14 ms·

Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate and from what?

• sdernley 12y ago
  I have a small iPhone app that generates around 200 a month. Nothing spectacular but not bad for a bit extra.
  • afoot 12y ago
    I always thought that building something like this might generate an initial income (and potentially a profit) but that consistent, longer-term revenue was much harder to come by. Any chance you'd expand on what your app does and what the revenue generation/ongoing promotion model is?
    • joshvm 12y ago
      You can do reasonably well (if you're just after pocket change) with a decent utility app - let's be honest, most of them have shockingly bad UX, and reap ad revenue.
    • sdernley 12y ago
      It's a utility app. I think that if you build something people will get some use out of, and make it look (and be) easy to use then you should get a fairly recurring revenue. A lot of the smaller apps look bad, so i just tried to make mine look a little more like something i'd want to use. I 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.
• zrail 12y ago
  I wrote and self-publish a book named Mastering Modern Payments[1], with a fairly recent second edition. It's making about $2k/mo. 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 https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com [2]: https://www.payola.io https://www.payola.io [3]: https://www.payola.io/pro https://www.payola.io/pro [4]: https://www.petekeen.net/payola-subscriptions https://www.petekeen.net/payola-subscriptions Edit: You can read a free preview here: https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/read
  • ivan_ah 12y ago
    > https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com > 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/ http://minireference.com/static/newsite/ cf. http://minireference.com http://minireference.com
    • zrail 12y ago
      The team option sells occasionally, mostly to agencies. 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.
      • ivan_ah 12y ago
        I've been in contact with some tutors (and tutoring agencies), but the book is kind of competition to them. For $29 students get a lot of content, and will need less tutoring. 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.
• stevenmays 12y ago
  Stocks, depends on the month: 1000-2000 on average. Link: http://mays.co/i-made-6k-this-month-doing-nothing/ http://mays.co/i-made-6k-this-month-doing-nothing/ Webhosting: $20 (Mainly just pays for my VPS) Launching soon: http://gymbrew.com http://gymbrew.com (Subscription box service for protein goodies)
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • phreeza 12y ago
    By stocks, do you mean dividends? Or do you cash out the gains you make periodically? Otherwise, I don't think I would count that as 'income'.
    • stevenmays 12y ago
      Dividends and gains. I do not cash out and "realize" the gains, but my net worth increases. Net worth increases I count as income as it decreases my time to reach financial independence.
  • tvanantwerp 12y ago
    This blog post is highly misleading. The only reason you made $6k in a month with index funds is A) because you would have already had about $60k in the account and B) because indexes were recovering from a large drop just before that one-month time horizon. To give more perspective, the 3-month return for your most heavily weighted fund is about half of the current 1-month average. To make $6k/month assuming average annual growth (not something you can always count on, but let's keep it simple), you'd need closer to $900k already in your account. 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.
    • stevenmays 12y ago
      I have more then 60k in the account. Yes, results are atypical. I said that in the blog post. I also said assume 8% a year returns on average. 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.
• wwarren 12y ago
  I have a little Android app that makes about $60/mo. It's my burrito money for the month :)
• drsintoma 12y ago
  My German job board https://englishjobs.de https://englishjobs.de started generating around $50 per month on some link referrals, but the site is still on dippers.
  • s3nnyy 12y ago
    Do you scrape the jobs from somewhere else or from where do you get the content from?
    • drsintoma 12y ago
      Everything, I get proper referral feeds, RSS feeds, some scrapping and on-site posting. Everything that is not posted on-site is a just link to the original source. https://englishjobs.de/faq#sources https://englishjobs.de/faq#sources
• waterside81 12y ago
  Personalized kids books on the iPad (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-heroes/id477247738?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-heroes/id477247738?ls...) ~ 2K / month
  • jeremyjarrell 12y ago
    This is awesome.
  • tristanlabbe 12y ago
    Very nice indeed
• johntdyer 12y ago
  I am a Google apps reseller and have a few customers. My customers get the accounts for a small discount then what they would direct and I make a small margin. Right now the total on that is about 1200 a year. I pretty much use that as a "toy slush fund" and use it to buy geeky stuff without getting in trouble from the boss ( wife ).
  • dalanmiller 12y ago
    Do you provide just customer service? Or do you also manage the accounts for them as well?
  • zo1 12y ago
    Would you mind telling us how you got into such an area?
  • yitchelle 12y ago
    Would love to hear the detail about Google Apps reseller? What is it exactly?
• xerophyte12932 12y ago
  You mean apart from the day job?
  • tthrowaaa__dddd 12y ago
    You mean your day job isn't sitting around reading HN? ;-)
• gravitronic 12y ago
  100-200 a month from having an android app. The free version has had 483k downloads, makes ~5$/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.
  • Ologn 12y ago
    I've made $1500 in the past month on my Android apps. I also did some additional Android stuff with a partner, so that would be another couple of hundred dollars on top of that. All from ads. Mostly Admob, but also Millennial Media and Inmobi.
  • jonahx 12y ago
    thank for sharing. it's surprising that nearly half a million downloads translates into such a small amount of revenue. is this the nature of in-app advertising, or is this because the number of active users of the app is much smaller than the number of downloads?
    • gravitronic 12y ago
      my app's a bit special - it's purely SDL / opengl / C with a tiny java wrapper just to get going. TBH, there's some key technical problems with it with respect to onboarding, and because of those problems and likely technical problems there's <20k installed users. 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.
• jjp 12y ago
  About 10K per annum from www.rssweather.com. Been a reasonably consistent source of money for ten years.
  • WallyL 12y ago
    Just with the ads? What are your revenue channels?
    • jjp 12y ago
      Yes just with ads.
• tthrowaaa__dddd 12y ago
  $3,400 this year, from dividends and bond interest.
• vbsteven 12y ago
  I currently make about 1000EUR/month consistently from an Android app I sell for 9.99EUR. It's a tasks app that syncs with OmniFocus. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.apps.androidfocus https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.app...
  • phreeza 12y ago
    That is quite remarkable, do you think the OmniFocus integration is the killer feature that gets most people to pay?
    • vbsteven 12y ago
      I think so, the app is purely focussed on OmniFocus integration and reuses their backend. Most of my customers pay for the app because they are heavy OmniFocus users on the Mac and recently switched to Android.
  • pknerd 12y ago
    Do people _buy_ Android apps?
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• jeremyjarrell 12y ago
  I generate about $1750 USD per month producing training videos for Pluralsight, most recently on how developers can make sense of agile. http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell http://www.pluralsight.com/author/jeremy-jarrell The $1750 month is the current rolling average. It can be much more when a new course is launching.
  • quickpost 12y ago
    From only two courses? That seems pretty darn good!
    • jeremyjarrell 12y ago
      Thanks! Believe it or not about 70% of the revenue comes from the Creating Effective User Stories course. I have another course in the same vein, Agile in the Real World, coming out in a few weeks that I hope will do as well. 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.
  • NicoJuicy 12y ago
    Same question as to the other Pluralsight creator. What tools do you use to create these courses?
