Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
The last two threads by the same name got a lot of attention (and a lot of love from patio), but seeing how its been over a year since then it would be interesting to hear from new people (HN userbase is ever growing) and also get updates from some people who posted in the previous threads.
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603
Previous to Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
440 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadStill nice to get a small check at the end of the month.
The site in question is http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com, it provides printable gift certificate templates.
EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-o...
As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time.
The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.
It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine.
Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.
Thank you for writing that post.
"Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast."
How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots?
Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".
On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.
And yeah, lots of typos :-O
United States v. Scheinberg is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus (Absolute Poker/Ultimatebet), and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering in order to process transfers to and from their customers. (...) After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers.
Its an interesting world though where only us, table ratings, and mailer actually do mining (as far as I know) and we sell at wholesale prices to some of the other resellers. And then of course there are lots of people who buy hands and without our consent resell them through forums, web sites etc and that is an ongoing battle. We all have interesting ways of marking our hands so we can track them back to users and ban them.
EDIT: My portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio
Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.
Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is design. Feel free to email me with a link to your portfolio if you want some specific pointers...
I've send you an emails, thanks!
Great redesign, btw!
My point being. I don't think anyone would give you a specific idea for recurring income cause then they would go ahead and do it themselves.
I might be wrong but I doubt it.
Then, you can tweak it, one small change at a time.
Seeing real examples can sometimes give a better idea of what an idea is really worth, with real numbers, not what a concept could be worth IF(and a BIG IF) people really want to buy it, or visit it, or download it..etc... 1 Real life case study is worth 100 ideas for apps/businesses.
Sep 3, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603
Sep 4, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293
Sep 24, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771
May 21, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
Mar 9, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599
[1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
the hard part is keeping the profits as we learn to scale the business.
http://www.plastaq.com
I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com. We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month.
We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates.
Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 13.02%
May: 12.37%
June: 13.76%
July: 15.61%
August: 16.46%
Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:
April: 39.54%
May: 40.06%
June: 37.21%
July: 32.8%
August: 31.17%
So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction.
Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.
Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...
Really awesome to see people being so transparent about how they're doing.
By the way, if you ever want to write any blog posts and cross-post them to Lifestyle.io [0], we'd be happy to have them.
[0]: http://www.lifestyle.io
We launched Staff Squared about 18 months ago, it was originally an internal app that I used at my software company http://atlascode.com that we realised could be useful to other companies. We bootstrapped the app from the outset and haven't taken on any investment as I wanted to see if we could make this thing work first. Turns out it's possible to make a profitable business from it but it's by no means easy.
I do pretty much everything...sales, marketing, support, QA, specifying new features, and so on. My team of devs at Atlas consists of four full time .Net developers. I now also have a part time person who helps me with marketing, newsletters, copywriting and design. Our office manager assists with some of the support requests we receive and manages our oLark chat on the site...
We're looking to grow now and take on more developers as I'm finding it hard to balance the client work we've got at Atlas and keep Staff Squared "fresh". All good problems to have :)
I'll check out lifestyle.io and see if I can contribute something of use to that community. Thanks for your interest!
We have a limit of £30 per day on PPC. It drives traffic to the site but I'm still getting under the hood of whether it delivers real ROI.
We get a lot of interest in our app from the Chrome web store. I think a lot of people overlook that as a (free!) place to market their software. They have a whole section dedicated to HR software and the majority of the time we're featured at the top. We're going to get listed on the Google enterprise marketplace soon too.,
A bunch of other stuff we do includes:
* Advertising on various HR blogs
* Partner marketing - I could write a whole post on just this topic, it's a big undertaking
* Writing guest posts
* We're trialing influads.com at the moment, which is an ad platform. Again I'm not sure if we're getting value from that just yet...
The one thing we've not done to date is press releases. We've performed exactly zero PR for the app, but that will change once we complete a few super cool features we're working on that I feel will set us apart.
Hope that helps!
EDIT: Formatting
In the Google marketplace it's a bit more advanced, and you can integrate with Google authentication for sign in, and with documents for document sharing and so on.
