Here as well, but after hearing what some of my friends do, and seeing stuff online being done, I keep thinking there's got to be a way to get in on that.
Will people really give away the sources of their income? I'm guesses not, since it's possible they could end up with a ton of competitors from it. (Which is why I'm not mentioning what my friends do. It wouldn't be fair to them.)
They will. I tell everyone I know about affiliate marketing and how I make money online, but I will never show anyone any of my websites.
It's too easy for someone of low skill to completely copy your operation. Hurting your own bottom line isn't good for business.
If you want it badly enough, you'll figure out a way to make $1/day online and then scale it to $100/day. If you don't want it badly enough, you'll get nothing and that's exactly what you deserve. It's a lot of work, but it's rewarding when you see the results.
Actually, I guess that's not true: My bitcoin mining is currently making me about $200/month, minus power expenses of about $40. It's on a rapidly downward trajectory, though.
I launched TikiToki Timeline Software (http://www.tiki-toki.com) in March. It is currently making about $250 a month from subscribers. This month I have also sold a $1500 single timeline license. Hopefully more of them in the future!
I am currently operating TikiToki as a side project from my main business as a freelance web developer. Aim to go full time with TikiToki at start of July.
This will be a bit of a gamble, given that what I earn from subscribers via TikiToki for a full month is less than what I would earn in half a day as a freelance developer!
We do it for love as much as the money!
Edit:
If we want to go into detail, I should also add that I also earn about $80 a month from Adsense for a blog my wife and I run (http://www.casualgirlgamer.com) and about $25 a month via Big Fish's affiliates scheme. Peanuts really but it all adds up...
Yes, we have Flickr integration. So you can add your Flickr images to your timeline. Facebook integration is in our roadmap, though not as yet a top priority.
Man, that's great. I'm guessing the big clients would be news organizations. I would aggressive argue that this should be on their homepage as their updated news feed and then have the timeline move by the hour.
Cheez, don't hate. Rental property is great. You just have to follow a few common sense principles. It's not magic. The people that get fked are the ones that speculate and flip houses, that's not real estate investing, that's gambling.
I assume it's because he's running his rental business right.
You've got to consider the following things, which greatly reduce the actual "income" you're getting out of them. The obvious ones are mortgage payments, insurance payments, and tax payments. Then you've also got a vacancy allowance, because you assume that units will be vacant at least some of the time between leases. This can vary between 5-20% depending on where you are.
And lastly you need to set aside money for repairs and maintenance. Most people forget to factor this into their calculations when thinking about rental cost. It's common for people to say "Well I'll just pay for it when it happens, and take it out of that month's rent". But that doesn't really apply when you're talking about things like putting on a new roof, installing a new furnace system, or any large "maintenance" project that's going to likely need to be done over the ownership life of the property. My Dad just put replaced the roof on one of his rental properties for the 3rd time since he's owned it. (He bought it when he was 21, is now 67, and the roof needed to be replaced shortly after he bought it.)
So yeah, for a single unit (depending on the area, again), you're doing well if you're getting even $100/month out of it. And as mentioned above, you're constantly building equity.
I also only invest in a city with outstanding economic fundamentals. I could invest in more depressed areas and have higher cash flow but the risk is not worth it to me.
Yup the renters are paying down the mortgage as we speak.
The beautiful thing is as you accumulate more/larger rentals the income just keeps on building on itself.
I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROMs have been long removed so traffic has obviously fallen, however due to the links and still decent search engine rankings it gets roughly 100k page views per day. End result is that the ads give me around $2k to $3k a month. Pretty happy with that since I no longer work on it and it's basically just rotting away.
I did in the early days, but they eventually banned me. (still paid what they owed me, though)
I hear from a friend still doing this that adsense is pretty bad these days. More graphic ads convert better and pay more. So ad agencies like Matomy(Xtend), CPX (basically any yieldmanager platform) performs a bit better. Of course, if you can get into platforms such as Tribal fusion then you'll make a killing as they have really high paying ads.
Wow. Why not move the domain to an anonymous registrar (or 301 all the traffic to a new one), host the site on offshore bulletproof hosting, and put the roms back? That's a huge chunk of change you're probably missing out on.
Too be honest because it felt wrong to run such a site and know you were a huge part of the piracy problem. But yes, I basically decided that I didn't want $20,000 a month. At the height of its time it served 2 million page views a day!