    • jeremyjarrell 12y ago
      Hey Nico! 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-Aluminum/dp/B002OO333Q/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1416409819&sr=8-2&keywords=blue+snowball 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 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.
• andrewtbham 12y ago
  i make about $2k per year with my location aware time tracker app. iOs only. I spent about 100 hours to write it, spend about 40 hours per year on updates and support emails. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time-tracker/id470803110?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onsite-time-tracker/id470803...
  • consta 12y ago
    how many total downloads do you have if I may ask?
    • andrewtbham 12y ago
      I offered it for free for a while and it got picked up on app advice... so when that happened I got 10k downloads in one day. but paid downloads... about 100 per month.
• bengarvey 12y ago
  http://kidsdungeonadventure.com http://kidsdungeonadventure.com http://kidsmorningadventure.com http://kidsmorningadventure.com Usually around $50/month. A little more lately since I launched the new gamified getting ready for school project.
• carloscm 12y ago
  ~150USD / month from http://thespatials.com/ http://thespatials.com/ with a jump to 1000 USD in October after we announced our successful Greenlight. Launching in Steam in early 2015 and expect to shake things up.
• moron4hire 12y ago
  I didn't answer last year, but last year would have been $0/mo. Today, it's $800/mo from two subcontractors I have on a project I run for a client. They each only put a few hours in a week, so I don't really have a lot of time spent on management.
• breitling 12y ago
  Real Estate - Thanks to the financial crisis, I've been able to pick up some cheap real estate that generates cash flow. Currently, I'm making about $50k/year.
  • cylinder 12y ago
    I've always wondered, when you try to vulture on cheap property during a crisis, are you able to secure financing at all or do you have to buy all-cash?
    • breitling 12y ago
      I'm not an American, so financing is a little more difficult but if you are willing to put down 25%, it's doable. With 50% down, almost anyone will give you financing. This is institutional financing...there's always private money with higher interest rates...they are much more flexible with the terms. Cash is king. You can get better deals if you have all-cash and can close quickly.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• websitescenes 12y ago
  I make a nice chunk of money every two weeks working full time at a steady Rails job. I'm sure that's not what you meant but to be fair your question is very ambiguous.
  • moron4hire 12y ago
    It's not really ambiguous at all. Between the general entrepreneurial nature of this site, the phrasing of the question, and certainly the backlinks, OP clearly means passive income streams.
    • raphinou 12y ago
      I think he is absolutely right in that the question is ambiguous. The linked questions are phrased exactly the same and don't mention passive income. It is not because everybody, myself included, interpreted that passive income is meant without it being mentioned that the question is not ambiguous. It is just our interpretation due to what we expect to see on this site.
    • websitescenes 12y ago
      He clearly meant that and I knew it; just didn't actually mention that anywhere. I was literally answering his question. Can't help it, I'm a smart ass.
  • arsenide 12y ago
    If you're sure it's not what he meant, it's not an ambiguous question.
    • websitescenes 12y ago
      Those are not mutually exclusive things. You can have an ambiguous question but be sure of the intent because of the context.
• phreeza 12y ago
  Crappy t-shirt designs. I have a bunch of random shirt designs (I am no designer, just made some mediocre SVGs with funny ideas I had in Inkscape), and sell them on the German spreadshirt marketplace, makes about 20 Euros/month. 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?
  • rawrnosaur 12y ago
    I think that you can start on threadless.com
    • phreeza 12y ago
      I believe threadless designs are much more refined that what I have produced.
  • yaph 12y ago
    Don't know if they are the best, but I used zazzle.com and redbubble.com. One argument for zazzle is, that you create a product once and it is available in all countries where zazzle is present, e. g. UK, Germany, Spain etc.
• psobot 12y ago
  On average, $400/month from https://the.wubmachine.com https://the.wubmachine.com, an online music remixing app. Split pretty much evenly between Google AdSense and Android/iOS In-App Purchases for the Android/iOS native clients.
  • joeframbach 12y ago
    That's pretty neat. Although it took me a while to think of a good song to use. If you have insights on "popular tracks" or "recently used tracks", how about a quickstart link on the wubmachine? That would be handy.
    • psobot 12y ago
      I might be able to do that for popular tracks fetched from SoundCloud, but I take special care not to keep any of the data people upload to the site due to copyright worries.
• mokkol 12y ago
  $800/month with an online proposal software app: http://nusii.com http://nusii.com We are open for 2 months now.
  • eweise 12y ago
    Nice looking site!
    • mokkol 12y ago
      Thanks!
  • notdarkyet 12y ago
    Site looks nice, did you use a specific frontend/css framework for the design?
    • mokkol 12y ago
      Thanks! Mostly it is all from scratched. I used bootstrap for the grid. Here a little article about the process: https://medium.com/sketch-tricks/how-i-used-sketch-to-design-nusii-beautiful-proposals-simplified-b7162d7d7078 https://medium.com/sketch-tricks/how-i-used-sketch-to-design...
  • nojvek 12y ago
    That's super awesome looking. I signed up just to use the interface.
• bennesvig 12y ago
  $200-$600 a month from a book I wrote 2 years ago: http://www.amazon.com/First-World-Problems-Reasons-Terrorists-ebook/dp/B006OGG4D6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416407973&sr=8-1&keywords=first+world+problems http://www.amazon.com/First-World-Problems-Reasons-Terrorist...
• AwesomeMan 12y ago
  I currently generate a couple hundred a year from http://www.randomamazonproduct.com/ http://www.randomamazonproduct.com/ I made it in a couple of hours one weekend as a way to show a friend how to build a website.
• pankajdeoria 12y ago
  Using adsense and Affiliate, http://www.cricketwa.com http://www.cricketwa.com and http://couponcodewa.com http://couponcodewa.com , avg $1000/m overall
  • razyshah 12y ago
    Hi Pankaj, when did you get your Adsense account approved? Would you be able to share the process? I understand that it is quite a challenge to get Google Adsense approval in recent times.
• twelvenmonkeys 12y ago
  $190 / month (net profit, after tax, fees, everything) from my cheap-as-hell VPS company (http://kihi.io http://kihi.io). Helps little-businesses get off the ground for only a $2 VPS. Fortunately it hasn't had many orders as of late since everything is quite full. Largest customer base has been China & Indonesia which brings in a lot of happy faces and awesome customers, so I got that going for me at least, which is nice. Been looking at alternative plans (disposable VPS' maybe?) and other ways of profit. I've done enough Android development to warrant a decent app, so maybe I should create a few more in the horizon.
  • Someone1234 12y ago
    That is "cheap-as-hell." People who have ran other hosting companies have claimed that "the lower the price the more support you have to provide" (because in the low end many users won't have dedicated technical personnel or are just penny pinching and will shift problems to you when possible). Has that been your experience? How do you cover the cost of support time in general at $2/month. Also is there a language issue as your customers are Chinese and Indonesian?
