Our latest side project was specifically built to have as little operating costs as possible (while still delivering a kick-ass service). We were lucky enough to break even about 14 days after launch.
I've had a start up for about 1.5 years now and we are covering our bills plus salary for a contractor. We are still growing and since this is bootstrapped, it will be a long road. But we just released a hacker news equivalent to our niche market just yesterday and are already receiving rave reviews. So we are doing great things for our market, so hopefully things will keep looking up.
My personal side project, a MUD client for iPhone and iPad, is not even remotely profitable. That's right: online multiplayer text-based games. There are still thousands of them online today, set in fantasy, sci-fi, absurdist, and many other worlds!
I knew before I started that it wouldn't make much money. That's not why I wrote it; I wrote it because I wanted this app for myself.
It expands to fill much of my free time, driving my ROI even further negative, but I sure do enjoy it. :)
I first learned to program when I was 11 or 12 years old because I was playing MUDs and wanted one of my own so I could implement features and ideas I had. Best of luck. :)
I think I can also attribute my initial interest in programming to MUDs. Funny how, all these years later, they still give me satisfaction albeit through a much different tech stack. :)
I created my first Ruby on Rails SAAS few years ago. My goal was to earn $5 and call it done. But within 2 hours I made $12 and I was ecstatic. That year I made $2000 from the site. My overall expense was just hosting on Linode and time I took to learn Rails and develop it.
I no longer run the business actively as it was very hard to reach the ideal market.
I'm a solo founder on www.rocketlease.com, which gives landlords an online rental application for screening prospective tenants.
It's profitable but my total investment still probably hasn't been recovered. I'm probably just over ramen profitable at this point.
It's been about 2 years since I started focusing seriously on it around jan 2012), it got to around cash flow breakeven in q3 2013. I haven't received any outside investment.
I write quite publicly about it and am happy to answer questions for anyone curious.
Thanks giulianob. Added it to my ticket list to check :)
That is probably not very good since IE usage is disproportionately high among my customer base (side note, I'm going to check my conversion stats by browser now...)
Wow, good for you, I'm impressed. A quick Google search indicates that's a very competitive space (probably an understatement). What is your approach to marketing?
As a landlord you're trying to reach, I'm curious how you're getting the word out. As a developer, I'm curious what you've found most effective.
Getting the word out: honest and probably in satisfying answer is that it's a huge slog. As an engineer, I kept looking for automated solutions that would be scalable and elegant.
All the "growth hacking" talk out there makes you want to search for the "one secret trick" or the better placed share button, but for Rocket Lease I did/am doing just tons of unscalable, schleppy, inelegant stuff.
I personally have made thousands of cold calls, found property management companies with errors on their websites and offered to fix them for free to get a conversation started, tried tons of online ad channels (Adwords converts for me now, but I can't buy that many clicks profitably and the viable keyword space is smaller than expected). Flyers, postcards, calling brokers and taking them out to lunch....
Basically all the elegant automated stuff I wanted to happen didn't.
Dogged persistence has been the biggest winner to date. It's gotten easier and with domain age and more back links I'm starting to do better in organic search but it's still not that much (~70 hits a day). With more customers now I have some social proof and I'm starting to get more recommendations in but I think the tipping point for when that becomes a meaningful growth driver is still a ways away.
Oh, and customer service. Unreasonably good customer service. Not because I have to but because I obsess about my business, I personally get to support tickets really fast, try to personally connect with the customer and understand their needs and figure out how to help them.
If I think rocket lease isn't the best fit for their needs, I'll tell them and recommend them to a better suited competitor (this happens if, for example, the landlord wants online rent payments built in to the same system).
Landlords really appreciate the quality service and personal attention. This is typically only necessary early on, and after the customer has used it a few times, it's pretty much auto pilot and they're a customer for life because of the great on boarding experience.
There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.
I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.
It's too early to tell for me. My mvp proof-of-concept was front page on HN and has had a ton of signups, but the manual payment process I'm using really sucks and no one has actually paid yet.
I'm currently writing the automated backend to enforce payment (along with some improvements), and then we'll see how much revenue it brings in.
I'm building http://test.gmbl.io as a side project - it'll be a nice stats site, I mainly built it for my own use and then decided to make it accessible on the web, rather than just replacing my spreadsheets. Might monetise it eventually, but I just want to finish it off in the end.
(Excuse the designed-with-a-potato look, the prototype designs are at http://test.gmbl.io/static/prototype/1/index.html though!)
Edit: worth pointing out, I learned to code building this the last 4/5 months in my spare time.