These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to such high traffic and bandwidth usage.
Go for it. In my experience, the profit difference between my paid app and my ads-based app is something like 30:1. (And my ads-based app is better rated)
somewhere around $100/mo from an adwords/affiliate thing, and less than $50 on a web app i'm slowly working on. in the future, web app will generate more income, and i'm working on a niche piece of hardware that ought to also produce a few bucks on the side.
edit: on the "takes money to make money" front, i make several hundred bucks on dividend-returning stocks.
This thread may sound silly, but there's some truth here. Time you spend waiting for the idea is time you waste actually implementing an idea. PMF doesn't happen in your head, it happens when interacting with the market. Get something together, pitch it, refine it, repeat. You'll get there.
I would suggest starting the "idea" with data about paying customers. There's a lot of data out there. Find a market, figure out what they need/want and build a POC. Figure out if your market will pay for it and garner feedback. You might just find that your market will reveal the elusive "idea" for you.
This seems like one of the best "right answers" to the "doesn't scale" problem. You can sell a product over and over. If it's critical to someone's business or well being (according to some definition of well being) then you can sell it OVER and over.
I know it's recurring, but I thought the OP was asking about things that "sell themselves", that is, no effort on your part to make an extra unit of money. Could be wrong though.
I average about $300 a month from app sales of a paid app and an ad-supported app. (This month is looking better, for some reason)
[Edit: I didn't actually say it, but these are iPhone apps]
On average, almost all of my income is from app sales, and not from ads or In-App Purchases.
I had a Lite version of the paid app, but that seemed to do more harm than good.
I have In-App purchases (both to unlock some extra content and remove ads in the ad-based app, and to unlock each feature of the paid app into the free app), but these have been rather slow to sell (maybe 1 or 2 a week?)
My best paid app sales month was about $900. (This was actually Christmas and a strong early January, which was all reported as January) No other months have come close (although I've only been up since December, really)
I DON'T advertise of any kind. Even my official website gets zero traffic, so I don't bother to keep it up to date.
P.S. I honestly expected my apps to spike in sales and then drop down to a couple a week. In fact, all of my apps continue to be very steady. Even my highs and lows tend to be distributed across all three apps, implying (but not proving) that it's the market itself moving up and down, rather than anything I'm doing.
[EDIT: Responding to replies:]
[EDIT: Responded to wallflower]
statictype
-I don't openly connect myself to my apps, mostly because they are a little embarrassing. Maybe I'll write a blog post tell-all.
-They started earning steadily from the beginning, almost entirely through searching for solutions in the app store. I should point out that the paid app is actuall $2.99 so $300/month is really only an average of 4 sales per day or so.
hello_moto
-As for getting started in the iPhone business, I came into it as a young but seasoned programmer who had an idea for a market that was somewhat established, but under-served. Since then, my opinion on that market and my initial idea have completely changed, but I don't have any better ideas for iPhone apps at the moment.
As for rules and regulations? I haven't registered a business yet, so Apple treats me as an individual developer. I tried to hide my real name when I set it up, which half-worked, but took like a week.
I've run into IP infringement cases for my apps, and have even had a DMCA take-down against it, which was resolved very quickly by both sides (at the expense of my app becoming hideous). Apple actually reviewed and approved my changed app within 2 hours of me submitting it, which was awesome. I actually only had a single day of zero sales through all that.
I had an app take about 2 and a half months to get through review. Apple is MUCH slower with free apps than paid apps.
wallflower
The graphic design/presentation was absolutely awful for a long time. Now the app itself is decent enough looking (no where near "Apple" pretty, but the logo is still awful).
none
Completely unrelated to your responses, I'm planning on submitting my fourth app this weekend (which is an optimistic estimate, to say the least).
What are your apps?
I didn't see anything mentioned in your profile about it.
And how long did it take for your apps to start earning at this steady level?
Congratulations, I'm curious what is the level of the graphic design/overall presentation of the finished product? Without revealing it.
> -I don't openly connect myself to my apps, mostly because they are a little embarrassing. Maybe I'll write a blog post tell-all.
I know some prominent iOS developers who have a throwaway LLC where they test stuff. There is no shame in making what the market wants. Remember the ideal customer for most iOS apps are teenagers with their parent's credit card. Most of them are willing to drop $1 to look cool(er) to their friends. It's all about making someone look interesting or cool. Or momentary, interruptible entertainment. Not about business productivity.
