Right now only about $300 a month but it is fairly passive. I also do freelance work and sell other products.
I recently started using Google AdWords as so far I've done very little marketing. Hopefully AdWords can improve that number into something far more impressive.
I'm also building a couple of other websites which I think have potential to make a lot of money but they will take a while longer yet.
It's my ultimate goal to build a sustainable living from software products online. I think it's a realistic, yet very difficult goal but I'm enjoying the challenge!
It's a few products actually, mainly aimed at small businesses who need web software. My main product is http://paymentsplugin.com which gets most of the sales. I enjoy putting products together though, some hit, others miss. It's good practice on the sales and marketing side of things too as I'm mostly a developer.
Interesting product, how well is selling through envato working for you? I've looked at it before but the rates seemed a little too much for new members.
It's a tough trade-off really. Envato have millions of members so I get regular sales but the commission rates are very unfavorable. I'm working on moving some of my more popular products from Envato marketplaces and onto my own websites. It's a slow process though as I want to keep the benefits of the traffic from Envato throughout. Plus I'm still learning with regards to internet marketing and can't hope to attract the types of traffic Envato can bring me.
I started it three years ago with a single web page and an email-me-when-it's-ready form. I barely got enough emails (50-60) in the first couple months to justify moving forward. But I did, with three designs and a simple design-by-form interface. Fast forward to today and I have dozens of templates and a custom drag and drop interface done in canvas. I have a pretty good conversion rate given that I only get ~90 uniques per day.
It's interesting that you have adwords on your homepage. Does it bring in any revenue? To me it detracts from the overall look of the site. I just Googled custom cupcake design and you are 4th, maybe there just aren't that many people after the service?
I plastered them all over the site in an experiment to see if I could move to 100% ad based monitization since so many visitors are just looking for free printables, but they only make like $50/mo. So I need to remove them. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. The whole site is just a playground at this point since the search volume indicates I'm close to maxing out the potential revenue. My next move is to package the technology as Custom Designed Printable X for your business and sell it along with a setup and maintenance fee.
I created http://www.twimemachine.com. Costs only about $6 a month to run (S3 static costs). And I make between $70 - $100 a month from just the one ad box on it. Pocket money that usually goes into buying some more Bitcoin.
I basically started it to get away from Hostgator which along with other providers started to oversell anything under the sun and presented gradually degraded speed and quality of service.
So I got dedicated server to myself and fully configured it for hosting needs including automated iptables-based firewall protection and malware protection.
Then i sent emails to my past web. dev clients out of which a few signed up.
Right off the bat I started to offer malware protection for which site5 charges $30+/mo (10 sites max) and thevault.com charges $40/mo (1 site).
I offer everything for $25/mo, unlimited sites, no BS, firewall, complete malware detection/protection, daily account-wide, off-site (off-continent actually) backups for which I renting specialized service in another country.
Originally I was hoping to just cover my costs but it started to become profitable already - so I plan to boost this side of effort.
People do see value in this where they feel protected and having fast service without doing anything.
Currently https://www.photographer.io is costing me about £100 a month to run, as its income is only via referrals to Digital Ocean until I add a subscription model. I've been holding off for a few months as I don't feel happy charging for something which I still feel is incomplete; at what point do other people feel happy charging users for their products?
I'm thinking of offering early adopters a significant discount for helping pay for the costs whilst the site develops, as it's nowhere near the point where I'd be happy charging a similar amount to Flickr/500px yet. However the popularity of the project has helped me out personally; I've been offered a number of jobs due to my increased visibility as a developer.
> I don't feel happy charging for something which I still feel is incomplete
If you're like me, you'll never feel like it's complete. But, is it useful?
I'd suggest charging now or very soon. Early adopters who are willing to use an incomplete service want that service to grow and be around. Charging them a nominal fee increases the changes of that happening.
I hope it's useful! It seems to have a small number of dedicated users right now, a number of whom have said they'd like to support the site. I think I'm going to aim to get subscriptions in within the next month.
I must admit that one reason why I've been putting it off is having to finish setting up the business side of things. I probably can't put off figuring out my accounting much longer :D
It feels like I've seen photographer.io for a while now. It isn't my bag but I'm honestly surprised you aren't making anything yet. It seems long overdue, honestly. I think the other advice is perfect and to some users, they may not see value until you put a price on it you can live with.