    • twelvenmonkeys 12y ago
      Yeah, that is one issue that I did encounter at first. Supporting users. Luckily, since most of the marketing comes from word-of-mouth, a lot of users have a decent knowledge of Linux / VPS'. I also make Ruby scripts as well as using a crap-ton of custom shortcuts in Mutt (terminal-based email) so answer support tickets quickly and without a ton of effort. The occasional ticket I usually get involves some form of client-side/user issue such as a borked Linux package install. Usually I bite-the-bullet and say "We don't usually provide support.. but I would suggest having a look at X or Y on your VPS." 90% of the time the customer fixes it with my guidance and they learn what do to next time it happens. The other 10% I unfortunately say tough luck to and suggest to hire a Sysadmin or I link them to someone who can provide support for cheap setting things up. Funny enough, most Chinese / Indonesian customers rarely ask questions! Even if they don't speak English well, we can still understand each-other in Linux terms. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but most Eastern clients countries try and figure the issue out themselves first. Western clients usually open a ticket first, then figure the issue out.
• RTigger 12y ago
  I net about $1000/mo from one decently-watched pluralsight video I made over a year ago - http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/description/building-dotnet-web-services-10ways http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/description/building-dotn...
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • NicoJuicy 12y ago
    What tools did you use to create the video?
    • RTigger 12y ago
      I used (and they recommend) Camtasia Studio. Also picked up a Rode Podcaster microphone for decent audio quality.
• chrisdew 12y ago
  I wrote virtsync, an alternative to rsync, which performs much better on sparse, GB+ files that don't change much (like VM disk images). http://www.virtsync.com http://www.virtsync.com It's a niche product that makes me $1-2K per year. More importantly, virtsync customers have hired me for other jobs.
• jliptzin 12y ago
  Around $2k / month from real estate rentals after expenses. It'd be a little less if I hired a property manager to make it fully passive, but I actually enjoy doing the property management myself as it gets me away from the computer and exposes me to things I would never otherwise be involved with.
  • mikemac 12y ago
    how many units do you manage? what would you guess you spend, time wise, managing the property per month?
    • jliptzin 12y ago
      2 properties, currently looking for a third. Probably about 3 hours / month right now max. Edit: It's so low because I buy properties that are in good shape. I have a full time job so I wouldn't have time to focus on doing repairs and improvements.
      • mkaziz 12y ago
        Any advice for someone looking to get into real estate investment?
      • jliptzin 12y ago
        Feel free to email me for advice
      • markyc 12y ago
        been looking into real estate investment lately, what do you consider a good roi?
        • breischl 12y ago
          Rule of thumb is that the monthly rent should be at least 1% of the purchase price. More specific ROI calculations are good, but people typically forget a lot of expenses (repairs, vacancy, time spent managing, etc) and end up calculating an unrealistic ROI. After accounting for all that stuff, at least 8% cash-on-cash, plus more in debt repayment.
• onaclov2000 12y ago
  I make around $10-$20 a month from my amazon affiliate link generator. http://blog.onaclovtech.com/2012/12/how-to-quickly-build-amazon-affiliate.html http://blog.onaclovtech.com/2012/12/how-to-quickly-build-ama... That actually got me work for another app, and I make around $10-$20 off that as well per month.
• tjbiddle 12y ago
  Just wanted to add a note: Most people who aren't making anything won't be posting, so results will be drastically skewed. So for anyone here getting discourage because they think their a minority - think otherwise (And then get back to work on trying to get your own setup ;))
  • jmnicolas 12y ago
    It's been several years now that I'd like to launch a few side projects. But contrary to the crowd here I'm just a normal human : when I come home I'm just exhausted and / or want to do something else than coding. I could use the extra cash though. This month I even tried placing bets on soccer and tennis and failed miserably.
    • tmuir 12y ago
      I've found that you have to work on something that you're passionate about, something you want to use. I don't have the magic formula for finding these things, but after trying several side projects and having them fizzle out, I've finally found something that I want to spend almost all of my free time on, and I do. I do hope to sell the product, but what keeps me working on it 40 hrs a week, in addition to my full time job, is the promise of actually using the device. The closest I can get to making the process formulaic is to find a hobby that requires gear of some kind. Before you ever build something to improve that hobby, you need to enjoy the hobby. Then, find some aspect of that hobby that could be improved, most likely through some sort of automation.
      • mgarfias 12y ago
        If only I could figure out how to make $ working on my car or playing with my kids.
        • sweettea 12y ago
          Mechanics are people who enjoy working on cars; and beyond that, cars provide lots of space to tinker --- I remember being inspired by old Mother Earth News articles on converting your pickup to be wood-burning, or vegetable-oil-burning, or any sort of alternative fuel. Farming/gardening is a great way to play with your kids, and make a little money on the side too; the money is likely to not be significant, but the pleasure at making money from the work of your hands is personally palpable, since I normally am a knowledge-worker.
• patio11 12y ago
  Bingo Card Creator is pretty firmly EOLed. Sales YTD this year are about $30k, probably $35k all-in for the year. Profits are stable at about 60% unless I miss my guess. This is down substantially from previous years, partly as a result of Google changes which I haven't made the least bit of effort into looking into. Also have ~$1k a month from books/courses, and hoping to get out another course before the end of the year, if life cooperates. My main gig these days is Appointment Reminder. I'd describe it as "modestly successful." (A single signup for the largest publicly available plan is, probabilistically, worth more than BCC made in its best months. Historically, that has only received about as much sales effort as BCC clients got -- i.e. nil -- but I'm experimenting with having active inside sales starting this week.)
  • JasonCEC 12y ago
    Please share your experience with active inside sales (when you have some anecdata) - I know many of us would find it a valuable read.
  • chrisan 12y ago
    > partly as a result of Google changes which I haven't made the least bit of effort into looking into Do you know what google changed at least or simply that google changed _something_ and organic traffic dropped significantly?
    • gk1 12y ago
      Moz keeps a record of known Google algorithm updates: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change In 2014 alone there have been more than a dozen of major updates. Keeping up takes significant effort.
  • dennisgorelik 12y ago
    Could it be that decline in Google traffic was caused by your reducing the capabilities of free Bingo plan? If users are disappointed about how little free product can do - they are less likely to open Bingo Card Creator's page in the future and Google takes that unwillingness into account.
• Threep78 12y ago
  I own and run a website, in the category of special-interest news stories, that's making 10–15k a month consistently for almost 10 years. (Yeah, we got started early, which is probably why I have good search engine rankings.) Google AdSense is the only means of income. We get close to 1 million unique visitors a month. Just me and one other part-time employee running it, so it's been a pretty spectacular (and unexpected! It started as a hobby) success.
  • gk1 12y ago
    Can you share a link? I'm curious to see how the AdSense ads are integrated with the content/layout.
  • scottydelta 12y ago
    will Google allow me to display adsense ads on a website like this http://www.mega.pastemehere.com http://www.mega.pastemehere.com ?
