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Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping
Hello everyone,
I’m Hari, and I’m a serial Microstartup Maker. 2021 has been an amazing year despite the pandemic where I reached my recent goal of $500/day. Compounding works everywhere, even in microstartups. It took 3 years to reach to $300/day but just 4 months to $500/day. The business model of my microstartups is a mix of App sales, subscriptions, affiliates and ads. I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs. My next goal is to reach $600/day.
My Microstartups Rewind 2021
* Revenue - $117K/year (67% ▲)
* Expenses - 3K/year
* All time high revenue - $15K/month in Dec (18% ▲)
* Daily goal - $500/day reached in Dec
Visa List - https://visalist.io
* Revenue - $50K/year (39% ▲)
* All time high revenue - $8K/month in Dec
* Total Users - 2.6M/year
* Active users - 250K/month
AnExplorer - https://anexplorer.co
* Revenue - $50K/year (95% ▲)
* User growth: 130% ▲ yoy
* Active users: 350K
ACrypto - https://acrypto.io
* Revenue - $10K/year
* Active users: 30K
Tech Stack i used:
Android - Java
Firebase
VueJS
GoLang
- kbrannigan 5y agoThis is very inspiring. I'm so happy to learn that this sort of business model exists. I always thought it was either fail or make $1M a month, no in between. Good job
- 1hakr 5y agothanks
- masonic 5y ago"I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter."
- 1hakr 5y agoi don't have a newsletter yet but i regularly post on twitter https://twitter.com/1HaKr https://twitter.com/1HaKr
- MattGaiser 5y agoWhat was your process to monetize these? As to me they seem to be in very competitive verticals.
- beningrad 5y agoAddendum to this question, if you don't mind: How do you choose what your next microstartup will be?
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoAlso very curious about this. I went to his websites with the goal of finding out how I could give him money. It was incredibly difficult for Visa List - and all I got to was a buymeacoffee page that couldn't possibly be the only source of income. If OP is making money off of these from users then they could make way more by having an obvious CTA in the nav to give him money.
- chii 5y agothe visalist page has a popup asking users to either re-enable ads, or subscribe (which i presume might be paid? didn't look further).
- teaearlgraycold 5y agoAh, I do have ad block that might have blocked ads and the pop up. Didn't see any indication of a subscription system.
- ryanSrich 5y agoFor subscription sales, how are you driving growth? Google ads? Organic search? Selling always turns out to be the most difficult part. Building an idea and even getting a few people to sign up is doable, but I struggle with anything beyond that. Congrats by the way!
- pigiou 5y agoI have the same question, would be glad if OP could answer. I so far had success only using Google Ads, but I also pay them 50% of my sales (which I do not know if it is a lot or not)
- asennoussi 5y ago
- phreack 5y agoHow does Visa List make money? I'm not sure I can find its business model besides ads, though that might be it.
- asennoussi 5y agoAre revenues Net revenues?
- ninjaa 5y agoAnExplorer also fills a massive need
- 1hakr 5y agoTrue and its available for phones, tablets, TV's and watches
- guessbest 5y agoIs "My Microstartups Rewind 2021" a thing or is that the term for the summation of all your endeavors? Also, have you considered iPhone apps? If not, why not? Anyway, best of luck to continued success and growth.
- 1hakr 5y agoCheers mate! Its summation of my microstartups in 2021. ACrypto is actually available on both android and ios. you can check it out https://acrypto.io/ https://acrypto.io/
- herpderperator 5y agoDamn, every single one of those websites load literally instantly. 8ms latency from me. Cloudflare does wonders if you set it up well.
- 1hakr 5y agocloudflare is a life saver!
- notreallyserio 5y agoWere there any other projects you tried to launch but didn't work out? If so, what do you think was different about them?
- djacob93 5y agoHey Hari, this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know. I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website https://visalist.io https://visalist.io, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid
- kqr 5y agoWell, how would you operationally define updated? Would you, as a traveller, be satisfied if it's no more than two days out of date? How long does it take to check and update the information for one country? Let's call it 90 seconds when you have the routine in. (Maybe every tenth time you check you have to actually change something in your database and that takes 10 minutes, the rest of the time you change nothing and that takes half a minute.) There are about 200 countries in the world, so updating them all takes on average five hours. If you only need to do that every other day, that's quite literally 10 % of your time to do manually. Now it could probably be optimised -- some countries might not be as popular destinations, and others might not change their rules as often. This is data you get for free from the effort of maintaining it. You can use that to adjust frequencies and I'm sure get it down to just 3 % of your time or less. That's while still doing it manually! Then if there are some places that are really popular or change really often, you can start automating the updates for those countries. Since they are the ones you'd spend the most time on updating manually otherwise, you can probably get it down to less than 1 % of your time. But never forget to start by doing things that don't scale. You can get very far with a good manual process. Automate only when you have a good manual process and you've driven the last inefficiency out of it.