Getting about 60$ a month with http://udeployer.com/ - considering the amount of work I put into it I'm definitely opting for more than 60 dollars, but better than nothing... at least I can have a fancy dinner once a month :).
Continuously expanding with some marketing, hoping to reach the $500/month mark someday.
Experiment with 10x the license fee just for one month. This is clearly targeting bigger teams / enterprises / SMEs rather than home users. $19 -- what were u thinking?!
I just started this in January so I thought I would give it some time to spread the word out with the low-pricing, then maybe make it more stable with a monthly fee.
Unfortunately I was selling this for about $200 and I wasn't getting any buyers at all, so I was forced to switch to a lower price.
looks pretty interesting, but I think your homepage needs some more explanations. Is this for local networks only, or can I use it to install software across the internet? We have staff in 6 cities, many working from home with company supplied computers. I would like a solution like this to keep the virus software etc, up to date. You may want to look at a monthly charge instead ($9.95 per month) or a charge for an account with so many licenses - 10 PCs for $10, 50 PCs for $25 per month, etc.
This works for local networks only. You're the first business that I came across that needs to achieve installations across the internet. It could be done but it's not the scope of uDeployer.
What do you suggest to add as explanations? I figured the homepage is pretty exaustive in telling what the program does.
These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work.
I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket. Consulting does (egads), but distracts quite a bit from working on AR.
I don't own a hat, but if AR doesn't become larger than BCC, I will buy a hat so that I have one to eat.
Aside from being owned by me, though, those two businesses are as alike as a kitten and a kumquat. (e.g. AR could take external investment, something which I am kicking around doing later. BCC would be an extraordinarily poor candidate for it.)
I'd be surprised if you don't do well with AR too. You could probably benefit from an active sales force a lot, though I could certainly understand why one wouldn't want to go down that route. The place I get my hair cut at, for instance, makes dozens of these calls a day yet would probably never hear of your service without a cold call.
Hey Patrick, any chance for an affiliate account with your service (as opposed to your white label)? I'd gladly refer my barber, dentist, plumber, etc. As a stats junkie, Id like to see how many of my referrals actually sign up. Getting a reward for it would also be pretty sweet.
It may just be my setup but on your http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart page the yellow text on the yellow background isn't even readable. Is it the same for the rest of you?
Update: Looks like it rotates through colors for every refresh... So, if you refresh enough you can read all the sections of the pie chart.
Colors get chosen randomly on page load, so just refreshing will probably sort you out. (The actual stats are cached, the presentation layer not so much.) I have a string around my finger to fix that someday but today is not a good day and tomorrow not looking great either.
With such a vast shift away from desktop downloadable applications, I'm curious to see what you've done from a marketing standpoint to get those numbers. How did you promote your application and drive sales?
The overwhelming majority of my customers are on the online version now, since I've exiled the downloadable version to electronic Siberia. If no customer ever found it again I would be happy.
With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.
Patrick, if BCC pays you more than your old salary, did you consider giving up consulting and working solely on your startup business (i.e. Appointment Reminder or new product)
It seems like that would accelerate growth of your startup - while BCC revenues ensure that you have enough runway to grow the business.
Of course, it is possible that consulting adds in more value to the business (e.g. new domain knowledge, useful contacts ) besides pulling in revenue.
Short Version: Hosted Web App making just under $10,000/mo.
Using a throwaway account for this because I'd rather not share our numbers publicly yet, but in about 2.5 years since our hosted web app went live, we're generating just under $10,000 per month in revenue. That's working on it part-time for the first couple of years and, more recently, full-time.
It's targeted at developers/designers, and the growth has been very slow and steady. There's never been a break-through moment as revenue has grown at an average rate of about 3.5% per month since we launched.
We have multiple people involved, but I'm the only one working on it regularly. We aren't paying any dividends yet, so the majority of that goes to pay my salary. At some point, we'll begin paying dividends to everyone. That's a long way of saying there are multiple people involved, but I'm the only person getting anything out of it at this point.
I own about 70% of the company and have done the majority of the work by myself thus far. (That's beginning to change.) My investor/business partner put up a small amount of money to get us off the ground, and he helps handle more of the business side of things so that I can focus on design/development. However, I'm still pretty involved in every aspect of the business.