    • scottydelta 12y ago
      http://mega.pastemehere.com/ http://mega.pastemehere.com/
• Threep78 12y ago
  I own and run a website, in the category of special-interest news stories, that's making 10–15k a month consistently for almost 10 years. (Yeah, we got started early, which is probably why I have good search engine rankings.) Google AdSense is the only means of income. We get close to 1 million unique visitors a month. Just me and one other part-time employee running it, so it's been a pretty spectacular (and unexpected! It started as a hobby) success.
• dfar1 12y ago
  As cheesy and sketchy as it sounds I make about $600 a year by logging into my "surveys" account once a month (need to login to keep it active). All the money comes from referrals, I no longer take surveys. Every now and then I login to check my balance and to cash in. I used to run a blog where I got all the referrals from, about 2400 people. The blog has been down for a couple of years, but the referral's money continues to come in.
• dangrossman 12y ago
  $30K per month from https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com A few thousand per month from https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com
  • paromi 12y ago
    nice stats. i have signed up for w3, proceeded to add a site, noticed i cant make the counter invisible, saw the pro signup page, closed the site. maybe you should consider to let the first site added to be free with pro features and charge for the next sites , or maybe for a 60 day period and then ask for pro.
    • dangrossman 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. W3Counter has around 79,000 users despite never being advertised; I don't really care to grow it faster by giving away more. The PRO features cost money because they cost me more money -- they include real-time reports that take more server resources to scale. W3Counter's always been a pet project I built for myself, back in the days before Google Analytics existed, that I've just been happy to see pay for itself. The site turned 10 this year.
  • notdarkyet 12y ago
    Wow, so is improvely is run just by you? 30k a month is impressive. I checked out your blog, but have you ever had anyone else working on it or have you always maintained the full stack?
    • dangrossman 12y ago
      It's always just been me. This is a lifestyle business for me, and I don't really feel time-constrained at all. The variety of skills you have to develop to run a software business alone is what makes it interesting to me; I never get bored with the work since there are so many roles I can choose to take on each day. There's always something new to learn on the horizon, and great motivation to do the learning (like ack! you're about to have more traffic than one server can handle, better learn how to handle that!). The only downside to working alone is being on-call 24/7/365 for the servers. I have a good alert system that will wake me up if anything goes wrong overnight, though most components of the stack can fail without taking down a site. Lots of load balancing and warm failovers at a second host just in case.
• razvanh 12y ago
  I love reading and I'm a designer so I started http://greatdesignbooks.com/ http://greatdesignbooks.com/ where I share books that inspired me. I'm using amazon affiliate links which brings in a few dollars a month :)
• guiomie 12y ago
  around 1$ a month from my android game ChubbyFish. It was really just me experimenting with android game developement.
• mikelbring 12y ago
  My new service has 2 customers at 29$ a month each. https://textfollow.com https://textfollow.com
  • othello 12y ago
    How did you get these first two customers?
    • mikelbring 12y ago
      They are two local businesses that my partner knew the owner of. We tried cold calling a few others and working with local marketing agencies with little luck so far.
• plehoux 12y ago
  Conferencebadge.com(+Leanticket.com) started in January 2013, generates ~$36k / month and growing. Interesting to note we were reject after interviewing in SF for YC S2013. We are a team of four working on this. Mostly part time, customer support, fulfilment with partners. The money from this enables us to focus most of our time on a newly not announced projet, which we plan to launch in spring 2015. We plan to apply to YC with this one and are confident it will be a good match. Big vision, big plans. I personally also have an old flash game portal (jeuxgratuits.net) started 13 years ago still generating ~1.5k / month. All legacy traffic from Google and 10 years of web links. 0 maintenance time.
  • MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
    Looks really nice. I'm suprised lanyrd.com and similar didn't get that idea. Charging per badge is a nice business model.
    • plehoux 12y ago
      Lanyrd.com is all about discoverability. Conferencebadge.com is more utility. Really different in my opinion. I think the success of the plateforme was in our ability to mitigate all the pain points of managing attendees badges, which is not a sexy business.
  • mastef 12y ago
    impressive!
  • raphinou 12y ago
    Conferencebadge.com is very clever!
  • bernardom 12y ago
    What really good example of executing very nicely on one thing. Congratulations.
  • dharma1 12y ago
    like it. textbook example of great UX
• scrumper 12y ago
  About $20-30 a month from an $1.99 iPad synthesizer app. Probably grossed about $2k over its life. It's entirely passive income: I haven't done an update since iOS 6.
• Osiris 12y ago
  I earn about $1500 a month from a program called BatteryBar, it's a laptop battery meter for Windows laptops. Sales are driven mostly by referrals from web forums and Q&A sites where users recommend it. It's a freemium model with the vast majority using the free version.
  • klausjensen 12y ago
    That is an awesome program, I have used it for a while. Good work. :)
    • Osiris 12y ago
      Email me and I'd be happy to send you a free Pro license key.
  • lovelearning 12y ago
    I find that both eye opening and inspiring. Couple of years ago, I developed a battery meter and alerter for windows. I never thought anybody would buy it, much less use it. Never published it anywhere :(
    • yitchelle 12y ago
      Should go the extra step now and publish it..You never know.
• bussiere 12y ago
  Stocks 300 / month with a custom data analysis (very simple, it's based on event. It analyse stok data and highlit regular period of high on the stocks on the same date each year, and after by hand i try to find why it goes high, and i can put past event also and it told me if theses event have an influence on stocks in the past). http://www.skruge.in/ http://www.skruge.in/ https://github.com/skruge/skruge.github.io https://github.com/skruge/skruge.github.io I'am limited by the amount of cash. I'am in the process of launching a fund.
  • why-el 12y ago
    I am fairly clueless about stocks. Would you mind sharing how would one start? How much upfront cost does it require?
    • bussiere 12y ago
      Play only money that you don't need, my program aims to 3% per month. Choose a sector that you like (biotech , videogames etc ...). Take care of trading costs. And if you are a programmer try to find pattern in stocks. https://www.quantopian.com/home https://www.quantopian.com/home If you play even with an algorithm or without, write your rules (i play this amount, i go aout at this date or if i loose this percent). Have a clean head when you play. By analysing data you can earn a little. For the upfront it depends of what you aim. And in the end if someone talk you about technical analisys , run it's bullshit like horoscope for trading -_-
      • jslabonte 12y ago
        As a neophyte trader, I can't tell the difference between technical analysis, and what Skrudge does. Can you elaborate ?
        • bussiere 12y ago
          Technical analysis, take too much non rationnal things in account and try to find pattern with it or rationnalise it after. It tries to find pattern and rationnalise it with its method (that use too much random , too much non relationnal things (i even heard one use golden number)). Here i'am just trying to find pattern in stocks and find if an event can explain it. I correlate event and stocks fluctuation. The goal is to find event that are regular (like black friday or a keynote for apple or announcement etc ...) I will not say it will goes up because of my method, i say it will goes up because there is the black friday / christmas / exdividend Date. English is not my main langage. Don't donate to us if you want but run away when someone talk about technical analysis. Sometimes stock market is so random that you can "explain" it with bullshit theory.