I must admit that it has mostly been my laziness, mixed with a variety of real-life situations (girlfriend finishing her PhD, me having a tonsillectomy etc), which have delayed me adding paid account support. I'm finally back into the swing of updating it now and I'm aiming to get paid accounts in within the next couple of months at the latest. I'd be happy if the site just made enough to keep itself running, to be honest.
> I don't feel happy charging for something which I still feel is incomplete
It's not so much a question of what you feel happy charging for, as what your customers are happy paying for. The only way to find out is to add paid tiers and see what happens. You can always round out the feature set by adding additional 'premium' features to the paid tiers - free upgrades for paying customers!
Aye I have a number of features planned which will need subscriptions. One of them is the ability to host your own portfolio site on the platform, which I'm planning to add fairly soon as I need it for my brother's and father's websites :D
Always charge and set your price high unless your running a freemium model. Its much easier to lower your price than raise it. And if your customers pay and are upset you can always refund them.
The product looks pretty good imo. You should start charging soon.
Btw, which one of DigitalOcean's cloud servers are you using? Did you find it reliable for a startup? Also, do you mind telling how many users you have?
Thanks! The current server setup is: 2x2GB servers (web+workers), 2x1GB servers (DB & replicated backup), 2x512MB servers (one HAProxy loadbalancer, one running redis & memcached). All running a fairly recent version of Ubuntu, based in the Netherlands datacentre. I could run it on fewer servers but I like to separate out the roles so a failure in one place doesn't take everything down.
For the first month reliability was a bit spotty but for the past 3/4 months it has been really reliable. The only problems I had at first were network latency which they seem to have resolved now.
I'm happy to answer pretty much any questions about my projects! There are currently 1687 users. Signups go in bursts when I promote the site; once I've got a number of improvements done over the next month or so I'm going to try to promote it again.
I'm also really excited by what other people are doing with the codebase. There's a chap in Japan who's managed to get it running for his figurine fan website, which is impressive mostly because my documentation is so shockingly bad :D
Thanks for the detailed answer. ;) That's a good number of users. You shouldn't have any trouble at all getting your first paying customers. All the best. :)
My side project http://www.browser-details.com is doing about $100/month right now. I haven't started to do any marketing yet as I want to give it a small makeover before.
It started as a tool for my company so I know there's a need for it - not sure yet how to best market it, though.
Chose bad backend provider. Thought I'd use Parse.com for a quick start. Ended up rewriting the whole thing to plain node. But until I have time to write it all, parse is cashing in on me. After that, It'd probably go down to around 30 bucks.
Visiting in chrome and firefox yields me an issue with your certificate and a large warning about how your site is potentially unsafe. That may be an issue with your certificate.
It also may be a reason for poor returns if this has been going on for a long term.
Making 500 Euro per month and after expenses I am making 450 euro . My first customer and 110 customers in beta list which I am going to starting releasing beta next week . here is the product . http://bit.ly/HDcvfA
got 2 freelancers , but as a founder , I am alone. I am a 2 time failed entrepreneur and both times Investors rejected my startup just bcoz I am a single founder, but still fighting alone to show what a one person can do :)
it is making absolutely zero money (yet), but the engagement on the site is INSANE. also, the site itself, and the people who come to it (and email/tweet/blog/instagram/vine/smoke signals/carrier pigeon/etc about it) are passionate and willing to support craft beer.
besides the benefit of interacting with super cool, kick-ass people who love craft beer, i've also been in touch with some breweries who are wanting to partner on a multitude of things, and i've been invited to come brew a batch at a few of them, with the head brewers!
so to summarize:
• making no money on this side project.
• not losing any money on this side project.
• over 75 million hits since launch, over 1 million people and over 50 million suggestions every month.
• fuckloads of fun interacting with the craft beer lovers and the craft beer world.
