own. With the licensing system in place for my apps, I was also free to distribute and sell my application binary on my own, without fear of it being pirated.
After seeing piracy drop dramatically and talking with other Android developers with the same problems, I decided to build a site around it and sell my system to other developers.
It took me about 2 weeks to build www.androidlicenser.com and I saw my first $40/month subscription within 5 days. It still brings in about $500/month consistently. Google has since come out with their own licensing system, but it suffers from the limitation of it only working for apps purchased through the Android Market which, in a world with many Android Markets, isn't good enough.
Looks like a useful too in android dev arsenal with Amazon Appstore launching..is there some type of blog post, etc as I would like to do some type of post for ChicagoAndroid.com which I am a member of..
What happens if someone bypasses your client library in the APK file? Also, will the application fail to launch if it cannot reach androidlicenser.com (or wherever it goes) to verify the user when the app is launched?
As always, the APK needs to be obfuscated to prevent hackers from decompiling the code and bypassing the client library.
If internet connection is unavailable or androidlicenser.com is unreachable, it is completely upto the developer to determine what to do next. My best practice recommendation is to allow the user to continue to use the application.
Isn't the permit/city licence insanely expensive? Is it still profitable after that?
On a similar note, I was looking at the difference in fruit prices between 'whole' fruits and sliced portions in super markets the other day and started daydreaming about selling portions of pineapple on warm summer days, much like an ice cream stand but with pineapple. I think the markup is similar to hotdogs - can you share how many customers you serve in a typical hour?
I have a small WP7 application I submitted around launch, I'd done Silverlight development before so it was pretty easy to jump in. I built it over about six weeks of occasional evenings and started selling pretty much immediately. I've released my downloads and sales figures for the first three months.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadAfter reading that comment, I felt a simple yes/no answer seemed a viable answer (at least to me). I agree though, that this response would detract from the general trend and usefulness. (Although getting a neg score seems a bit harsh). Thanks for the response.
The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP.
I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.
I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.
The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of chargebacks common to such services.
Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex, nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the service's success.
It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.
The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
Or "la cerise sur le gâteau", if you prefer :)
Note to self, if I ever buy a site on Flippa, make sure to get a con-compete too.
1. Build a template of a simple site
2. Create 10000 instances of it & SEO them one at a time
3. Resell to suckers with too much money.
4. Profit!
Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe 3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.
Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of the webapp stuff that others are producing.
If you're using Wordpress, try one of the Twitter integration plugins. You can choose hashtags when creating a new blog entry and it will be auto-posted to a Twitter account. You should see a bump in traffic after each post.
I've actually been doing manual updates to my personal twitter account after each post with a blurb about the latest article. Each tweet is customized rather than a generic auto-update message. I'm just not sure whether this is the best way of going about it or if I should take your suggestion and completely automate it. Maybe create a separate twitter account and do both?
No reason not to. :)
I had a few blogs (well, "autoblogs") go from $5-6/day on 400-500 unique visitors to $10-12 after installing and configuring Twitter Tools. A human touch generally results in higher yield than automation with most marketing stuff, though.
Do you think that's because readers recognize it as being "more human" and are more interested, or because humans are better at making copy than automation, or a combination of the two?
If you're writing posts/excerpts/replies manually, it's way more authentic and believable. Language is obviously super important in marketing (especially online), and it's one area where computers still have lots of improvement to make.
I plan to continue writing books, both non-fiction and fiction, and I expect that they'll all help bring in passive income.
Edit: I put a one-page sample on Lulu if you're curious.
I'm also looking into advertising on Something Awful. I'm exploring Facebook ads, but I'm not sure how good they would be. Google Adsense would be nice, but I was banned from the Adsense/Adwords service some time ago for some reason and Google has been especially unhelpful about responding to anything about any of their services.
Personally, I found out about your book yesterday, after reading your comment about videos without captions in the code school thread.
If the revenue was being donated, I'd understand, but to do it for profit, and to brag about it here...
I still pull in $30-$50 a month on it, but I don't do much to promote it anymore. Linden Lab has really fucked up over the years and the quality of their software (the environment my app runs in) has gotten considerably worse. Its sad to say that my machinima app ran better 5 years ago than it does today, and multiple re-writes over the years has proven it impossible to go any further with the it.
Alternatively, I just put my first app up in the App Store last night. Its waiting for approval. I'm going to keep launching small utility apps and see where it goes.
It was my Artix Phase.
It's a highly technical blog, mainly documenting my personal electronics projects, but covers pretty much anything I want it to, which rather limits my readership. Having a more cohesive, single subject would certainly raise the glass ceiling on readership.
TL;DR: the cost of that extra 82 cents a day is having your site cheapened by advertising that you don't necessarily control and that negatively impacts your credibility. If the spare change isn't going to make a big difference, the perception that you don't need the money is of more value.