• raivo 12y ago
  About $15 a month from 3 iOS baby tracking apps. Built to scratch my own itch, so to speak :) Here's one, and the side bar lists the others. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/napendar-baby-sleep-tracker/id898565907 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/napendar-baby-sleep-tracker/...
  • dotnetkow 12y ago
    Scratching your own itch is the best way to get started! Congrats, keep it up!
• mipapage 12y ago
  My wife and I have an old website that makes about 1200 euros/mo from Adsense. No work on it in years. So many ideas, so little time.
  • junto 12y ago
    Whilst I understand you won't want to share what the website is, can you give us an idea of how you went about picking the particular niche you choose, how you built traffic, how you wrote the content? I presume most of this is pure organic search engine traffic that is highly SEO optimised? Those are some nice figures. Have you not though about replicating this x100?
    • mipapage 12y ago
      Thanks for asking! "Have you not though about replicating this x100?" My wife's family asks us that at least once a year. We started the site a looong time ago, back when google dances were all the craze and SEO was just a baby. We worked hard building quality content around our theme in order to get pages indexed and were one of the first to market in this area. We ranked very well rather quickly, and started to get inbound links from university sites and courses where teachers linked to our content. As a result we get huge traffic relative to the work we put in. We were lucky. Most of the traffic boost happened before AdSense existed. I remember when it came out and we got accepted. Seriously? We can make money off of this website? Advertising was never the intention, it was lead gen. Anyways, on went AdSense and lo and behold we made 80 cents that first week. I forgot about it for a long time until at some point we received a big cheque. We have tried a lot of other things to monetize the traffic (lead gen no longer being necessary), but AdSense has always won. We have tried to build other sites to replicate this, but we were never able to luck out as we did with this one. These days I would really like to do something more meaningful as well, rather than try to build an MFA site (not that this first one was, nor were many of the later ones; we always tried to tie the website into lead gen for a local company in some niche - friends, neighbours, family - using adsense in the hopes the site may be successful one way or the other). WRT some of your comments, we didn't highly optimise the content, wrote most of it ourselves and the niche was our area of work. The main idea behind the content was building out the theme of our site, adding content related to the various aspects and explaining terminology, history and other details.
• chaseadam17 12y ago
  We launched Watsi's Universal Fund [1] (our monthly donation product) a few weeks ago. However, we had people beta testing our previous version of monthly donations for around a year before that. We've had 671 people join in total. 1 signup today. 8 signups this week. $21,300 in recurring monthly donations. $1,900 in recurring monthly tips (to our operations). The median monthly donation is $20. Since we launched the Universal Fund we've seen a conversion rate of 2.42% (signups/sessions). I'd be curious to know what conversion rates other recurring revenue products see. [1] https://watsi.org/universal-fund https://watsi.org/universal-fund
• embwbam 12y ago
  About $450 a month from my share of a spanish language bookstore, reader, and audiobook player app. It provides public domain books and Librevox recordings in a nice UI and all cleaned up. Users can buy books for 0.99 or 1.99 or buy the whole library for 4.99 I spent about 4-5 months working on it full time and kind of consider it a failure, but revenue isn't dropping. I don't know how to grow it though because it is search targeted.
  • markyc 12y ago
    link?
• abuiles 12y ago
  I wrote and publish a book through leanpub about Ember.js: ember-cli-101[1]. I started to sell it without finishing it and it was bringing about $500/mo, but now that is completed sells are going up. I hope it would be above $2000/mo for the following months. [1] https://leanpub.com/ember-cli-101 https://leanpub.com/ember-cli-101
• pedromsantos 12y ago
  I generate about $500-750 USD per month on a few apps I have published on the app store https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/letsbasket/id409205141 https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/letsbasket/id409205141 and google play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bytesteam.letsbasket&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bytesteam.... Income comes form advertising (admob/adsense), in app purchases and paid versions.
• buro9 12y ago
  A forum I ran which pulled in GBP +30k per year (for 4+ years) in affiliate fees is approaching EOL. eBay changed their fee structure and cookie policy last November, and this has coincided with a rise in voucher sites and cashback sites which take the prize of the last cookie placed. At the moment, across multiple side projects, I'm breaking even. I'll look to shutter some of them next year and will try something else.
• heliodor 12y ago
  One day, I saw opportunity. I called in sick from work the next day (because I just couldn't wait for the weekend!) and hacked out an Android app. Net result after several years: $50,000 in revenue. The way it happened is that I was already working on my Iridium Flares app, when one day I saw a certain new app launched. I knew I could do it better and I already had some useful code from another project, so I called in sick from work for one day, and hacked out a better version of what this guy had just launched. That app's user reviews told me exactly what to build. It took off from there. I have built several Android apps in the early days of Android. The just-mentioned app, which was my most profitable one, was selling for $3.95 and netted about $50,000 over the course of its life. Highest monthly income from that was $1500/month for about two months. I also had an Iridium Flares app for Android. It contributed maybe about 5% of the numbers stated above. This app was priced at $1.95. Both apps had a free version running ads. Most of the revenue came from the paid version of the other app. In the early days, simply putting an app on the Play Store was enough to have people find you through the search box and the 'new apps' list. I remember I was scanning the list of new apps every few days for neat new things to try on my G1. Making a better mouse trap would ensure your app got installed. Which brings me to the present: I just launched a cryptocurrency price charts website a few weeks ago with a friend. https://pizzacharts.com https://pizzacharts.com Got about $20 in donations at launch. We have a freemium model, $9/month only payable in Bitcoins at the moment, and ads. We'll see what kind of revenue comes out once we scale, fingers crossed.
  • aembleton 12y ago
    https://pizzacharts.com https://pizzacharts.com doesn't work for me (get an SSL connection error) and my ISP (Virgin Media in UK) blocks http://pizzacharts.com http://pizzacharts.com
    • heliodor 12y ago
      Would you be able to provide more details on that SSL error? The http url should redirect to the https (if your browser doesn't do it for you first).
      • 12y ago
• mox1 12y ago
  Roughly $200-400 / month from Admob on a single app that I put out 2 months ago. App is ranked Top 5-10 on Google Play for a fairly common English keyword. Same app available on iTunes, but little to no traction. I get 400-800 downloads a day on Google Play. 10-50 a day on iTunes. Requires $5/ month VM instance for a database and 1 hour a week for updates.
• MicroBerto 12y ago
  We run a network of product microsites that use PricePlow's API to hook users up with good deals and free samples. The new microsites are actively maintained (blogging, product updates, support questions, security) and definitely not passive, but some of our older ones from 2010-2011, like http://www.coconutwaterlife.com http://www.coconutwaterlife.com sit around collecting Amazon money for doing next to nothing. The non-maintained network of sites earns about $500/month. That sounds great, but honestly, I wasted so much time building so many of them -- scaling business in the wrong direction instead of building a real brand -- that at this point, I believe that had I spent the time working on the main PricePlow setup in those two crucial years, my returns would be far higher than what I'm getting from screwing around with a ton of microsites. Plus, pareto principle. 10% of the old sites make 90% of the passive revenues. The rest of them were total WOMBATs.