• the amount of engagement the site has will help support the next phase which will make money :)
well... did you? if not, go ahead, then report back.
but really, it's not an exhaustive list as there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of beers and new ones getting all of the time, so I'll make sure to add it. and like it says on the site, shoot an email if you've got suggestion ;)
you're broken.
the actual beer is called "Mephistopheles' Stout" if you typed that in, it will offer congratulations and offer to fuck your face. and even if you were to just type in "Mephistopheles" it would want to hang the fuck out with you.
if on the other hand you typed in "Mephistopheles Stout" you would of course not have entered the name of the beer, and you would be rightly told that you are an inspiration for birth control (or other such wonderful life lessons)
or at the end of it, you can be like the others who get it and realize, it's vulgar insults and vulgar encouragements that helps suggest craft beers to drink after you're done drinking the one you're currently on. either way, thanks for looking and taking the time to type in your beer to see if a shitty website approves of your (mostly) shitty life choices :)
but did it swear at you in an endearing way, like wanting to fuck your forehead? or did it swear at you saying you were a dick bag? because there is swearing in a site that has the word "fucking" in the domain ;)
ps: i typed in "sweet action" and it went all green for me. i submit to the jury exhibit B that clearly shows that ANDREW RITCHIE can not fucking type!
but how about you go drink a sixpoint and then take one of the suggestions it's thrown at ya?! enjoy a good fucking beer tonight :)
the site is called "should i drink this fucking beer ?" not "should i drink this fucking beer by this brewery?" ;)
typing "Dale's Pale Ale" brings forth the lovely foamy compliments i so desire in a green, hoppy, insulting website. go give it a shot and you'll feel warm and fuzzy (from the website, not just the beer)
so tonight, i raise my bottle of pliny to you and tomorrow i shall raise my can of heady topper to you. for you will have checked out a site about beer. and typed your shit correctly.
So, after it got mad about me putting in Bud Light or whatever, it suggested "HOFBRAUHAUS BERCHTESGADEN JUBILÄUMSBIER", which I then copied and pasted back into it. Instead of telling me to fuck off, it just blue screened and hung there forever. If you replace the fancy "Ä" in there with an "A", then it will not get stuck but still tell you to to fuck off.
Zero now. Was a time when I was making $100/mo from ads on my free Android app (took the ads off, now it's just free as in free) and I sold another Android app for $2.5k. Those were my first two software projects ever so it was some awesome feedback, convinced me to get a CS degree.
The idea was to get content for the main website so that it would make money. I've got over 2000 recipes now but traffic is still under 1000 hits a day so I've still not tried to monetise the main website.
I've now started to develop a job recruitment website as I can see that earning money a lot easier. Other sites in the niche have 10 job postings a day each and charge on average my prices which would mean £1000 a day. I just need to solve the recruiter / applicant traffic problem... http://www.platejobs.com/
Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) passed $10k/mo RR not too long ago and is about a year old. I run several other SaaS sites with a couple thousand a month in revenue each. It's enough that I never regret turning down the standing job offers I had at the end of college 3 years ago.
Nothing really compared to the short-lived but very successful WordPress plugins I used to build and sell. A few days' work could turn into the equivalent of a year's salary. One had over $250,000 in sales in 18 months before I sold rights to it for another $90,000 to another company. I don't work with WordPress much anymore, and don't have much motivation to force myself back into that ecosystem to sell more plugins. It just wasn't as fun as running live services that handle lots of users and lots of data.
I'm selling Wordpress plugins right now with nothing near the same success as you. Do you think it's a market that is too saturated to achieve the level of sales you saw?
I'd also love to hear how you managed to attract the number of users to your website that gave you over $250k in sales? It's something I'm having trouble with right now and any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
True. My thoughts too which is why I got into doing this about 6 months ago but since I've only had limited success I've had a few doubts recently.
I wish I could find a really good online marketing guide. One aimed at developers would be perfect. It seems there is no shortage of "learn programming" resources out there but marketing courses always seem so scammy.
What about a job at Google, Facebook or Twitter would be better? If you think they're strictly better, there must be some huge downside to my lifestyle I mentioned that I don't see. They offer worse hours, less pay, less autonomy, higher cost of living, and they're on the wrong end of the country if I want to keep close ties to relatives.
The compensation at these is substantially better than what you've mentioned. Some offer regional offices around the country and world. I can see how the extra autonomy and reduced workload would be nice, but I'm not sure you can judge without trying both.
Glassdoor/Salary.com say an experienced Google software engineer makes $150k/year (including benefits and bonuses). That'd be a big pay cut. So would paying more to rent a one-bedroom apartment out there than I pay to mortgage my 4-bedroom detached house. As for "trying both", I have. I did the internship rounds while in college. Spent 6 months on the west coast with Microsoft, and a year at two smaller companies, as a full-time software engineer.