I set up a web dev blog in 2003, at ILoveJackDaniels.com, and after a few months of rubbish blogging starting doing free cheat sheets to download. At its peak, from AdSense and text link ads, it made about $1200 per month. I had to move domain (trademark heat), and moved to AddedBytes.com. Lost lots of traffic and links, unfortunately. Ad revenue dropped over time (around $100 at its lowest), and I recently ditched the text links and adsense to go with CarbonAds.
Dude. Your cheat sheets were amazing back in the day (2004) when I was first getting into LAMP. The HTML entities sheet and CSS sheet were lifesavers. I had them all printed out and hanged up on the wall above my monitor.
I LOVE jack daniels. Your site was incredibly helpful, I think I have 100 copies of various cheat sheets across all the computers I've used over the years.
I can attest that Jack Daniels is litigious and they will actively defend their trademark. Jagermeister will also. And Chuck Norris. I speak from personal experience.
I have 4 apps on the Mac App Store. It took me a total of 2 months to develop. I make roughly $3300 in sales per month. After taxes and Apple's 30% cut I make roughly $2000.
For fear of competition, I'd rather not say. They live in the education, lifestyle and graphics category. Two of them are ranked within the top 10 of most paid in many countries.
Between 3000 to 5000 a month USD spending about 10 hours a month on support. Last year, made about $40K. Nothing to sneeze at, but nothing to get too excited about either.
I'd like to know what you do for your normal paycheck (and how much it is) if an extra $40k a year isn't anything to get too excited about. Isn't that close to the median household income in the U.S.?
Over the year I average $30 a month - but only with about 30 minutes of work a month. It's sad, but I bet I spend more time checking on that income than I do making it. These are mostly old learning experiences and playgrounds for me and I rarely update them.
60% is from Adsense on a sports-related niche website. I make most of that during a couple bursts related to sports seasons - playoffs, spring training, opening day, March Madness, etc. I absolutely stumbled upon that niche from seeing traffic on a related blog post I made. If I really did the SEO and worked on the site I could probably make 5-10 times as much, but I couldn't really grow to other niches.
39% of that is from Amazon affiliate links on a niche gift shopping site. That occasionally lands a sale throughout the year, but it booms from October to early December. This is something I could easily grow to lots of other niches - if I built out the automation. It doesn't really excite me, but shoveling Amazon affiliate links onto dozens or hundreds of niche shopping blogs should be lucrative. I would only focus on the Christmas shopping season though, unless you targeted different holidays like Mother's Day.
1% of that is from a few photos on iStockPhoto. That's where I actually want to put more of my effort going forward. I like the challenge of taking good photos and I like the idea of making my photography hobby self-supporting. But I also think the stock photography (and video) I produce will have a longer sellable life than anything else.
$300-$500/month for a Windows desktop application. I wrote it to help out my mother-in-law since she found Photoshop too complicated to do what she wanted: placing text on pictures. Turned out to be a great learning experience on how to sell things online. See it here: http://www.pmesoftware.com
Yup, using Google adsense. Took a couple of months to tune it. That's really it. I tried 'seeding' the product by mentioning it photo forums and the like but it wasn't worth the time.
Did you mean "How do you monetize it?" (if you meant AdSense) or, did you mean "AdWords" if you really meant "market it"? AFAIK, AdSense is for making money from your content, while AdWords is for marketing your products / services.
I generate about $1000/mo from an iPad app I wrote (that I haven't updated in a long, long time) and then between $5-10k from iPhone user interface design/development tutorials that I sell.
Just me, I do everything (design & code, ha!) and it takes about 4-5 weeks to fully do one. I'm working on more, just need to find the time to crank them out.
I would love to hear more about this as well. How do you advertise? Do you just have the one free tutorial and the two paid tutorials (also sold as a bundle), or do you have others that I'm not seeing?
Bear in mind it's been flying solo since 2007 with only a single facelift about 6 months ago. No marketing or anything. Pays for the server, but that's it.
I was earning approximately $10-15k annually from affiliate marketing from 2002-2006 (formerly giftsforaguy.com), but I didn't spend the time I needed to stay up-to-date with my search rankings.
When I tried to start over with a more general gift affiliate site in 2009, I found that the game had changed so much that it would likely take over a year to get back to the earlier level using organic SEO.
So I've put it on hold, hoping to relaunch using social discovery for customer acquisition.