- jackdh 5y ago5 hours every ten days is not 10% of most people working time. Assuming an 8 hour work day that's closer to 30%. Even at 12 hours that's 20% and that's not including weekends.
- 5y ago
- scrumlord 5y ago
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoOPs post is the exact type of post I come to hn to see.
- pigiou 5y agoCongratulations! I have a question, how do you maintain the validity of the information you provide at visalist.io ? These things changes really often (especially the covid-related stuff). Do you have someone that researches and updates the information? Is there an API for this?
- humbrag 5y ago
- diordiderot 5y agoThe material design for ACrypto looks great!
- mesozoic 5y agoWhat strategy do you use for marketing and growing your site visits/app downloads?
- twomoonsbysurf 5y agoSuper inspiring OP! On VisaList, for example, it's great to see you've had your product picked up into the news by various publications. Thanks for sharing your revenue/expense numbers. - Do you have a blog/personal site? - Do you have github/gitlab / other open source projects? Just want to learn more about what ya do, and how ya do what ya do.
- daniel1969 5y agoWhere have you learned about design? Your apps look awesome. My look like command prompt. Is there any course, book, tutorial, blog that you would recommend?
- Flankk 5y agoYou must be terrible at business. Your companies only make money while you're sleeping.
- dkersten 5y agoSimple solution: just sleep more!
- orionblastar 5y agoAny hints on how others can do this? I am on disability but if I can earn more with Microstartups it would be better.
- 1hakr 5y agoThere are four things need to have a potential microstartup. #1 Problem that has business potential and big enough #2 Audience who has that burning problem #3 Distribution channel to get the solution into users hands #4 Business model aka pricing fit for the Problem-Audience
- CTmystery 5y agoGood list, thanks! For the projects in your post, how did you solve #3?
- extradhungel2 5y agowhat about competitors? do u research competitors that might have already solved the problem also?
- TrackerFF 5y agoNot OP, but...completely bootstrapping it? 1) Learn the tools to build your product. 2) Research some product / markets, see what other products are out there. Chasing some noble idea, or "hidden gem" just to gain first-move advantage isn't all that, IMO. It's almost always better to join an existing market where proof of concept has already been done for you. Even better if the existing products are stagnant or lacking. 3) Figure out a business and marketing plan, doesn't have to be the most complex thing in the world - but it forces you to do some research before just diving into something blindly. 4) Start developing your MVP. Reach out to users in the relevant places, which means going to forums, twitter, subreddits, etc. Try your best to get user feedback, iterate your product on said feedback. Any money you get from donations, purchases, gifts, family, whatever should go towards infrastructure and marketing. 5) With enough users, look into how you want to monetize your product. Ads? SaaS? Purchases? Lots of ways, but they all have their pros and cons. But, to be honest, it's a lot of work for a single developer. Especially if you're not already experienced with all the various aspects. You're basically gonna be doing everything on a smaller scale. Lots of things to learn, lots of things that can go wrong. And importantly, it can take years to build up a userbase large enough to live off the project. Sometimes you never grow to that size, and the product life-cycle has peaked, on its way downwards. The people that do this kind of stuff, have tried and failed multiple times before. But there's always something to learn, which you'll take to the next project.
- u2077 5y agoObviously everyone’s path is unique, but could you tell us the most important things you learned along the way? For example, my side project was not built for scale (was just a hobby at the time) and now needs rebuilding. I also wasted too much time perfecting things I thought mattered, but didn’t affect customers.
- 1hakr 5y agoOne thing which worked for me when i look back is, i spend less than 4 weeks to validate an idea, if it got traction, i worked on it more, if it didn't then i moved on. Validate and fail fast.
- allenu 5y agoCan you elaborate on your success rate and how frequently you work on new ideas and retire failed ones? I'm curious how you decide to pursue an idea and how you measure if something is working now that you've done this for a while.
- arrayjumper 5y agoHow do you measure traction? And what should the measurements look like in 4 weeks for you to be able to say this might be worth spending time.
- 1hakr 5y agoI set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. Traction is something you define for yourself and your product.
- jsncbt 5y agoHow would you mostly validate these ideas?
- 1hakr 5y agoI would always try to do a quick launch, take no more than 4 weeks and launch it on PH, IH, Reddit, LinkedIn. The long term growth strategies are entirely different thing. But you will get basic validation. You are trying to fail fast.