There's nothing about employment I miss. You could double the salary and I wouldn't trade lives with an employee at any of those companies. I wake up in the morning without an alarm, decide what I want to work on, program in my PJs, work as long as I care to, answer a few customer e-mails, and I'm done for the day. Some days I flip the schedule and shop/socialize/veg in the morning/afternoon, then work late at night. If I want a day or a month off, I just take it.
If I'm building something new, like the two months or so I spent on Improvely, I probably work about 4 hours a day, which is the most number of productive hours I ever got while working for someone else 8 hours a day. That's 1300 hours a year of time wasted on commutes, meetings, endless e-mails, employee reviews, forced socialization with coworkers, and kissing up to managers so you rank well for bonuses and get better projects. Ugh.
There is one downside to what I do. I'm on call to keep the servers running 24/7. That means I pay for some monitoring that can SMS me if something fails, and I carry a Surface Pro in the trunk of my car so that even if I'm away from home I can get to a computer. It's a once-a-year type responsibility. Had a hard drive crash in one server this year, and a power supply pooped out last year. Not a terrible burden.
PageBlox (https://www.pageblox.com/) earns about $300 a month and is growing steadily... The hardest part has been SEO and marketing, something I am still quite new at.
Around $150-300/mo. with http://testyourvocab.com from Google AdSense. Tells you the size of your English vocabulary. And it was HN which popularized it in the first place!
just checked out your site, i think its decent it would be great if you made it easier to tick the words, its difficult to pin point and click too many check boxes
I make around $600 per month on http://www.binpress.com. I sell 6 software components for iOS. Most of them were component that I had already developed for other projects. I just tidied them up and made them available for purchase. The income's very passive - max 2 hours a week. Here's a link to my profile: http://www.binpress.com/profile/ben-smiley/14290
Fan of the Week plugin for Facebook pages. It chooses one fan each week and highlights them, kind of like an employee of the month. http://www.fanpageapps.com/
Last month made $474.85 from premium upgrades, $152.53 from ads. The servers cost $144.63.
The app has been added to 601,409 Facebook pages so far. For each of these pages I do a weekly dance with FB to look at their feed, see if access tokens are still valid for automatic posting etc., so it makes for a pretty interesting server usage pattern. http://i.imgur.com/Q1WylAY.png
Bugrocket (https://bugrocket.com, since March 2011, bug tracking for small dev teams) is subscription-based and grows slowly, currently around $500/month in revenue.
CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net, since December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales) is a lot less consistent but growing faster, currently $300-$400/month in revenue.
SimpleCrew (http://www.SimpleCrew.com - a mobile photo app for businesses, real estate investors, marketing street teams, etc...) is earning $1,600/mo RR right now... ~35 customers averaging just under $50/mo per customer.
The number isn't enough to support us in the US yet, but it excites us regardless because of its implications. Between the revenue and usage (weekly photo totals are consistently up and to the right) we believe we're on a reliable path to financial sustainability with this one:
Assuming ARPU stays at $50, we're earning 6 figures per founder (ignoring costs, just revenue) at just 333 customers, and we'll reach 7-figure earnings at 1,666 customers.
Those numbers are completely doable! God bless the economics of monthly recurring revenue, and DHH for spelling it out so clearly in his Startup School '08 presi (on YouTube). I can say without irony that that video has deeply influenced the course of my life.
Watch out for patents in the US. I worked on a similar MVP for a client a few years ago and he did some patent research and did not move forward because of what he found.
197 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadI recently started using Google AdWords as so far I've done very little marketing. Hopefully AdWords can improve that number into something far more impressive.
I'm also building a couple of other websites which I think have potential to make a lot of money but they will take a while longer yet.
It's my ultimate goal to build a sustainable living from software products online. I think it's a realistic, yet very difficult goal but I'm enjoying the challenge!
I started it three years ago with a single web page and an email-me-when-it's-ready form. I barely got enough emails (50-60) in the first couple months to justify moving forward. But I did, with three designs and a simple design-by-form interface. Fast forward to today and I have dozens of templates and a custom drag and drop interface done in canvas. I have a pretty good conversion rate given that I only get ~90 uniques per day.
