Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?
The same thread was started 2 years ago with a follow up last year. I think it's time for a refresh and updates from those who answered before.
Previous threads:
Last Year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603
Year Before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
343 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI think it depends on store positioning too, once i got into the top charts for my section then I got more downloads (or maybe i got there because i got more downloads, i guess it's a rolling ball effect).
I plan to do some more utility ones soon, and i'm working on a bit of a bigger one (health based) now that will hopefully provide more value to people.
I'd be happy to tell you more about it and what i did if you want. My email is in my profile.
https://englishjobs.de/faq#sources
I am also selling paid support and add ons for my open-source Rails engine for Stripe named Payola[2][3], which very recently gained support for subscriptions[4].
[1]: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com
[2]: https://www.payola.io
[3]: https://www.payola.io/pro
[4]: https://www.petekeen.net/payola-subscriptions
Edit: You can read a free preview here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read
Very cool. if you're helping people earn money, they will pay :)
Is the high-end team options selling? Also what it the split between the mid-price and the lowest price?
I'm trying to figure out the pricing for my book[1] so it (a) is dont-need-to-think-about-it-cheap, (b) doesn't devalue the book (if too cheap readers won't trust), and (c) interacts nicely with Amazon who are undercutting me on price. Any tips?
[1] http://minireference.com/static/newsite/ cf. http://minireference.com
Low and mid tiers have sold approximately the same number of copies, which means the mid tier brings in about double the revenue.
Not sure what to tell you about Amazon. I don't sell there because I like taking 97% of my revenue instead of 30%, but for a math textbook maybe it would make sense. Do you market to math tutors? It seems like if you could get tutors on board they would be able to easily sell to their students.
I'm thinking a good partner would be university departments who offer tutoring for free---the incentives would be there since they'll need to hire less tutors.
To setup and collect payments world wide outside those countries is a pain in the ass. Any book on that (or good services) deserve money & success.
[1]: http://www.boku.com
Webhosting: $20 (Mainly just pays for my VPS)
Launching soon: http://gymbrew.com (Subscription box service for protein goodies)
Should people invest? Yes. Should they invest in index funds instead of day-trading? Almost certainly. Should they expect $6k/month returns from whatever change they scraped from underneath the sofa cushions? No.
Edit: Btw, everything you said is true. And great advice for those trying to follow a similar path. I rarely even check my on my stocks, it's mostly set it and forget it. I simplified this for family members and friends who I think would benefit greatly from investing.
I saw what your investing allocation was from your blog post 60% VTSAX, 25% VTIAX, 10% VGSIX, & 5% VBTLX
Have you heard of betterment? https://www.betterment.com/portfolio/
What do you think of betterments portfolio strategy and allocation? For younger people they recommend 90% stocks 10% bonds.
I like lazy allocations, take a look at this: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios
Also, keep in mind that any investment you do it is WAY better to do it in tax advantaged accounts (401k, roth ira, ira, etc). Typical advice goes like this
Max out 401k up to company match Max out roth ira (currently 5500 a year) Max out 401k fully (up to 22,500 a year) Invest in non tax advantaged accounts
When you contribute to 401k it lowers your taxable income, so if you make 80k, and contribute 20k to your 401k, you only pay taxes on 60k which can be great for tax savings.
They both do the same thing, tax loss harvesting and automatic rebalancing. That fee difference over 30 years assuming an investment of 20k per year and an 8% return could cost you like 400k - which is not chump change.
It seems to be roughly the same idea, but without any fees at all (I haven't used any of them, so I'm likely missing something)
While income from side jobs can be irregular, returns from investments mainly concentrated in equities can be more volatile.
Volatility in the S&P 500 (as measured by the VIX) has been relatively quite low for the past few years, other than a few marked events. (US debt ceiling crisis, etc.) A chart of the S&P 500 shows more-or-less an upward trend over the past five years; certainly since the beginning of 2013 there have hardly been any wild swings.
This can lull investors into a false sense of security about the distributions of returns; just because returns have been steady (i.e. low volatility) over the past few years does not mean things will remain this way.
I don't dispute the long-term average yearly return of ~8%. What I am saying is that, as with many other things, averages don't tell the true story. One year, you could be down 30-40% in equities and another you could be up 30%. Getting a constant 8% return every year is unlikely.
For some long-term investors, they aren't concerned about the volatility and this is a perfectly rational thing. However, there are some people who cannot bear the volatility of such investments and will be in constant worry. Such individuals would likely have to apportion a higher percentage of their to less risky assets and perhaps miss out on some overall return.
I heard of many people freaking out just because the mini-correction that happened in mid-October. These sorts of people aren't cut out to be investing like this as they will panic and sell during downswings.
The free version has had 483k downloads, makes ~5$/day advertising (admob/adsense). ~250 downloads a day, been on the market since 2011.
The paid version ($2.99) has had <2000 downloads over the ~3 years it's been on the market.
Unfortunately I've no time to keep it updated so last update was in 2012.
All from ads. Mostly Admob, but also Millennial Media and Inmobi.
It's DJPad, feel free to try it - the library functionality is embarrassingly bad but the audio engine and UI's half decent.
Probably the biggest feature is that it's lower latency than the competitors written in java. It doesn't hold a candle to any of the DJ apps on iOS whatsoever though.
I started a new job/career 2 years ago, and now I'm a dad - suffice to say my free time is gone. If I had stuck with this project I would have rebuilt the library and built a dedicated onboarding walkthrough.