- velokick 5y agoWhat are your stacks for these projects?
- 1hakr 5y agoadded tech stack to the post but i always learnt things based on what was need to built my microstartup.
- catchmilk 5y agoThere has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least. What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing. Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?
- pcbro141 5y agohttps://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/
- badestrand 5y agoYou need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment. This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work. I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.
- spiffytech 5y ago> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. I think part of making this distinction comes down to whether the creator thinks the product will ever be 'done'. A lot of products are run with the assumption (implicit or explicit) that they'll keep getting updated as long as they remain viable as a business. Either approach is a valid but they're both choices. Though you may have to choose right from the start, as for some products only one of the two is viable.
- reneherse 5y agoThanks for sharing this update and being so transparent about your earnings! I've found your posts inspiring and it's great to know your projects continue to grow.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThanks Hari for the inspiration! I am a fan from Australia. As well as the success, Hari does give a lot to the meetup community here and I got the impression he has a very strategic mindset.
- 1hakr 5y agoCheers mate!
- ninjaa 5y agoVisa list is brilliant
- TuringNYC 5y agoThanks for the share. I'm curious if you have a favorite best-of-breed vendor stack you use? Do you try to optimize much on the tech or just do whatever works? I'm curious about several things specifically: who do you host with? SSL certs? CDN favorites? automation tool favorites? which hosts do you use to scale out?
- 1hakr 5y agoi use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoYeah I think people way overestimate how much scaling they will really have to do. If you write something reasonably efficient you can serve a surprising level of traffic with just a regular ol' big-fat-server and a cache.
- Ostrogodsky 5y agoThe Power of Habit book suggest that if you want to be X you have to behave like X, what was your routine, not now, but in the period between starting from zero and reaching, say 4k MRR?
- 1hakr 5y agoI love solving problems by building solutions. I Travel every now and then. Make a backlog of new ideas, keep pitching them to friends, work on my current one. One step at a time. I took things very slowly instead of rushing and getting into pressure.
- Ostrogodsky 5y agoThanks so much
- Uptrenda 5y agoWhat is your long-term approach to growing your businesses? Feel free to share what you've learned about customer acquisition for micro-startups. Sure people would find that knowledge VERY valuable - and nice work dude. You're successful. I plan to do a bunch of stuff myself this year. Cheers.
- 1hakr 5y agoMy general approach is t make my business fully automated. Once i do that, i have time to thing in different directions. Organic channels are your lifesavers, the ones which will make your microstartup successful, so start working on them from day 1. I have few things planned for 2022.
- reducesuffering 5y agoWhat are the key insights into coming up with a monetization strategy and converting users to paying customers?
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoDo you have a process for ideating new microstartups? Or are your microstartups based on problems you experience in your day to day life?
- Glench 5y agoYou might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-business-ideas-ab51c3d51c https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoThis is great! Thanks!
- 1hakr 5y agoYes there were a few. But I try to always keep the cost of failure small. This is how I try to be frugal. * I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build * I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it. * I do a public launch in IH, PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit. In few weeks if I reach the goal that I set at the beginning, then I continue working on it to improve. If not then I will drop it and move on the next. You have objective in making this choice, most people cling on to the sentiment.
- daniel1969 5y agoTo which specific groups you post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit?
- turtleTome 5y agoIndie hackers : IH? What's PH?
- 5y ago
- earksiinni 5y agoYou wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no? I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence. Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong. Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?
- blamazon 5y agoI’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc. The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.
- halpert 5y agoNot OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about. Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have? To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.
- moneywoes 5y agoWhat is your marketing stack?
- falsenine 5y agoThanks for sharing your knowledge. I have two questions: (1) What learning pathway would you recommend a total beginner in programming to follow in order to develop their own microstartups or side projects? (2) How do you come up with an idea for a given microstartup? Is it an organic process, or is it more about thinking actively of potential business plans? Do you have any advice regarding idea generation?
- Glench 5y agoYou might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-business-ideas-ab51c3d51c https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...
- andrewf 5y agoCongrats! You mention compounding - what input to your success has been compounding? Eg revenue per user, success with SEO or other marketing channels, increase in underlying demand for travel/crypto, number of products shipped, something else?
- potamic 5y agoGot blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.
- suifbwish 5y agoIf companies made their ads informative/interesting in some way instead of pure propaganda mind poo with dumb jingles, puns and foolish attempts to sound humorous perhaps I wouldn’t black hole them all so much with Adblock and pihole
- Case81 5y agoit's the opposite for me. If they were actually interesting, it'd be way worse for me.