Text ads, top banner and bottom of right bar. $300 a year; as a college student, yeah, that's worth it.
Why don't you have any ads on your C Programming Tips site? I'd be interested in the number of hits that gets compared to your blog.
Hits in last 31 days (5 month running CTR avg):
http://kennethfinnegan.blogspot.com/ - 4,574 0.33%CTR
http://ctips.pbwiki.com/ - 544 0.14%CTR
http://www.ducttape.pbwiki.com - 1,073 0.14%CTR
http://kwf.dyndns.org:5821/ - 164 (Mostly script kiddies attacking my Chumby) 0.86%CTR
The C tips site was a half-finished project. There was a lot more work to be done and I never promoted it.
And yes, all of them are very stale unformatted html pages. Web development isn't my interest or skill, and plain pages like those have never bothered me. Most of it is useful notes to myself, which I think others will find useful.
The Duct Tape site actually pays much better than my blog per page view, bringing in 2-3 cents per 1k, where the blog almost never brings in anything per 1k, but the blog pays $0.30-$1.50 per click, where the tape site only brings in 5-15 cents per click, so the blog brings in about 95%, the tape site the next 5%, and the C site brings in 2 cents on a good month.
The first step in being a real man is not looking to others on how to be a man. (Or at least finding a mentor with true character, not Maxim magazine articles and other garbage)
I still think your site has a great potential for an audience though, I fell for the same sort of BS when I was a freshman in college. Took me a couple years to undo the stupidity I had come to believe about what being a "man" really meant.
But being rude wasn't even the point though, was it? This is really just blogspam...
http://www.alphamal.es/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/msft.png
http://www.grafting-tool.com/magento/index.php/
I started by buying a few samples to sell on e-bay to see if there was a market. So I guess you could say I started making money right away. The problem with trying to replicate my business, is finding the right product to sell. I was lucky that I saw they had this item, and I figured that there would be a market online for it. Trying to find a new product to sell and establishing links with the manufacturer would take some time. You would also need to contend with issues of minimum order size.
I guess you could call it a partial success. Currently its bringing in about $300 per month. I want to increase my revenue, but it hard to know what to focus on. The other problem is it has somewhat of a high overhead - we need to spend time shipping products, etc.
For my new side projects, I'm thinking of doing something digital, that can be handled entirely online.
I have tried selling photos to a stock photo service. I spent many hours tagging photos, waiting for them to work through the approval process, etc. After many months of letting my photos sit, I have yet to sell one.
Next I am looking at writing some Smartphone apps. We will see how that goes ...
'Staged' photos of people in various situations do sell better. People are always looking for photos that illustrate different abstract concepts, such as "income protection" or "brown nosing with the boss".
In my case though, I was looking to make some money of the photos I already had, which apparently were not that suited for stock. I don't doubt that if I invested time taking photos that were betters suited, I could make a little money. But from my early experience it would seem that too much effort was required for too little pay off.
To throw out some totally made up numbers, it was like; for every hour of effort invested in my grafting tool site, I could increase my monthly income by $2. For every hour invested in stock I could increase my monthly income by $0.10 . It quickly became obvious where I should spend my time :-)
I would guess that for anybody who can code, the numbers would likely prove similar. Therefore I would not recommend stock photography to the HN crowd.
Just to test this out, if anyone is staying quiet about their project for fear of attracting competition, could they please reply to this comment and say so? Don't worry, your silence is totally understandable :)
(The sampling bias will probably still remain somewhat due to folks have their projects linked to from their profiles and not wanting to remove them.)
Most people won't be up-front about working in that space publicly.
Um, now that you've asked, the most important part of any secret is knowing the existence of a secret (or phrased otherwise: you don't ask questions about stuff you don't know the existence of).
So: no, you can't really control for this sampling bias.
But thanks for asking, we're fine :)
I have to say, it's pretty rad. Software startups don't have a monopoly on giving you experience in doing branding, marketing, sales, running ad-campaigns, taxes, and just all manner of things that go into running a business.
S/W startups definitely don't have a monopoly on it, plus other types of startups make you face very different sets of problems than the ones generally/commonly discussed on HN.
The trick with headshots is enough finding people (close to you) willing to pay enough money to make it worthwhile. That usually means actors, authors, or executives.. but I'm sure increasingly wide-eyed young startup kids and software developers make the Bay Area an interesting target.
Normally a headshot session with me costs $250, lasts an hour, and includes multiple locations and clothing changes. A client would receive a few dozen shots, high resolution, on a disk. This is appropriate for actors and authors picking a photo, but unnecessary for bloggers or people who just want decent avatars for linkedin, facebook, twitter, etc.
OH! You can also market this to people who need photos for online dating.
