In 2007 I created a WordPress plugin to add some features to one of my sites, and threw it up on my blog as a free download for anyone else that could make use of it.
There were so many downloads, comments, feature and support requests I couldn't keep up. I started from scratch and created a premium version that did more and was better designed, front-end and back, and tossed a link to that on my blog as well.
I sold about $200,000 in licenses to that plugin before selling the rights to it for another $90,000 1.5 years later.
I wrote a payment system called 'webpay', and sold individual licenses. One day some guy calls up and asks about a source license. I didn't feel like selling so I asked an outrageous price, $100,000, and jokingly I added 'in small bills'. Three days later (Christmas eve, no less) some guy shows up at my house with a suitcase full of fifties... he'd been on 3 flights from Minot, North Dakota with a bunch of lay-overs. We waited for the banks to open so the money could be deposited and I burned him a CD.
If this is a true story, wow. Without any confirmation, he just shows up with a suitcase? That's quite a lot of effort without first confirming the transaction — good thing it worked out.
I have blogged for the last four years. Apparently some of what I wrote was interesting enough that people remember my name. Some of them have large amounts of other people's money to spend on outside consultants. This is a fortuitous and totally unplanned coincidence.
I love it when this happens. I've had a similar experience with blogging and owe everything to it. It moved me from Nebraska to California, has won me big clients, and even provides significant passive revenue.
Is it more profitable to work for people instead of continuing to build products? What do they hire you for - SEO expertise or programming ability?
And how much of your name-recognition is due to your blog, and how much is due to how much you comment on social websites like this? It seems to me your comment output far exceeds your blog output.
Back in 1995, I started dabbling with the web design in my final year of engineering. Back then, the web was a brand new world and I was having a lot of fun trying out new thing - as my first project, I created a fan site for the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (Cool Calvin & Hobbes Collection - http://www.nivmedia.com/calvin).
After a few years, I moved state, degrees, jobs and stopped maintaining it. In 2005 I happened to check the web logs and noticed that it was still getting several hits a day. In a fit of nostalgia, I redesigned the whole site using the knowledge I had gained in the past decade (web design was always a hobby, not a job), and in the process added some Amazon links and some Google adverts.
I've barely touched the site since 2006, but it still consistently gets several hits every day and generates around $1-1.5k in Google ad revenue and $400 in Amazon revenue a year.
Nothing to retire on - but as the first site I ever created and for something I don't maintain, it still brings a smile to my face when the ad revenue arrives in my bank account :)
I wrote about http://PeterAnswers.com on my blog and it became the #1 google result for "ask peter". The post got a ton of traffic and I built a clone called http://askjud.com
-- Redirected everyone, added Adsense, and now it gets 6k - 10K visits / day.
Remember the feature of the old iPods where you could add notes that used a subset of HTML? When I was in high school I wrote a little command-line program that would generate a bunch of notes linking to each other that in effect let you play blackjack on your iPod. It was a total hack, but I had a casino contact me asking to sponsor it. It didn't end up happening, but it's the closest I've come to accidentally making money.
I've written other open-source software since and had people offer money for new features, but I'm not sure that counts since it involves additional work.
When I was 15 I coded a basic WYSIWYG editor for WAP pages (early days mobile internet pages) as a freeware, and I got contacted by a company willing to acquire all the assets and hire me to work full time on a branded version of my editor.
They bailed out once they realized how young I was (and still in school).
I did some work for a comedy writer / actor a few years back that ran a company called Talking Panda, where they sold software that was basically iPods hacked to work as info decks & translation tools. At their peak I heard they were pulling in between $500k - $1m a year. Pretty sure the App Store squashed them out of existence, but pretty amazing story since I think it was originally an 'accident' as well
Haha - very interesting sounding game! Too bad that sponsorship fell through - that sounds like it really could have worked. You could have contacted more casinos and started a bidding war!
In Fall 08, I wanted an iPhone app to track up-to-date poll results between Obama and McCain and...as it turned out, there wasn't an app for that. So I wrote one in a week and sold ~50,000 copies (http://structlab.com/iphone/polltracker/)
A few years ago I started helping out making user generated content for a HL2 mod in my spare time.
The mod got quite popular and a couple of us got invited on an all expenses trip to the US to visit Valve's HQ and meet Gabe etc along with the mod's creator.
Helped re-write the entire thing from scratch to eliminate the myriad of bugs which had gradually crept into each subsequent update, still in my spare time.
A few months later started selling the mod on Steam.
I think so far it's sold in excess of 500k copies.
In case you haven't guessed, the game was Garry's mod.
I didn't make anywhere near as much as Garry the mods original author, who's pretty much set up his own fully funded game dev studio with the proceeds, but it was a fun summer nonetheless.