About $100 per month for http://giftyweddings.com/ -- a website that lets you make your own wedding gift registry/list (not tied to a specific store). At this point my maintenance consists of answering about one email a month.
Roughly $1,000 a month in revenue from http://isitnormal.com. Expenses add up to around $300 a month for hosting on linode and paid moderators. Given traffic levels, I feel I should be able to do better than this somehow. Still searching for the best way to monetize all the super-weird (but interesting!) UGC content.
Hmmm... It took quite a few years to build up decent traffic. At first I just asked friends to submit some questions (like http://isitnormal.com/story/-1/) and I seeded some myself. I posted the link on various forums and submitted it to "cool site of the day" type stuff. The concept has always resonated with people and I managed to get a few semi-decent sites to link to it early on.
New content started to slowly trickle in. Eventually search engines found the existing content. That search traffic led to more submissions. Rinse, repeat.
Most of the traffic comes from search now. Apparently people search for "is it normal that I ____" or "is it normal to ____" a lot. I didn't really anticipate this when I started the site in late 2004, but I guess I got a bit lucky with the name in that regard. However, if I had to do it all over again I'd probably pick a subject matter that's easier to monetize. iPods and cars instead of fetishes and phobias.
The ads on your site, the ones that show up in a lightbox that you cant close and show a little pre-OS X stopwatch icon for the mouse? Really, really, really annoying. I left your site and don't have a reason to come back.
Around 400-600 euro a month selling subscriptions to people and schools who do exercises to improve their Dutch language skills.
We offer free exercises for everybody and people can get extra features with subscriptions.
I used to make about $1,200 a month from a website with dating advice on it, via affiliate sales of dating products.
It started off as a Digg-esque site for the vast quantity of dating-related articles on the net based on some custom Perl I hacked together, but I quickly realized that while that was getting me linked by 'dating experts', the traffic it was bringing in didn't convert, where traffic to very generic articles ("How to meet girls at the gym") converted much better.
I tried to make sure it was updated every day, and finding, sourcing, and writing the articles took an hour a day. I ended up selling the site for ~ $16k when I needed some money to pay a tax bill quickly.
There are now so so so many sites farming this kind of content, I think it'd be very hard to reproduce in this field. That said, the affiliate commissions are pretty good - one guy would pay you $40 for every $20 ebook of his that was sold as a result of you (because he figured you'd sent him a paying customer who'd end up spending a lot more with him).
I once had a collection of poker-related software that did in the low 6 figures per month. Unfortunately recent government actions kicked that in the nuts.
I believe it's more that the majority of the market was playing on the sites that were recently shut down. Less online players and play opportunities would correlate to a reduced interest in playing aid software.
Unfortunately it's more because my customers are. If I could just move I would have to have maintained that level of income. It's hard to pass up a few hundred grand a year for not much work.
316 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadWill people really give away the sources of their income? I'm guesses not, since it's possible they could end up with a ton of competitors from it. (Which is why I'm not mentioning what my friends do. It wouldn't be fair to them.)
It's too easy for someone of low skill to completely copy your operation. Hurting your own bottom line isn't good for business.
If you want it badly enough, you'll figure out a way to make $1/day online and then scale it to $100/day. If you don't want it badly enough, you'll get nothing and that's exactly what you deserve. It's a lot of work, but it's rewarding when you see the results.
I am currently operating TikiToki as a side project from my main business as a freelance web developer. Aim to go full time with TikiToki at start of July.
This will be a bit of a gamble, given that what I earn from subscribers via TikiToki for a full month is less than what I would earn in half a day as a freelance developer!
We do it for love as much as the money!
Edit: If we want to go into detail, I should also add that I also earn about $80 a month from Adsense for a blog my wife and I run (http://www.casualgirlgamer.com) and about $25 a month via Big Fish's affiliates scheme. Peanuts really but it all adds up...
That is from rental properties I own.
You've got to consider the following things, which greatly reduce the actual "income" you're getting out of them. The obvious ones are mortgage payments, insurance payments, and tax payments. Then you've also got a vacancy allowance, because you assume that units will be vacant at least some of the time between leases. This can vary between 5-20% depending on where you are.