Double edit: Eh, it's pretty clearly Definitely Not Finished. Lots of placeholder text and stuff, but yeah.
As a soccer fan, this makes me happy! When do you expect to finish? I would love to use this as a back-end API for a couple of app ideas I have. By the way the data side of the business is pretty tough to break into. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, absolutely tough to get into. I'm using some free resources right now (football-data.co.uk in particular), but would like to pull more information - the Betfair API in particular is a mess, and Opta are ludicrously expensive - c£8-10k a season. Actually might have public beta in a couple of weeks, I'm just going to put the prototype layouts into Django templates, and then troubleshoot. Want me to ping you an email when we're doing a soft launch?
(PS: If you know anywhere that has a free, REST/JSON livescore API, that would be grand...)
Thanks for the link. I have used an RSS based feed by a gent in the UK and he was charging about 20euros/month for the feed. It has been two years and I cannot get the link. Will keep looking for it.
Nope, probably not ever going to be profitable, but I barely have any operating costs either. My project is called Simple Blocker, and it's an extension for Chrome that lets you block websites to help you concentrate. It was designed to be as simple as can be (hence the name), while still having all the essential features.
I don't really have any plans to monetize it, and I think asking for donations is a bit tacky. But who knows - it's good practice with Javascript and the Chrome API even if it never breaks even.
@bigmario
I used your extension and liked it. (I'm currently trying a different one). I don't think it's tacky to put up a donate button. I'm happy to throw a cup of coffee amount to free apps. There's even a few that I use often where I donate yearly during the holidays.
Since building stuff is both a career and a hobby, I've always had 3 types of "projects":
* One or more services that are intended to make money. Some of them never make it; I've more failed ideas under my belt than winners. But the winners really win and pay for all the time spent on the rest; Improvely and W3Counter are doing really well and provide a comfortable lifestyle financially.
* Projects that are never intended to make a profit. I have a few open source libraries used by thousands, but I never intended to build any business around them, and I don't ask for donations. One did once generate so much customer support e-mail and customization requests that I made a commercial version that sold well, but I was never passionate about it so I ended up selling the rights and probably wouldn't bother doing that again.
* Projects that I know full well will run at a loss, but I build them anyway for various reasons, from "it's fun" to "maybe it'll be good marketing for the paid stuff". I've hosted website guestbooks for people since 1996. I run the contact form and some other widgets for about 4000 Shopify e-commerce stores, which costs a VPS and some Mandrill/Sendgrid fees to send a few thousand e-mails a day. I just felt like hacking on their API.
I built a security scanner that scans WordPress installations for threats (plugin vulns, outdated installs, theme vulns, xss, sqli etc) without any installation or code knowledge required. I posted it on Reddit and got a few sign ups, after that I just got bored and I'm not sure what to do next. I'm thinking about partnering with WordPress tutorial websites and give them a recurring revenue cut or something. I really wish I was better at marketing products. Maybe I should just sell it or something. Any WordPress related websites with good amount of traffic please contact me if you're interested in partnering.
http://ridewithgps.com - now supporting four full time employees with competitive salaries for Portland. Looking to be 6-5 by end of year. All bootstrapped, all subscription revenue. Lucked out that a hobby project in our niche could be profitable (the demographic for cyclist is pretty amazing, 40+ years old, lots disposable income, used to spending a bunch on their hobby)
We bootstrapped our SaaS company (www.cbinsights.com) and while profitability is not a goal as we reinvest any excess back into hiring, technology, etc, we're doing 7-figures of annual recurring revenue.
We launched 4 years ago with 3 folks and should be 20 by this summer assuming we find the right folks (we're 15 now). Just hired our first biz dev guy a couple of months ago. I'd sold the first couple of million in subscriptions. While I'm not sure if we should have hired a BD guy sooner, my co-founder and I did feel like we needed to understand the sales process first.
The good news is that I'm pretty far from a natural salesperson so if we get this product into the hands of someone who really knows how to sell, we'll be on an even better path. That said, I brought a really solid understanding of the product to sales calls which def helped us.
It's been a great and rocky road. We're about to reach escape velocity I think, and I'm really looking forward to that.
As an aside, I try to convene a group of bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs for lunch/dinner periodically to exchange ideas/tips/help one another so if you fit the bill and are based in or near NYC or going to be in NYC, please reach out. (details in profile)
We're not religious about bootstrapping. We may raise funding at some point but want to do it when we find the perfect partner(s) whose interests are aligned with ours. Ultimately, we think bootstrapping and building the company up to be real gives us leverage down the road, i.e., we're not raising money to survive or test a hypothesis but to put more fuel in the tank so we can accelerate growth.