It's a tasks app that syncs with OmniFocus. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.app...
Most of my customers pay for the app because they are heavy OmniFocus users on the Mac and recently switched to Android.
The $1750 month is the current rolling average. It can be much more when a new course is launching.
The trick seems to be to find a niche that people are interested in and that will continue to be interested in for some time, since the course revenue will decay over time.
For me, agile seemed to be that niche...groovy, not so much :)
It also helps if you already have a brand going in. For example, if you're already well known from books or a popular blog you'll have name recognition and some of your audience will follow you. This wasn't the case with me, but I've seen it happen several times with more well known authors.
Regarding hardware I record with a Blue Snowball cardoid mic and a pop filter. The entire setup including mic, stand, and pop filter cost me a little over $100 on Amazon. Pluralsight also reimbursed the majority of that after my first course was delivered. (http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Microphone-A...)
Regarding software I record and edit with Camtasia for Mac ($99) on a MacBook Pro. I've used Camtasia for my last three courses and while the Windows version is quite nice the Mac version is...painful. I'll be starting a new course in January and plan to record with Screenflow (http://www.telestream.net/screenflow/overview.htm) and edit with Adobe Premiere. Screenflow and Premiere are more expensive options and, as painful as Camtasia was to work with, it was more than adequate to get me started.
I also use a bevy of other free tools to support the production process. For example, I do all scripting, outlining, etc in Google Docs and track the entire production process in Trello. Each course is a fairly large undertaking (the course I'm wrapping up now will have about 135 hours into it by the time its done) so being able to keep track of where you are and how you're pacing for the deadline is critical.
I also have a full time job, am married, and have two young kids (a 3 year old and a 3 month old) so I have to make time for production at odd hours of the week. This makes trello all the even more important for helping me manage the process ;)
Let me know if I can give you any more information.
I haven't tried it yet but it did occur to me as an option, perhaps I should revisit it.
When an author produces a course Pluralsight actually acquires the copyright and therefore exclusive distribution rights for the course as part of the transaction. In return authors negotiate a royalty rate for each course which is a function of how much that course was watched per month versus total viewing of the catalog by paid subscribers. These royalties are where your revenue as an author actually comes from.
If you distribute your course through a subscription company like Pluralsight this is pretty much the standard model across the industry. As a matter of fact, it's actually pretty similar to how artist royalties work in the music industry.
However, fpr me there were a lot of big wins for going with a publisher like Pluralsight. For one thing, they take a lot of things that are not really related to video production off of the table so you can focus on content. For example, - distribution (i.e, an LMS platform with video hosting that actually works across the globe) - payment processing, especially if you want to do subscriptions since that entails a whole other level of PCI compliance - dealing with video piracy, which can be a bigger problem than you'd ever imagine
Now, I'm actually a software engineer by trade so I could eventually build all of this infrastructure myself if I really had to. But once I realized that I'm in the business of producing content and not creating an LMS that path made much less sense to me than it did at first. Basically I just asked myself 'what would be my differentiator?'. Was it doing video hosting? No. Doing PCI-compliant payment processing? Nope. But, making sense of all of the mud around agile techniques in a way that normal developers could actually use start using them day to day was. So, why not focus on that an outsource the rest.
On top of all of that though the biggest win with going with an established publisher is being able to tap an already existing audience. As I mentioned previously I didn't have an established brand going in so any attempt to launch videos myself would have likely launched to the sound of crickets. Launching on Pluralsight immediately gave me exposure to a large audience who were already paying for this type of content. I'm not sure if Pluralsight makes their subscriber numbers public but, as an example, their twitter account has over 200K followers. Now while not all of those followers are paying subscribers you can assume that those who aren't are at least prospects since they've expressed an interest in hearing about which videos are being released. Getting immediate access to that audience, as well as a marketing channel to reach them, can be huge for getting you started...especially when you don't already have a brand of your own.
Does that mean that I'll never release a video under my own brand? Probably not. There are a lots of LMS as a service providers now on the market that make it much simpler to launch my own video distribution platform than it would have been previously. In addition, one of the biggest drawbacks of using a third party publisher is that you lose visibility into the entire sales funnel. For example, I can track people through my funnel through twitter, to a post on my blog, to a CTA at the bottom of that post that directs people to a related video available on Pluralsight, but I don't have visibility into whether or not they actually convert...which is the most important part. Distributing under your own brand gives me visibility into the entire funnel which would help give me the ability to really grow the business. But, before that's a viable option, I need to have a more established brand than I do now. Otherwise...I would simply launch to crickets :)
If you have any questions later, or are curious about things you don't want to ask in public, don't hesitate to hit me up directly either on twitter at @jeremyjarrell or by email jeremy AT jeremyjarrell DOT com. I'm happy to answer anything.
I also have a contact page on my site that I monitor: http://www.jeremyjarrell.com/contact/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time-tracker/id470803...
but paid downloads... about 100 per month.
http://kidsmorningadventure.com
Usually around $50/month. A little more lately since I launched the new gamified getting ready for school project.
Cash is king. You can get better deals if you have all-cash and can close quickly.
Most of them trivially translate to the English-speaking market, I should really do that. Does anyone have a hint where the best place to sell 'low-end' t-shirt designs in the US is?
I made it in a couple of hours one weekend as a way to show a friend how to build a website.