- trishmapow2 5y agouBlock Origin's element picker (not zapper - that's temporary) is your friend here. Works to get rid of basic overlays.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoI notice that your AnExplorer file explorer app is a hefty $9.99. How do you get sales at that price point? Word of mouth over time?
- westoncb 5y agoOut of curiosity, how do you have 350k users for AnExplorer and only earn $50k/yr if it's selling for $10/copy? (I'm just wondering if there are some unseen costs or something to selling an app for a fixed cost like this.)
- holgersindbaek 5y agoHow do you make most of your money on visalist? Is it affiliates or ads? I have a solitaire website myself (https://online-solitaire.com/ https://online-solitaire.com/) that has ads, but I haven’t tried out affiliate links yet.
- umen 5y agoCan you please share how do you setup your web application for example your visalist site . i mean how do you handle the scale and how did you setup the hosting thanks
- sillycube 5y agoHow many people are there in your team to manage 3 projects? Are you solo? Can you share how you allocate for the projects?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oasisbob 5y agoI miss the days when visalist wasn't full of hostile anti-patterns. Back in 2019, it was easy to recommend to fellow travelers as an accurate source of information. Not so much, now. I'm sad to see that it funnels users away from official government sites. eg, a US citizen traveling to India is eligible for a cheap e-Visa which generally issues in ~72 hours here: https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html The big green "APPLY FOR VISA" button on visalist sends traffic to iVisa.com, which is much less useful.
- namdnay 5y agoI doubt the Indian government pays those sweet referral fees :) Edit: I wish the UN would provide a free honest alternative to this kind of scammy “visa information”site
- MrDresden 5y agoHaving a partner that works in a UN run institution as a researcher I have seen first hand how bureaucratic and starved for funds that entity truly is. Getting funds for paperclips is a massive battle.
- Jugurtha 5y agoHow are they passing around TPS reports without paperclips ?
- MrDresden 5y agoFrom what I hear they used to just staple them together, what with the lack of paperclips. But now the stapler seems to have gone missing. Its quite the pickle.
- accountofme 5y agothose red swinglines were on the chopping block for quite some time.
- GurnBlandston 5y agoHow many products have you built and later shut down as a failure? How long have you been building microstartups? How many tries did it take to get the 3 successes in your post?
- masteruvpuppetz 5y agovisalist.io would not let me browse the site asking for adblock to be disabled. Even though there is no adblock running. ..and these guys making $500 per day?
- locusm 5y agoYou running PiHole?
- bArray 5y agoRelated: "Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping" (this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964 "AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups" (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132 "Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup" (2020): https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969 https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969 "Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to keep your desk job away" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674 "Show HN: I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr And so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr To answer the question "how do you advertise your products?", clearly it is to spam Hacker News until you get lucky.
- melenaboija 5y agoAlso seeing the title and the upvotes tells this is one of the topics that matters to the HN community, simply how to make money. Not saying it is bad, just an observation.
- throwawayvibes 5y agoHave you never written a HN upvote bot to push your submissions up? It's how it goes.
- seydor 5y agoI think it matters more to be independent. And getting people's attention without truckloads of money is hard nowadays
- mattbrewsbytes 5y agoI clicked because I've had ideas over the years (dating back to reading Joel On Software and about Micro ISV's) and the title of this post makes me wonder if my ideas are too big and that's a reason why they never got to implementation. The concept of a bunch of small/micro things that make hobby level money is interesting.
- Dippidang 5y agoSeems, money is your strongest motivation. Money money money. Your work is beautiful. How about emphasizing that?
- bijant 5y agoBeauty is in the eye of the beholder. Subjective opinions vary and when you put out art people will criticize you. Even people who like your art might question why it doesn’t sell. If your art makes money, whether that be picasso or bored ape type art, people will be far more reluctant to criticize your style and execution after all, other people are paying a lot to acquire your art, there might just be something to it, something the critic is missing, so they might shut up and look for that. Peer pressure is a thing, when other people are putting their money where their mouths are, instead of being flooded with cheap criticism, you might be drowning in demand from sycophants.
- carlodenaro 5y agonice show of your microstartup, tech stack for visalist?
- mtsx 5y agoAny hints ?
- flashu 5y agoqq: what tech stack are You using for iOS and Android apps?
- icco 5y agoIf folks enjoy these types of posts, check out https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/, which is an entire community of folks like this.
- PinkMilkshake 5y agoIf this is not too personal of a question, what do you do with all your free time?
- navalsaini 5y agoHari, would you have advice on marketing my microstartup. I made an app halfchess.com TIA
- catwoe 5y agoHow did you validate the AnExplorer idea? What is it that makes this app unique among all the alternatives that exist? Thanks and congrats