Because of what we do, our 1 requirement is that they have o have been a customer of the product. We need believers :)
We'll see. Right now, the focus remains squarely on the product, customers and the team. Thanks for the kind words.
I'm the founder of http://oregonlaws.org which is Ramen profitable. And now I'm revving up v2 to do the rest of the U.S. Since Oregon is just 1% of the U.S. population, I'm optimistic. But I'm tired of the slow bootstrapping pace and starting to look for funding.
Meanwhile I'm spinning off an internal tool for black-box testing web apps. It should launch today: http://think200.com/beta But I really don't know what to expect.
I run level09.com, I do services for web/mobile for around 10 clients, I work full time with another company, and I create a lot of side projects (propertify.me, uaeboard, getanymp3.com, flasharabia.com etc ..) I also invest in bitcoin.
I think this year I should be able to make around 180k, but life is getting tricky with all those tasks.
My first start-up http://moodpanda.com gets donations that covers the hosting and runnings costs and helps hundreds of thousands of people, which is fine with me.
My brand new start-up http://crowdscore.io is targeted at mid to large business's so is going to need quite a bit of cash to get traction, I've had some early interest but I think its going to be a much harder sell than my first.
My brother and I have been working on http://rukus.io for the past year. We've gone from a super simple linear rendering proof-of-concept to an architecture that scales to millions of renders/month. We're not living off this income quite yet, but we haven't given up any equity or taken any funding.
This has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding things I've ever done despite having to make some serious sacrifices. Even if we don't succeed financially, my personal growth has been reward enough.
I built a stock screener to calculate the present value based on the past five to ten years of owner earnings for myself and family members. On a whim I put ads on the articles explaining how to use it. It's modestly profitable:
I launched fbmusicgate.com a facebook musician fan page app about a month ago and have a handful of paid subscribers and a lot of free users. Haven't reached enough to cover all the expenses yet but hoping to reach that milestone this week. Averaging about 17% weekly growth rate. Just have to figure out how to turn the free users into paying users.
We bootstrapped our products Codiqa and Jetstrap (http://drifty.com/) to profitability in 2013 with a team of 7 (though we just closed a funding round a few days ago).
In hindsight we could have gotten there a lot faster if we actually charged earlier and had a better signup/payment model. Oh well, lessons learned!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadI knew before I started that it wouldn't make much money. That's not why I wrote it; I wrote it because I wanted this app for myself.
It expands to fill much of my free time, driving my ROI even further negative, but I sure do enjoy it. :)
By Great Odin's Beard, a free copy! http://tokn.co/msvuyzp8
I have also open-sourced many of its iOS bits: https://github.com/splinesoft
My favourite past-time is game development, nothing of value is produced, but I enjoy doing it and I learn more about writing software and OpenGL!
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
its still there! http://www.residencymail.com
It's profitable but my total investment still probably hasn't been recovered. I'm probably just over ramen profitable at this point.
It's been about 2 years since I started focusing seriously on it around jan 2012), it got to around cash flow breakeven in q3 2013. I haven't received any outside investment.
I write quite publicly about it and am happy to answer questions for anyone curious.
http://blog.ezliu.com/rocket-lease-update-sep-2013/
That is probably not very good since IE usage is disproportionately high among my customer base (side note, I'm going to check my conversion stats by browser now...)
As a landlord you're trying to reach, I'm curious how you're getting the word out. As a developer, I'm curious what you've found most effective.
All the "growth hacking" talk out there makes you want to search for the "one secret trick" or the better placed share button, but for Rocket Lease I did/am doing just tons of unscalable, schleppy, inelegant stuff.
I personally have made thousands of cold calls, found property management companies with errors on their websites and offered to fix them for free to get a conversation started, tried tons of online ad channels (Adwords converts for me now, but I can't buy that many clicks profitably and the viable keyword space is smaller than expected). Flyers, postcards, calling brokers and taking them out to lunch....
Basically all the elegant automated stuff I wanted to happen didn't.
Dogged persistence has been the biggest winner to date. It's gotten easier and with domain age and more back links I'm starting to do better in organic search but it's still not that much (~70 hits a day). With more customers now I have some social proof and I'm starting to get more recommendations in but I think the tipping point for when that becomes a meaningful growth driver is still a ways away.