• hwswfun 12y ago
  $0.00 from my free game "Barnyard Politics" on Android. Immeasurable wealth realizing I could make the game in 4 days with a game sdk verses the whole summer I spent chasing an idea that I never released but used OpenGL, Android NDK, OpenCV. All the technologies I learned led to the next couple years of my work innovating for my employer so it was a good thing. Time well spent. Long live SDKs, APIs and other ways to get a product out the door without coding every bit myself. Fun teamwork results from these side projects also. Such as my wife recording her custom mix of "Old McDonald" + "Hail to the Chief" to be used as my background music for the game. She did this at 1AM of election day, 2010 so I could release the app that day. Can lessons in life be measured as recurring revenue? Maybe not monetarily but certainly in wisdom and the ability to execute better the next time.
  • ssharp 12y ago
    What SDK did you use?
    • hwswfun 12y ago
      For Barnyard Politics, I used AndEngine. Since then, I have used and loved Unity3D for hard core conceptual prototypes and am in love with Construct 2 now for my current side project though. I am walking my kids through developing and I needed something less complicated than Unity3D. Construct 2's dev environment is fairly easy to use and it exports to html,css, js. Better than that is that I can make my own plugins in js and make them available to people that will create content for my future website / app. I have extremely limited non-corporate time so I plan to author the first content to get started but then make tutorials and allow others to create. Note: My opinions on game SDKs or anything else here are entirely my own and have nothing to do with my role in the corporate world. The experiences I mention here stem from the fact that I cannot stop programming or thinking about apps when I come home. I love this stuff. And yes, I deeply desire to get to MRR at some point.
• laurenbee 12y ago
  $200-$300/month from ebook sales on Amazon. It was more ($600-$700/month) when I was releasing ebooks more frequently, but I haven't written any since July.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• edpichler 12y ago
  I get just $45,00 month with my web app. I have 1800 users. www.easypnr.com It's just a few bucks but, at least, pay the server bills.
• bdunn 12y ago
  I have an email course (autoresponder) -> course sales funnel setup for Double Your Freelancing Rate which nets about $1-1.5k a day in sales, mostly on autopilot. This is by far the most successful funnel I've created for any of my products, and is performing really stinkin' well. Product: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/ http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/ Email course: http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/free-pricing-course/ http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/free-pricing-course/
  • porter 12y ago
    What sort of conversion rate do you get on this funnel?
    • bdunn 12y ago
      About 8% right now, with an average sale of a little north of $200 (so it doesn't take many subscribers and sales to hit four-figures a day)
      • porter 12y ago
        Does the end of your sales funnel have some sort of scarcity built into it? Or are you basically just linking out to the sales page, to an always available book/course?
        • bdunn 12y ago
          Yeah, so there's a coupon offered that expires in a week. I'm applying an "Eligible for discount" tag in my marketing automation tool when I announce the discount, and retract it when the sale window ends. And my sales site checks for the presence of that tag before applying the discount. This effectively allows me to create a sale-for-one type system.
          • porter 12y ago
            Thanks so much for this. I've been trying to figure out how to create some sort of automated discount like this for a while now without success. Your sales funnel is actually very sophisticated. Do you think infusionsoft is the best automation tool to implement something like this?
• jdawg77 12y ago
  I've never participated in one of these before...deep breath. * Ebooks - I publish under four different names; the big alias I've been making $100-$400 dollars per month for several years. A few months I made over a thousand, but I haven't published anything new in months, thus the drop. Sales via Amazon (90%), Smashwords, BN, etc - I'm not on Google Play yet but on Apple, which is about 5x bigger than BN now. * Adsense - back in the day I co-founded a niche social network, peaked at nearly $60K per month in adsense, despite being 11 years old, the site still gets a few hundred thousand visitors per month - I sold my stake in 2012. * I'd like to add a 3rd here, but there isn't at present. Hopefully soon, keep posting these, they are hugely inspiring for all of us who mostly lurk.
  • wicker 12y ago
    I've been kicking around the idea of writing something but I'd like to do it under my real name and so I'm paralyzed by the fear that I'll write something terrible and get bad reviews and it'll show up on my search results forever. Maybe I'm more afraid it'll just languish once it's written. I don't know. Can you talk a little more about the ebooks? How did you choose a topic and could you point at a useful reference or two for how to market?
• mastef 12y ago
  we're a team of 4 core ppl ( some part time ) working on http://www.pitchxo.com http://www.pitchxo.com and have managed to increase revenue since launch ~4 months ago MoM by ~20% - to around 2000$ monthly. ( famous slow SaaS ramp of death ) In that whole time running manual services like http://www.sharkboard.co http://www.sharkboard.co ( monthly investor updates ) and http://www.stefanxo.com http://www.stefanxo.com ( cto consulting, PA services & hosting ) kept us afloat while building it with 4-5k$ + shortterm gigs backstory: i ran a small mvp 1-2 years ago on a blog of a famous european angel investor. we uploaded his next project's pdf behind a social login - 800 people signed up. few months later we made a similar page for a fintech firm that was raising a round - this time with email notifications about sign ups and adding them to a CRM. they got about 150 investors signed up and raised the money quite quickly so we started automating the process and building it as SaaS app step by step. at first with a few customers who we set up manually, then end of summer we finally launched the SaaS version
• mkertajaya 12y ago
  I ran shopebike.com, a dropship of electric bikes and soon electric scooters. I provide customer supports via email and sometimes over the phone. It has generated around $8000 a year so far, mostly in the warmer months. I tried google ads words in the past, but the cost was too much so I dropped it in the beginning of the year. Maybe I wasn't doing it correctly, but it was almost no conversions.
  • thisisdallas 12y ago
    This is really interesting. I have read a lot of articles about dropshipping being extremely hard to get right. Just out of curiosity, how much time on average did you put into marketing/seo in order to start generating income? Do you also blog about electric bikes?
    • mkertajaya 12y ago
      The article is probably correct. I had access to the manufacturer on this one. I haven't done much advertising this year. Most of my traffic comes directly from the manufacturer's site. I don't blog directly but I am actively looking and linking to other blogs/article about our e-bikes.
      • icebraining 12y ago
        What's the upside for the manufacturer in linking to you?
• gavinballard 12y ago
  ~$500/m from sales of my Bootstrap framework for Shopify themes (http://www.bootstrapforshopify.com http://www.bootstrapforshopify.com).
• selamin 12y ago
  I sell a self hosted web app (http://duetapp.com http://duetapp.com) that generates 3-4k a month. It used to be higher, but I haven't given it the attention it deserves in a couple of months.
  • foofoobar 12y ago
    Where do you advertise? Is your web page the only selling channel you are using?