And lastly you need to set aside money for repairs and maintenance. Most people forget to factor this into their calculations when thinking about rental cost. It's common for people to say "Well I'll just pay for it when it happens, and take it out of that month's rent". But that doesn't really apply when you're talking about things like putting on a new roof, installing a new furnace system, or any large "maintenance" project that's going to likely need to be done over the ownership life of the property. My Dad just put replaced the roof on one of his rental properties for the 3rd time since he's owned it. (He bought it when he was 21, is now 67, and the roof needed to be replaced shortly after he bought it.)
So yeah, for a single unit (depending on the area, again), you're doing well if you're getting even $100/month out of it. And as mentioned above, you're constantly building equity.
I also only invest in a city with outstanding economic fundamentals. I could invest in more depressed areas and have higher cash flow but the risk is not worth it to me.
I hear from a friend still doing this that adsense is pretty bad these days. More graphic ads convert better and pay more. So ad agencies like Matomy(Xtend), CPX (basically any yieldmanager platform) performs a bit better. Of course, if you can get into platforms such as Tribal fusion then you'll make a killing as they have really high paying ads.
These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to such high traffic and bandwidth usage.
If you're curious: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nations/id386514813?mt=8
edit: on the "takes money to make money" front, i make several hundred bucks on dividend-returning stocks.
[Edit: I didn't actually say it, but these are iPhone apps]
On average, almost all of my income is from app sales, and not from ads or In-App Purchases.
I had a Lite version of the paid app, but that seemed to do more harm than good.
I have In-App purchases (both to unlock some extra content and remove ads in the ad-based app, and to unlock each feature of the paid app into the free app), but these have been rather slow to sell (maybe 1 or 2 a week?)
My best paid app sales month was about $900. (This was actually Christmas and a strong early January, which was all reported as January) No other months have come close (although I've only been up since December, really)
I DON'T advertise of any kind. Even my official website gets zero traffic, so I don't bother to keep it up to date.
P.S. I honestly expected my apps to spike in sales and then drop down to a couple a week. In fact, all of my apps continue to be very steady. Even my highs and lows tend to be distributed across all three apps, implying (but not proving) that it's the market itself moving up and down, rather than anything I'm doing.
[EDIT: Responding to replies:] [EDIT: Responded to wallflower]
statictype
-I don't openly connect myself to my apps, mostly because they are a little embarrassing. Maybe I'll write a blog post tell-all.
-They started earning steadily from the beginning, almost entirely through searching for solutions in the app store. I should point out that the paid app is actuall $2.99 so $300/month is really only an average of 4 sales per day or so.
hello_moto
-As for getting started in the iPhone business, I came into it as a young but seasoned programmer who had an idea for a market that was somewhat established, but under-served. Since then, my opinion on that market and my initial idea have completely changed, but I don't have any better ideas for iPhone apps at the moment.
As for rules and regulations? I haven't registered a business yet, so Apple treats me as an individual developer. I tried to hide my real name when I set it up, which half-worked, but took like a week.
I've run into IP infringement cases for my apps, and have even had a DMCA take-down against it, which was resolved very quickly by both sides (at the expense of my app becoming hideous). Apple actually reviewed and approved my changed app within 2 hours of me submitting it, which was awesome. I actually only had a single day of zero sales through all that.
I had an app take about 2 and a half months to get through review. Apple is MUCH slower with free apps than paid apps.
wallflower
The graphic design/presentation was absolutely awful for a long time. Now the app itself is decent enough looking (no where near "Apple" pretty, but the logo is still awful).
none Completely unrelated to your responses, I'm planning on submitting my fourth app this weekend (which is an optimistic estimate, to say the least).
Thanks!
> -I don't openly connect myself to my apps, mostly because they are a little embarrassing. Maybe I'll write a blog post tell-all.
I know some prominent iOS developers who have a throwaway LLC where they test stuff. There is no shame in making what the market wants. Remember the ideal customer for most iOS apps are teenagers with their parent's credit card. Most of them are willing to drop $1 to look cool(er) to their friends. It's all about making someone look interesting or cool. Or momentary, interruptible entertainment. Not about business productivity.
Continuously expanding with some marketing, hoping to reach the $500/month mark someday.
Unfortunately I was selling this for about $200 and I wasn't getting any buyers at all, so I was forced to switch to a lower price.
What do you suggest to add as explanations? I figured the homepage is pretty exaustive in telling what the program does.
These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work.
I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket. Consulting does (egads), but distracts quite a bit from working on AR.
Do you think that, given enough time spent developing/marketing it, AR will provide as much recurring income as BCC?