Oh, and customer service. Unreasonably good customer service. Not because I have to but because I obsess about my business, I personally get to support tickets really fast, try to personally connect with the customer and understand their needs and figure out how to help them.
If I think rocket lease isn't the best fit for their needs, I'll tell them and recommend them to a better suited competitor (this happens if, for example, the landlord wants online rent payments built in to the same system).
Landlords really appreciate the quality service and personal attention. This is typically only necessary early on, and after the customer has used it a few times, it's pretty much auto pilot and they're a customer for life because of the great on boarding experience.
There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.
I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.
I'm currently writing the automated backend to enforce payment (along with some improvements), and then we'll see how much revenue it brings in.
http://www.manualviableproduct.com
May I suggest a 7 or 14 day trial, then prompting people to pay once they're invested in your site?
I don't want to pay without trying :/ but might be lazy in 14 days and let a few automatic payments slip through the cracks to your service.
Edit: worth pointing out, I learned to code building this the last 4/5 months in my spare time.
Double edit: Eh, it's pretty clearly Definitely Not Finished. Lots of placeholder text and stuff, but yeah.
http://test.gmbl.io/matches/Arsenal/Newcastle/
(PS: If you know anywhere that has a free, REST/JSON livescore API, that would be grand...)
I don't really have any plans to monetize it, and I think asking for donations is a bit tacky. But who knows - it's good practice with Javascript and the Chrome API even if it never breaks even.
http://simpleblocker.com/
* One or more services that are intended to make money. Some of them never make it; I've more failed ideas under my belt than winners. But the winners really win and pay for all the time spent on the rest; Improvely and W3Counter are doing really well and provide a comfortable lifestyle financially.
* Projects that are never intended to make a profit. I have a few open source libraries used by thousands, but I never intended to build any business around them, and I don't ask for donations. One did once generate so much customer support e-mail and customization requests that I made a commercial version that sold well, but I was never passionate about it so I ended up selling the rights and probably wouldn't bother doing that again.
* Projects that I know full well will run at a loss, but I build them anyway for various reasons, from "it's fun" to "maybe it'll be good marketing for the paid stuff". I've hosted website guestbooks for people since 1996. I run the contact form and some other widgets for about 4000 Shopify e-commerce stores, which costs a VPS and some Mandrill/Sendgrid fees to send a few thousand e-mails a day. I just felt like hacking on their API.
If you're doing it to obfuscate for spammers, then hyphens is the better bet.
We launched 4 years ago with 3 folks and should be 20 by this summer assuming we find the right folks (we're 15 now). Just hired our first biz dev guy a couple of months ago. I'd sold the first couple of million in subscriptions. While I'm not sure if we should have hired a BD guy sooner, my co-founder and I did feel like we needed to understand the sales process first.
The good news is that I'm pretty far from a natural salesperson so if we get this product into the hands of someone who really knows how to sell, we'll be on an even better path. That said, I brought a really solid understanding of the product to sales calls which def helped us.
It's been a great and rocky road. We're about to reach escape velocity I think, and I'm really looking forward to that.
As an aside, I try to convene a group of bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs for lunch/dinner periodically to exchange ideas/tips/help one another so if you fit the bill and are based in or near NYC or going to be in NYC, please reach out. (details in profile)
We're not religious about bootstrapping. We may raise funding at some point but want to do it when we find the perfect partner(s) whose interests are aligned with ours. Ultimately, we think bootstrapping and building the company up to be real gives us leverage down the road, i.e., we're not raising money to survive or test a hypothesis but to put more fuel in the tank so we can accelerate growth.
Because of what we do, our 1 requirement is that they have o have been a customer of the product. We need believers :)
We'll see. Right now, the focus remains squarely on the product, customers and the team. Thanks for the kind words.
Meanwhile I'm spinning off an internal tool for black-box testing web apps. It should launch today: http://think200.com/beta But I really don't know what to expect.
I think this year I should be able to make around 180k, but life is getting tricky with all those tasks.
My brand new start-up http://crowdscore.io is targeted at mid to large business's so is going to need quite a bit of cash to get traction, I've had some early interest but I think its going to be a much harder sell than my first.
This has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding things I've ever done despite having to make some serious sacrifices. Even if we don't succeed financially, my personal growth has been reward enough.
http://trendshare.org/how-to-invest/
It amuses me that most of the revenue comes from warning people about the risks of penny stocks.
If it had 10x-100x the number of users, it might be worth trying to turn a profit. For now, it's just a side project.
In hindsight we could have gotten there a lot faster if we actually charged earlier and had a better signup/payment model. Oh well, lessons learned!