In 2007 I had been working as a network engineer for a big networking vendor for 6 years, making close to 6 figures. I had also been preparing for 6 months to pass a very hard networking certification (CCIE), when my boss decided that he could hire a cheaper engineer and fired me. I had no idea what to do next but I had lots of free time on my hands. So, when my gf, who was into handmade crafts, asked me to set up a wordpress blog for her, I immediately decided to help her (even though I knew nothing of HTML or web development) because my self-confidence was going down in a spiral to the ground.
The blog made $500 in the first month from Adsense. A year later, close to $1000 a month. I created a few more websites around the same concept and now I make close to $2500 a month in passive income, which allowed me to spend a year studying Python full time (and web development in general) and also lets me work full time on my startup. I'm not rich, but I make my own time, work on my own projects and it's a nice sum of money for someone living in Brazil.
I juggle as a hobby, and someone invited me to give a talk about the structures and theory behind it. I make a lot of money giving that talk multiple times every year.
I wrote 10MinuteMail.com in order to teach myself the JBoss Seam framework. I hadn't looked to see if there were other sites doing the same thing (there were), with more features (there were), etc... and never intended to make any money with it. It got pretty popular and I make a bit on Google Ads. Not enough to retire on or anything, but it makes low five figures annually.
I cried because I realized snakes are just tails with faces. That high.
Wow, that's funny. And you just have Google ads and stickers? Seems like you could make much more off of direct advertisers, or even find something on CJ.com
Just a small quip: There's a tiny bit of side scrolling for me . I'm running 1024x768. If you change the margin on your #wrap div to margin: -10px auto 0 auto; it'll center it.
Earlier this year somebody contacted me about selling a domain name called "timemanagementclass.com". It was vaguely related to some other projects we were doing and we thought it might be useful.
I negotiated hard with the seller and got him down to $200.
Then a week later somebody else called and said he'd wanted the domain and was too late in responding to the original seller. He WAS really in the time management space and really wanted the domain. So I sold it to him for $900.
There's a moral to this story:
1. Always negotiate hard and be willing to walk away if you don't get what you want. This takes a lot of emotion out of the process.
2. Don't dither around like the other buyer did. He was part of a large organization and to actually sell him the domain took almost 6 weeks.
I wrote a small Facebook application that let friends send me text messages from my facebook page for free (using email=>sms that my provider offers). 0 => 3,000,000 users in a couple of weeks.
I started blogging for enjoyment long before the word entered the popular lexicon. That never made a ton of money directly (though it did make some) but it did indirectly help me land a book deal and start a couple related businesses that made a lot of money.
It also gave me a chance to figure out how to write and communicate well, which I think is why we got into Y Combinator. I'd say that writing is probably the second most valuable life skill (behind understanding the concept of expected value) that I've picked up to date, and I was abysmal at it before I started that first Movable Type blog.
So in a roundabout way, blogging has made me a fortune, though I never could have anticipated it. When I started nobody had made much off of it.
Agreed. 90% of the accomplishments on my resume are thanks to writing good essays in applications and receiving fellowships, internships, and admission to Stanford. I'd say I'm a competent engineer but nothing extraordinary. Writing made all the difference.
I hacked a Linux driver to make a slightly obscure hardware device work in Ubuntu (to scratch an itch). I spoke to the hardware manufacturer on the way. I ended up doing some contracting on Linux compatibility for some of their other products.
I began playing video games... and in the last four years from that I've gone through a full time job as a journalist in that field (award-winning :P), gained a lot of experience running large (70,000 person) events, consulting for companies that create games / hardware / events, and now work in marketing/various other areas, all in that same industry.
I created a social networking software package, initially intended to be downloaded and used behind their firewall by small and medium companies for free (http://www.jouzz.com). I am currently in discussions with a large corporation that wants to implement it, paying licenses for all its employees!
I accidentally made more money than I planned on when I created a website to sell those Chronotebooks by Muji (http://www.coolhunting.com/design/muji-chronotebo.php). When they were first offered, the company only sold them in their store or over the phone. I guessed that there would be people who preferred to buy over the internet (as it was pretty popular with blogs when it was launched), so I did the dirty work of ordering in bulk over the phone, and then selling individually through a website.
I didn't think it would be that popular, but it was around Christmas time when I started it and I used the profits to buy myself a motorcycle. The funny thing is sales dropped sharply after Christmas, so I shut down the site. It was really a fluke that it worked out.
I built some hardware a few years ago for hobby projects.
Someone came onto a forum asking about a way to read a certain sensor so he could integrate it with his software. My circuit happened to do what he needed, so I made a few minor mods and became his hardware supplier for a few years.
[+] [-] dangrossman|15 years ago|reply
There were so many downloads, comments, feature and support requests I couldn't keep up. I started from scratch and created a premium version that did more and was better designed, front-end and back, and tossed a link to that on my blog as well.