(FWIW, apparently "SMB" means "Small-to-Medium Business".)
BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.
For the record, if anybody thinks we've made a huge mistake on the site I'd love to hear about it!
To explain: I was experimenting with an app that it turns out breaks the twitter rules and so they've suspended us. I'm talking to Twitter now about getting us unsuspended.
I don't know if that's something that might turn off a woman, but it did sort of jump out at me.
[1]Full Disclosure:I only browsed through a few pages, I did not to a page by page gender analysis.
wtf? This is the kind of shit we're tired of in Sweden. There is a woman talking and why would anyone care when they're out looking to buy HR-software?
We are also targeting SMB sith a SaaS in a different area (sales): http://www.quotty.com.
We haven't still defined a strategy, but your comment caught my attention because we are facing the same issue. Your application is innovative, how do you announce it? I figure that hardly somebody will search for an application like yours that nobody figures exist?
In summary where you get most leads: keyword search, organic search, partnership, ads placed in industry blog? Did partnership generate results? With other software? With distributors?
Another issue we found is that many users are too lazy ans inexperienced for the trial disert. I am conducting the following experiment: instead of immediately sending a free subscription-trial password, we ask for a phone number that we will call to make an interactive (remote) demo of the product using real client data, This has improved results, but elevated cost.
Don't you have the same training problem with new users?
I saw the service of acquaintance of mine and what revenue he's making, so I though I can do better.
Generally, in this industry there's massive shortage of talent, ideas and innovation. This is a big opportunity for people who are delivering value in the "mainstream" startup scene and that was one of the reasons which made me try - you can get in and disrupt pretty easily if you think out of the box, which is not so hard in this context.
Most of the stuff is almost scam, the customers are threatened like idiots and technologically the year is 2002-2003.
There are people who say there's no money anymore in this industry and they're right - there's no money for people who are short on skills, ideas and execution, but there is huge potential for people who are coming from other "mainstream" industries.
My prediction is that lot of talented kids will enter this industry with great services - I see it as emerging trend at the moment.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Thylmann
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manwin
Source: I have just spent the last 12 years in adult and recently just severed all ties with the imploding industry.
In my case - I've kind of outsourced it, but every user submission is being reviewed before it's published.
I'm using Webair at the moment, but you can check also Amerinoc and Leaseweb.
details ...?
Google is much different in that you have the option to publish on alternate app markets, or self-publish your own apps, of which Google gets a cut of $0. This lack of control over their own app marketplace is probably the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market.
Was your comment sarcasm, or just terribly misinformed?
"Flagging" stock price? You mean the one that's hovering around all-time highs? Android's "failure to compete" with iOS for the mobile market? With 80%+ of global market share?
But make no mistake: if you had put a stick in the ground you would have seen the same result, provided you were as geologically fortunate as these two lucky suckers.
I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%
By the way, all in-app purchases are free today and tomorrow...
Zero-maintenance, which is nice.
Dirty "viral" tactic.
EDIT: Oops. I've had an ad blocker installed so long I forgot it even existed. :-) Leaving my comment up though to save this discussion thread in my history. Nice site!
I had already an app on android with ~3000 active installs for doing simple shopping look ups. I changed it to throw in some affiliate codes and fixed a crash and updated it approximately 18 months ago now and haven't made a single update.
It's next to nothing but it encouraged me to look more into at least trying things out for myself - I would never have thought (and still can't) it would be any more than a personal exercise. If I look at it as "free netflix for 2 years" then it's a real thing to me and "means something".
I do not focus on game apps, but when I did a few the ad click through rate was very low for them. So if I was doing games, I might look for a different revenue model. Pay apps, freemium etc.
It depends on the specific app. Some are better with an ad based revenue model, some are better when sold. European car navigation apps used to sell well. On the other hand, some simple flashlight apps with ads have also done well. So you can make money either way, and which way depends on the circumstances.
I should also say I have seen some new developers release their first app as paid and they make few if any sales. Unless you already have existing business knowledge of a specific area, for most new Android developers, they are usually better off releasing their first app quickly and for free.