Aside from being owned by me, though, those two businesses are as alike as a kitten and a kumquat. (e.g. AR could take external investment, something which I am kicking around doing later. BCC would be an extraordinarily poor candidate for it.)
Hey Patrick, any chance for an affiliate account with your service (as opposed to your white label)? I'd gladly refer my barber, dentist, plumber, etc. As a stats junkie, Id like to see how many of my referrals actually sign up. Getting a reward for it would also be pretty sweet.
With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.
It seems like that would accelerate growth of your startup - while BCC revenues ensure that you have enough runway to grow the business.
Of course, it is possible that consulting adds in more value to the business (e.g. new domain knowledge, useful contacts ) besides pulling in revenue.
Using a throwaway account for this because I'd rather not share our numbers publicly yet, but in about 2.5 years since our hosted web app went live, we're generating just under $10,000 per month in revenue. That's working on it part-time for the first couple of years and, more recently, full-time.
It's targeted at developers/designers, and the growth has been very slow and steady. There's never been a break-through moment as revenue has grown at an average rate of about 3.5% per month since we launched.
I own about 70% of the company and have done the majority of the work by myself thus far. (That's beginning to change.) My investor/business partner put up a small amount of money to get us off the ground, and he helps handle more of the business side of things so that I can focus on design/development. However, I'm still pretty involved in every aspect of the business.
Do you have a Paypal donate button/email? :)
I love the internet :)
60% is from Adsense on a sports-related niche website. I make most of that during a couple bursts related to sports seasons - playoffs, spring training, opening day, March Madness, etc. I absolutely stumbled upon that niche from seeing traffic on a related blog post I made. If I really did the SEO and worked on the site I could probably make 5-10 times as much, but I couldn't really grow to other niches.
39% of that is from Amazon affiliate links on a niche gift shopping site. That occasionally lands a sale throughout the year, but it booms from October to early December. This is something I could easily grow to lots of other niches - if I built out the automation. It doesn't really excite me, but shoveling Amazon affiliate links onto dozens or hundreds of niche shopping blogs should be lucrative. I would only focus on the Christmas shopping season though, unless you targeted different holidays like Mother's Day.
1% of that is from a few photos on iStockPhoto. That's where I actually want to put more of my effort going forward. I like the challenge of taking good photos and I like the idea of making my photography hobby self-supporting. But I also think the stock photography (and video) I produce will have a longer sellable life than anything else.
Ditto on this. http://islostarepeat.com doesn't get much love these days...
I'm in a very close situation. What would you do, exactly? Pay for an Adwords campaign? Canonical URLs? Improve the load times of the web?
I'm curious, what do you do for traffic? Just SEO?
I will definitely be grabbing some of those tutorials this Summer :)
http://www.iphone2die4.com/
Bear in mind it's been flying solo since 2007 with only a single facelift about 6 months ago. No marketing or anything. Pays for the server, but that's it.
When I tried to start over with a more general gift affiliate site in 2009, I found that the game had changed so much that it would likely take over a year to get back to the earlier level using organic SEO.
So I've put it on hold, hoping to relaunch using social discovery for customer acquisition.
New content started to slowly trickle in. Eventually search engines found the existing content. That search traffic led to more submissions. Rinse, repeat.
Most of the traffic comes from search now. Apparently people search for "is it normal that I ____" or "is it normal to ____" a lot. I didn't really anticipate this when I started the site in late 2004, but I guess I got a bit lucky with the name in that regard. However, if I had to do it all over again I'd probably pick a subject matter that's easier to monetize. iPods and cars instead of fetishes and phobias.
It started off as a Digg-esque site for the vast quantity of dating-related articles on the net based on some custom Perl I hacked together, but I quickly realized that while that was getting me linked by 'dating experts', the traffic it was bringing in didn't convert, where traffic to very generic articles ("How to meet girls at the gym") converted much better.
I tried to make sure it was updated every day, and finding, sourcing, and writing the articles took an hour a day. I ended up selling the site for ~ $16k when I needed some money to pay a tax bill quickly.
There are now so so so many sites farming this kind of content, I think it'd be very hard to reproduce in this field. That said, the affiliate commissions are pretty good - one guy would pay you $40 for every $20 ebook of his that was sold as a result of you (because he figured you'd sent him a paying customer who'd end up spending a lot more with him).