- Run hosting company that just became slightly profitable.
~$110/mo fully passive affiliate commissions for referrals to recurring membership businesses.
- Looking to enter into personal development niche.
So I got dedicated server to myself and fully configured it for hosting needs including automated iptables-based firewall protection and malware protection. Then i sent emails to my past web. dev clients out of which a few signed up.
Right off the bat I started to offer malware protection for which site5 charges $30+/mo (10 sites max) and thevault.com charges $40/mo (1 site).
I offer everything for $25/mo, unlimited sites, no BS, firewall, complete malware detection/protection, daily account-wide, off-site (off-continent actually) backups for which I renting specialized service in another country.
Originally I was hoping to just cover my costs but it started to become profitable already - so I plan to boost this side of effort.
People do see value in this where they feel protected and having fast service without doing anything.
I'm thinking of offering early adopters a significant discount for helping pay for the costs whilst the site develops, as it's nowhere near the point where I'd be happy charging a similar amount to Flickr/500px yet. However the popularity of the project has helped me out personally; I've been offered a number of jobs due to my increased visibility as a developer.
If you're like me, you'll never feel like it's complete. But, is it useful?
I'd suggest charging now or very soon. Early adopters who are willing to use an incomplete service want that service to grow and be around. Charging them a nominal fee increases the changes of that happening.
I must admit that one reason why I've been putting it off is having to finish setting up the business side of things. I probably can't put off figuring out my accounting much longer :D
Thanks for the advice!
It's not so much a question of what you feel happy charging for, as what your customers are happy paying for. The only way to find out is to add paid tiers and see what happens. You can always round out the feature set by adding additional 'premium' features to the paid tiers - free upgrades for paying customers!
For the first month reliability was a bit spotty but for the past 3/4 months it has been really reliable. The only problems I had at first were network latency which they seem to have resolved now.
I'm happy to answer pretty much any questions about my projects! There are currently 1687 users. Signups go in bursts when I promote the site; once I've got a number of improvements done over the next month or so I'm going to try to promote it again.
I'm also really excited by what other people are doing with the codebase. There's a chap in Japan who's managed to get it running for his figurine fan website, which is impressive mostly because my documentation is so shockingly bad :D
It started as a tool for my company so I know there's a need for it - not sure yet how to best market it, though.
It also may be a reason for poor returns if this has been going on for a long term.
http://ShouldIDrinkThisFuckingBeer.com
it is making absolutely zero money (yet), but the engagement on the site is INSANE. also, the site itself, and the people who come to it (and email/tweet/blog/instagram/vine/smoke signals/carrier pigeon/etc about it) are passionate and willing to support craft beer.
besides the benefit of interacting with super cool, kick-ass people who love craft beer, i've also been in touch with some breweries who are wanting to partner on a multitude of things, and i've been invited to come brew a batch at a few of them, with the head brewers!
so to summarize:
• making no money on this side project.
• not losing any money on this side project.
• over 75 million hits since launch, over 1 million people and over 50 million suggestions every month.
• fuckloads of fun interacting with the craft beer lovers and the craft beer world.
• the amount of engagement the site has will help support the next phase which will make money :)
• ...
• profit!!
but really, it's not an exhaustive list as there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of beers and new ones getting all of the time, so I'll make sure to add it. and like it says on the site, shoot an email if you've got suggestion ;)
Definitely broken, VB is worse than sea water.
if on the other hand you typed in "Mephistopheles Stout" you would of course not have entered the name of the beer, and you would be rightly told that you are an inspiration for birth control (or other such wonderful life lessons)
or at the end of it, you can be like the others who get it and realize, it's vulgar insults and vulgar encouragements that helps suggest craft beers to drink after you're done drinking the one you're currently on. either way, thanks for looking and taking the time to type in your beer to see if a shitty website approves of your (mostly) shitty life choices :)
the real question is: why don't you know the beer's actual fucking name?!