I sold about $200,000 in licenses to that plugin before selling the rights to it for another $90,000 1.5 years later.
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] limedaring|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freshfey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadavy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeb|15 years ago|reply
And how much of your name-recognition is due to your blog, and how much is due to how much you comment on social websites like this? It seems to me your comment output far exceeds your blog output.
[+] [-] tobtoh|15 years ago|reply
After a few years, I moved state, degrees, jobs and stopped maintaining it. In 2005 I happened to check the web logs and noticed that it was still getting several hits a day. In a fit of nostalgia, I redesigned the whole site using the knowledge I had gained in the past decade (web design was always a hobby, not a job), and in the process added some Amazon links and some Google adverts.
I've barely touched the site since 2006, but it still consistently gets several hits every day and generates around $1-1.5k in Google ad revenue and $400 in Amazon revenue a year.
Nothing to retire on - but as the first site I ever created and for something I don't maintain, it still brings a smile to my face when the ad revenue arrives in my bank account :)
[+] [-] Judson|15 years ago|reply
-- Redirected everyone, added Adsense, and now it gets 6k - 10K visits / day.
[+] [-] jasonlbaptiste|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] famfam|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|15 years ago|reply
I've written other open-source software since and had people offer money for new features, but I'm not sure that counts since it involves additional work.
[+] [-] fbnt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwhitman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadavy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DEADBEEF|15 years ago|reply
The mod got quite popular and a couple of us got invited on an all expenses trip to the US to visit Valve's HQ and meet Gabe etc along with the mod's creator.
Helped re-write the entire thing from scratch to eliminate the myriad of bugs which had gradually crept into each subsequent update, still in my spare time.
A few months later started selling the mod on Steam. I think so far it's sold in excess of 500k copies.
In case you haven't guessed, the game was Garry's mod.
I didn't make anywhere near as much as Garry the mods original author, who's pretty much set up his own fully funded game dev studio with the proceeds, but it was a fun summer nonetheless.
[+] [-] rlander|15 years ago|reply
The blog made $500 in the first month from Adsense. A year later, close to $1000 a month. I created a few more websites around the same concept and now I make close to $2500 a month in passive income, which allowed me to spend a year studying Python full time (and web development in general) and also lets me work full time on my startup. I'm not rich, but I make my own time, work on my own projects and it's a nice sum of money for someone living in Brazil.
[+] [-] abbacd|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RiderOfGiraffes|15 years ago|reply
I juggle as a hobby, and someone invited me to give a talk about the structures and theory behind it. I make a lot of money giving that talk multiple times every year.
For the last 25 years - about 1800 talks.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modoc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hajrice|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadavy|15 years ago|reply
Wow, that's funny. And you just have Google ads and stickers? Seems like you could make much more off of direct advertisers, or even find something on CJ.com
EDIT: had to add this link. Haven't laughed this hard in weeks! http://www.thathigh.com/stickiest/
[+] [-] Vindexus|15 years ago|reply
Just a small quip: There's a tiny bit of side scrolling for me . I'm running 1024x768. If you change the margin on your #wrap div to margin: -10px auto 0 auto; it'll center it.
[+] [-] gregorym|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keltex|15 years ago|reply
I negotiated hard with the seller and got him down to $200.
Then a week later somebody else called and said he'd wanted the domain and was too late in responding to the original seller. He WAS really in the time management space and really wanted the domain. So I sold it to him for $900.
There's a moral to this story:
1. Always negotiate hard and be willing to walk away if you don't get what you want. This takes a lot of emotion out of the process.
2. Don't dither around like the other buyer did. He was part of a large organization and to actually sell him the domain took almost 6 weeks.
[+] [-] JshWright|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qixxiq|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadavy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|15 years ago|reply
It also gave me a chance to figure out how to write and communicate well, which I think is why we got into Y Combinator. I'd say that writing is probably the second most valuable life skill (behind understanding the concept of expected value) that I've picked up to date, and I was abysmal at it before I started that first Movable Type blog.
So in a roundabout way, blogging has made me a fortune, though I never could have anticipated it. When I started nobody had made much off of it.
[+] [-] M_Sanger|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlpb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corin_|15 years ago|reply
Just because I played games online.
[+] [-] edv|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkokelley|15 years ago|reply
I didn't think it would be that popular, but it was around Christmas time when I started it and I used the profits to buy myself a motorcycle. The funny thing is sales dropped sharply after Christmas, so I shut down the site. It was really a fluke that it worked out.
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|15 years ago|reply
Someone came onto a forum asking about a way to read a certain sensor so he could integrate it with his software. My circuit happened to do what he needed, so I made a few minor mods and became his hardware supplier for a few years.