It was stunningly successful. I was able to take a slow time of year and churn out a lot of business. Because it is a special, it got written up in blogs and people Twittered it a lot.
So I say go for it! Just make sure you can deliver with quality headshots.
Another huge advantage wedfog has over commercial if you're getting into it while you've got a 9-5 is the hours. You shoot on Saturdays, and edit at nights. It's still grueling to do while you've got another gig (the year before my wife quit we shot about 20 weddings, which each take 6-8hrs to shoot and 20-40 hours to edit)... but it can be done.
Many other genres are going to be difficult to start doing seriously if you have a 9-5... the business models are all different. Much more to say than fits in a comment. I've been meaning to write some stuff up, but meanwhile feel free to drop me a line and I'm happy to share anything you'd like to know. famousactress [at] gmail
http://millswyn.com/ http://worqbench.posterous.com/
Have a few sales. Not complaining.
If you've got something that is growing or doing well already, see if you can grow it - when there is little competition in whatever segment it is an opportunity not to be missed. They are rare.
In 2008 I spent $7000 that I had made off consulting and 8 months of my free time to build my first project. It was a miserable failure. I've made about $80 off of it, so I'm still down about $6920... 3 years later.
In 2009 I built my second attempt. This time I spent about $1000 building it and it took me about 4 months to build it. I've made about $150 off that one, so I still lost money, but much less than the first time.
In 2010 I made my third attempt. This one I built at no cost, and 2 weeks of my free time. To date this one has made over $20,000.
I'm now in the 5th year since I first started on this journey and for the first time, I wrote myself a profit check last month.
Hang in there. You'll figure it out if you keep trying.
The thing that I didn't understand is that being successful in business has very little to do with having an original idea. You're much better off just looking at how other people are making money and becoming their competitor or improving upon what they are doing. 99% of successful businesses work this way. This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but I kept spinning my wheels trying to invent something instead of doing market research and building something that I know people need or want.
Just building something people need/want, or improving upon what works, is a deceptively simple generalization. It boils down to execution, and that's where our originality still comes into play.
If so, how difficult was it (or how long did it take) to get organic traffic/customers through google, etc. Since I would think your competitors were more "established" in the pagerank, seo etc.
Basically, I'm just wondering how hard is it to get traction against entrenched players. Even if your product were superior, you still need to draw traffic to sell and prove it.
First 1 I spent 12 months developing and only generated a few hundred dollars.
Few more in between all not generating much interest.
One took a few weeks of dev time and a bit coming out of it, still big potential there so I will pursue it, it just involves getting out to more businesses.
The most recent one built in a day to test the waters. Lots of positive feedback, 1 more day to polish the site (ie. make it look pretty) and now a large company is getting on board and lots of small businesses jumping in. (2 days work total) Obviously I have a lot more days of dev to keep expanding it.
I think the actual thing you learn is don't reinvent the wheel, just do something better than everyone else. And second start VERY simple, then build. Otherwise the app is too complex to get a quick and rapid user base who will then spend the time to use your app more.
What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.
The tools probably took around 80 hours. The models probably are hard to say because a lot of discovery was done over time; actually implementing them only took a weekend. The iPhone app is probably going to take around 40 hours, but it's as much a learning experience and labor of love as it is an effort to make serious money.
I'm starting to focus on looking for passive income, though. I am entering a PhD program in the Fall, so an extra ~$1000/mo will make a huge difference in standard of living.
I do this quite often!
After seeing piracy drop dramatically and talking with other Android developers with the same problems, I decided to build a site around it and sell my system to other developers.
It took me about 2 weeks to build www.androidlicenser.com and I saw my first $40/month subscription within 5 days. It still brings in about $500/month consistently. Google has since come out with their own licensing system, but it suffers from the limitation of it only working for apps purchased through the Android Market which, in a world with many Android Markets, isn't good enough.
These are some good posts to start at:
http://blog.androidlicenser.com/selling-shovels-to-android-g...
http://androidandme.com/2010/10/news/android-licenser-looks-...
If internet connection is unavailable or androidlicenser.com is unreachable, it is completely upto the developer to determine what to do next. My best practice recommendation is to allow the user to continue to use the application.
On a similar note, I was looking at the difference in fruit prices between 'whole' fruits and sliced portions in super markets the other day and started daydreaming about selling portions of pineapple on warm summer days, much like an ice cream stand but with pineapple. I think the markup is similar to hotdogs - can you share how many customers you serve in a typical hour?
http://itunes.apple.com/app/river-cross-logic-puzzle-game/id...
It brings in $100+ per month. I'm pretty happy with it.
The App: http://compiledexperience.com/windows-phone-7/to-do
The Numbers: http://compiledexperience.com/blog/posts/a-windows-phone-7-a...