THE Crisp (by Sixpoint)
http://sixpoint.com/beers/core/thecrisp
it's even IN the url slug! ;)
ps: i typed in "sweet action" and it went all green for me. i submit to the jury exhibit B that clearly shows that ANDREW RITCHIE can not fucking type!
but how about you go drink a sixpoint and then take one of the suggestions it's thrown at ya?! enjoy a good fucking beer tonight :)
typing "Dale's Pale Ale" brings forth the lovely foamy compliments i so desire in a green, hoppy, insulting website. go give it a shot and you'll feel warm and fuzzy (from the website, not just the beer)
so tonight, i raise my bottle of pliny to you and tomorrow i shall raise my can of heady topper to you. for you will have checked out a site about beer. and typed your shit correctly.
you have broken the system and you should be rewarded for such a thing… go drink a good craft beer and celebrate!
It just mocks whatever you put in and suggests something else?
Or will it actually express approval if you put in something 'good'?
The idea was to get content for the main website so that it would make money. I've got over 2000 recipes now but traffic is still under 1000 hits a day so I've still not tried to monetise the main website.
I've now started to develop a job recruitment website as I can see that earning money a lot easier. Other sites in the niche have 10 job postings a day each and charge on average my prices which would mean £1000 a day. I just need to solve the recruiter / applicant traffic problem... http://www.platejobs.com/
Nothing really compared to the short-lived but very successful WordPress plugins I used to build and sell. A few days' work could turn into the equivalent of a year's salary. One had over $250,000 in sales in 18 months before I sold rights to it for another $90,000 to another company. I don't work with WordPress much anymore, and don't have much motivation to force myself back into that ecosystem to sell more plugins. It just wasn't as fun as running live services that handle lots of users and lots of data.
I'm selling Wordpress plugins right now with nothing near the same success as you. Do you think it's a market that is too saturated to achieve the level of sales you saw?
I'd also love to hear how you managed to attract the number of users to your website that gave you over $250k in sales? It's something I'm having trouble with right now and any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
Not at all. There are thousands of plugins, but there are 72 million WordPress sites.
I wish I could find a really good online marketing guide. One aimed at developers would be perfect. It seems there is no shortage of "learn programming" resources out there but marketing courses always seem so scammy.
For anyone interested, I'm guessing this is it...
http://flippa.com/blog/dan-grossman-on-selling-wpreviewsite-...
There's nothing about employment I miss. You could double the salary and I wouldn't trade lives with an employee at any of those companies. I wake up in the morning without an alarm, decide what I want to work on, program in my PJs, work as long as I care to, answer a few customer e-mails, and I'm done for the day. Some days I flip the schedule and shop/socialize/veg in the morning/afternoon, then work late at night. If I want a day or a month off, I just take it.
If I'm building something new, like the two months or so I spent on Improvely, I probably work about 4 hours a day, which is the most number of productive hours I ever got while working for someone else 8 hours a day. That's 1300 hours a year of time wasted on commutes, meetings, endless e-mails, employee reviews, forced socialization with coworkers, and kissing up to managers so you rank well for bonuses and get better projects. Ugh.
There is one downside to what I do. I'm on call to keep the servers running 24/7. That means I pay for some monitoring that can SMS me if something fails, and I carry a Surface Pro in the trunk of my car so that even if I'm away from home I can get to a computer. It's a once-a-year type responsibility. Had a hard drive crash in one server this year, and a power supply pooped out last year. Not a terrible burden.
Also, how did you market them?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu... - highly recommended, really good read
Last month made $474.85 from premium upgrades, $152.53 from ads. The servers cost $144.63.
The app has been added to 601,409 Facebook pages so far. For each of these pages I do a weekly dance with FB to look at their feed, see if access tokens are still valid for automatic posting etc., so it makes for a pretty interesting server usage pattern. http://i.imgur.com/Q1WylAY.png
CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net, since December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales) is a lot less consistent but growing faster, currently $300-$400/month in revenue.
The number isn't enough to support us in the US yet, but it excites us regardless because of its implications. Between the revenue and usage (weekly photo totals are consistently up and to the right) we believe we're on a reliable path to financial sustainability with this one:
Assuming ARPU stays at $50, we're earning 6 figures per founder (ignoring costs, just revenue) at just 333 customers, and we'll reach 7-figure earnings at 1,666 customers.
Those numbers are completely doable! God bless the economics of monthly recurring revenue, and DHH for spelling it out so clearly in his Startup School '08 presi (on YouTube). I can say without irony that that video has deeply influenced the course of my life.