    • selamin 12y ago
      I don't do any paid advertising at the moment. I get a decent amount of leads from two other apps that I distribute for free (http://theanchorapp.com http://theanchorapp.com, http://getsoloapp.com http://getsoloapp.com), google, and word of mouth. Yep, the website is the only sales channel...
• nick2 12y ago
  iOS app average less than a hundred dollars a month https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tasq-logger/id877346886?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tasq-logger/id877346886?mt=8
• yesimahuman 12y ago
  A few years back my friend and I had bootstrapped a simple SaaS product to over $30k/mo in recurring revenue with insane margins. We turned it into a bigger business after that, but I sometimes can't believe how much we made with just two people.
  • softdev12 12y ago
    that's amazing. was there much of a sales effort involved?
    • yesimahuman 12y ago
      No sales or marketing spend. We built developer tools (still do) and just found really passionate communities that were willing to pay for things. We did spend a good amount of time on "virality" (just making sure we were utilizing organic growth on Twitter), and also tweaking and testing pricing models. We probably tried 5+ pricing models for new customers in a given year.
• alokm 12y ago
  Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.
  • aembleton 12y ago
    Which apps did you make?
    • alokm 12y ago
      Most of my revenue is from an app called Hindu Calendar. It has loads of features now relating to traditional Indian calendar, and festivals of India. [Edit]: See https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Alok+Mandavgane https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Alok+Mandavg...
  • softdev12 12y ago
    did you initially launch the app with ads? does the ad hurt the user experience?
    • alokm 12y ago
      Yes i added ads initially. But I always made sure they did not compromise with user experience. The ad revenue was not significant initially. It has grown steadily over couple of years as the user base has increased.
• OutsourceJunkee 12y ago
  This is a fun thread I make a Thousand a month by hooking companies up with outstanding off shore employees that I have tried and tested myself. The goal is to focus and become a the best.
  • scottydelta 12y ago
    try me: email me @ contact@pastemehere.com
    • OutsourceJunkee 12y ago
      Email sent
• justinmares 12y ago
  I'm around $5500 a month total from 2 Udemy courses and a launching Traction book. It breaks down like this (all links below): My SQL for Marketers course on Udemy does about $1500 a month, and has been pretty steady since launching the course on Udemy in late April. This takes almost no maintenance, though I am starting to work on improving it in response to student feedback. My other course, Productivity for Mac Users, is a simpler keyboard shortcuts one can use to be more productive on Mac. This one makes $400-800 per month, though average over the lifetime (launched in May) has been around $500. Lastly, we launched Traction book 3 months ago, and it continues to sell really well. Even after splitting with my co-author, I make about $3500 a month from that. You can see full numbers breakdown in the blog post we wrote summing up our launch. https://www.udemy.com/sql-for-marketers/#/ https://www.udemy.com/sql-for-marketers/#/ https://www.udemy.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts/#/ https://www.udemy.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts/#/ http://tractionbook.com http://tractionbook.com http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2014/10/getting-traction-for-traction-book-12328-copies-by-the-numbers.html http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2014/10/getting-traction...
  • stephancoral 12y ago
    How much work went into advertising your Udemy courses? Was it something that took significant advertising / reach to gain students?
    • justinmares 12y ago
      Honestly, no. One post to reddit, one to Growthhackers.com and the rest has all been organic.
      • stephancoral 12y ago
        Pretty good ROI it seems like. Thanks for sharing!
  • tacon 12y ago
    Udemy offered me the SQL for Marketers course on Black Friday sale for $10 (down from $199?). I couldn't pass that up.
• bizocean 12y ago
  I earn most of money from trading stock and binary options you read my review about binaryoption here http://www.bizocean.org/2014/05/Binary-signals-aka-option-trading-what-you-need-to-put-your-income-on-autopilot.html http://www.bizocean.org/2014/05/Binary-signals-aka-option-tr...
• dharma1 12y ago
  about $800/year, radio play royalties from music I made about 10 years ago. Pays for a new guitar each year
• rk0567 12y ago
  $100 per month from this little tool [1] I created few months ago (as a fun side project). [1] http://portchecker.co http://portchecker.co
• mrlebowski 12y ago
  $100 per month from my Android apps. I have three apps out, and only one is generating most of the money. $0 from http://favoriteof.com http://favoriteof.com - Site about recommendations by noteworthy people. Currently focusing on books!
• edent 12y ago
  Solar Panels. I've 4kWp systems on 2 properties in southern England. Making about £3k/year with them. The money comes from the Government and is guaranteed for 20 years. First 8 years will be enough to pay off the cost of installation. Money is tax free, but does depend on the weather (and components breaking). Lots of details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/solar-graphing-faq/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/solar-graphing-faq/ I run a silly little Amazon (UK) referral tumblr - http://fiverfun.tumblr.com http://fiverfun.tumblr.com Makes about £100 / month - which is enough to keep me in cheap electronics :-) Tried adverts & paid apps, only ever made ~£10/month. I rent out a couple of properties - that's ~£1,600/month (before tax, mortgage payments, new carpets, fees, more fee, insurance, more tax, etc). The key to all of them is to find things that take as little effort as possible. The panels need checking every quarter, the tumblr is a few minutes in the evening, the properties are handled by professional agents. All that leaves me time to work for a living :-)
• a89839812983 12y ago
  About $9000/month. I would say I am very good at what I do, but I am sick and cant be bothered to do business stuff. My nearest competitor just raised $10M. I do comparable stuff, but I am single person. So I found business guy (marketing cofounder) who takes care of everything and pays me flat fee. I live on tropical island and work in average 2 hours a day. Next year I will be probably better, so I am going to scale up the business (and income) little bit.
  • jayd77 12y ago
    What kind of business are you in?
• kalid 12y ago
  I sell math books and courses at http://betterexplained.com http://betterexplained.com and on Amazon. It's about 3k/m currently, hoping to improve that with better landing pages, a/b testing, retargeting, drip campaigns, etc. [the patio11 playbook]. More details on how I got started here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870015
  • porter 12y ago
    I bought one of your courses a while ago. nice work!
    • kalid 12y ago
      Awesome, glad to hear!
  • ivan_ah 12y ago
    Hi kalid. That's awesome to hear you're grown the business to 3k/mo. Clearly the model of free content online + sales of curated book-length content works. Imagine now if a bunch of people with tutoring experience in chemistry, biology, economics, etc. write textbooks on their subject. Wouldn't the life of the ugrad student get suddenly better? (Stop the exploitation of ugrads! ) BTW, since you cover a lot of high school topics, you should consider making a textbook that is aligned with the common core math state standards---the big textbook publishers are scrambling to update their books right now...
    • kalid 12y ago
      Hey Ivan! Been meaning to reach out about your mini reference guides, I really like the approach. I agree on aligning with common core, I've been out of school so long I forget what old textbooks are like (the courses I have are more like "enrichment"). Well-written, reasonably-priced books that teach lasting understanding would be awesome for undergrads.
• bigmessowires 12y ago
  Great topic. I have about $1000/month in revenue from selling floppy disk emulators for classic Macintosh computers. This was originally something I designed myself, just for fun. There's more labor required for order fulfillment and shipping than I'd like, though. I also earn a tiny $150/year from Amazon affiliate sales on a running/sports web site I built 10 years ago, and has good Google rankings. I used to have Google adSense ads too, but it always showed very generic ads that got very few clicks. Now I hand-select Amazon products I think visitors might be interested in, and include links to those.
• appplemac 12y ago
  $0 at the moment for Honey with a Story[1], but I made it pretty recently, and it did not get any coverage yet outside of my circle. But I hope it will :) [1] www.honeywithastory.com
• chemcoder 12y ago
  Recurring Income I run a small firm supplying air freshener services - dispenser along with monthly refilling. Manufacturing and selling water based air fresheners, car air fresheners, scented wood balls for cupboard. Recurring is growing fast. First is a service - I make around 3k USD in recurring revenue. Profit margins are good. Another counter sales is also periodic not monthly though unevenly amongst clients however it has been launched two months ago and had 2k in first and 3.5K in second in revenue. Here too i manage good margins because i havent yet made into big retail. Its increasing rapidly and consuming resources and money. Non recurring but periodic Also sell air freshener products suitable for larger areas like custom diffusers etc revenue ranges anywhere from 0.5-2.5K USD each month.
• scottydelta 12y ago
  I am making around $1500/month by freelancing on odesk where I work on max 2 projects per month(I am an undergrad student) and each project takes approx 4 days. Before that I was hired full time work from home(40 hrs/week) by a swedish company and was making 2500$/month for 3 months. PS: looking for full time remote work at startups, Pythonista web developer(flask/django)
  • icpmacdo 12y ago
    What programming languages are the oDesk job in? I am also a student and need to start making some money freelancing.
    • scottydelta 12y ago
      There are almost all kinds of jobs on odesk. From debugging a c/c++ code to writing algos and doing web developent etc. PHP is in high demand on odesk.
• bigmessowires 12y ago
  I see many comments about Android apps as money-makers, but only one for iOS. Does that reflect where app sales are in each market, or are Hacker News commenters just much more likely to be Android users?
  • not_with_retard 12y ago
    _Much_ more likely to be Android users.
• may 12y ago
  Does anyone have any good books or resources to help someone determine a match between possible niches and their skillset?
• par 12y ago
  I make about $15 a month from my blog http://devcodehack.com http://devcodehack.com and about $300/month from my Twitter marketing site http://followme.io http://followme.io
• fiatjaf 12y ago
  $3 a month at http://alimentos.alhur.es/ http://alimentos.alhur.es/ and http://tabelas.alhur.es/ http://tabelas.alhur.es/.
• bbcbasic 12y ago
  I have done too many things in the past (which are now dead) to even remember them all. My current project is making me a handsome $2-3 a week is an Andriod app for children. Money from admob. I am trying to slowly growth hack it in various ways. One is to get translations done on fiverr.com to countries where it is popular. An other is to think about improving my 'asking for ratings' UX so that I can compel people to give feedback and therefore improve the app, reduce the % of uninstalls. This is based on a simple idea that the number of installs stabilizes: Let new installs / day = N Let uninstalls = U Let % of uninstalls per day = P Let total current installs = C Then U = P * C This is stable when U = N So when N = P * C Therefore C tends to N/P So for example 100 new installs per day at 1% uninstall rate = 10000 installs eventually and no more. But get the % down to 0.1% is the same effect as getting 1000 new installs per day. So this is part of my plan.
• neoterics 12y ago
  Ha not sure if this counts, but around a year or two ago I found out a cheap source of page rank which I pointed to one of my loans lead gen website which resulted in me ranking for some fairly decent money keywords. I was making few hundred a day for a couple of months before the website was penalized by Google. I mostly dabble in whiter-hat stuff now but the progress is slow (but hopefully it lasts longer) and make a few hundred per month.
• itengelhardt 12y ago
  I make about $1,400 MRR from my SaaS app LinksSpy (https://www.linksspy.com https://www.linksspy.com). LinksSpy is a tool for SEO agencies that helps them find better link opportunities for their client's websites. I started it at the end of April 2014 (7 months ago) and it has grown ever since. Considering that I am moonlighting the app, it has been quite successful so far. AM(A)A
  • thepredestrian 12y ago
    What did you do to market your app?
    • itengelhardt 12y ago
      A bit of posting on reddit; spent a few bucks on FB/StumbleUpon/Reddit ads; Retargeting through PerfectAudience; Drip email campaign using GetDrip.com; Word of mouth plays a huge part as well. In addition to that I use LinksSpy to build more links to LinksSpy.
  • malditojavi 12y ago
    $1.4k MMR? I though these were real data http://www.it-engelhardt.de/linksspy-com-monthly-income-report-october-2014/ http://www.it-engelhardt.de/linksspy-com-monthly-income-repo...
• eb0la 12y ago
  About $80 yearly from an affiliate link inside a blog post I made some years ago. I still wonder why it is still geting traffic from google and how I could scale it.
• cerberusss 12y ago
  I bought a floundering app on AppTopia for $4000 and with some solid work and design, I'm getting about $170 per month.
• cx42net 12y ago
  I'm surprised to see that no one talked about money they make by selling themes or modules on sites like ThemeForest. I personally make around 400/500€ per month by selling a few modules on the Prestashop platform, and this month I'll pass the 1.000€ bar, which feel awesome. I made around 3800€ in 8 month with just a few support, and this feels great ! We also launched the new version of VoilaNorbert (https://www.voilanorbert.com https://www.voilanorbert.com) that aims to find email of people with a slick and easy to use interface. Since the new release (two weeks ago), we made around 250$. It's not much, but it's amazing :)
• Toadsoup 12y ago
  My friend and I launched our service last night. We will record a video note to someone you like on your behalf (anonymous if desired). It's a video service for secret admirers. We built the entire thing last night (11/19/14) in about 5 and a half hours from conception to implementation. If we sell any, we'll go about polishing the page and making it better. http://lovablenote.com http://lovablenote.com
• shanecleveland 12y ago
  $150-$200/month from ads on a few simple web apps to generate international shipping documents. Needed something better to use at my regular job, so I made my own. Turned out to be a decent demand for them (few hundred visitors each day). Narrow niche targeting businesses, so that helps with search engine rank and per-click Adsense value. Might be the potential to productize it.
• malditojavi 12y ago
  Mmmm I did my first $49 with an sponsor that I get for http://petithacks.com http://petithacks.com A website where I curate small hacks & tricks companies do to get more of your time, of your attention, of your money. Nothing spectacular, I know. I started to get some traffic (28K visits so far) 1 month ago after being featured in ProductHunt, SmashingMagazine, SitePoint, etc. Still trying to figure it out what I could do with the 1,4k signups I have.
• taphangum 12y ago
  $1,100 per month from a Udemy course - https://www.udemy.com/building-and-selling-a-niche-website-from-scratch/?couponCode=redditpeeps123 https://www.udemy.com/building-and-selling-a-niche-website-f...