I’m a full time developer but own a gym. By accident!
I went to take over a building as office space that was a liquidated gym. Signed the lease and the day before we moved in the owner called and said we can’t remove the equipment as it was all put in before the stairs. I asked a lot of questions about why the gym didn’t work, had already seen the equipment in there and did some negotiating on purchasing the kit, knowing I could still convert an area to offices.
The gyms main failure was due to the cost of staff. So I fully automated everything, door access, lights, aircon, TVs etc etc. Built a membership system. Making it a fully automated unmanned gym!
We then recruited a freelance personal trainer who does all the inductions in return for advertising and doing PT in our facility with no charge.
2 years in and it’s making £4,000 profit a month with minimal costs. Now looking to buy the building.
Gym: https://180fitness.co.uk
Me: https://roybarber.com
http://omgenomics.com/circa
Circa is an easy-to-use tool for building circos plots with genomics data. I built the visualization piece (and most of the UI) with D3.js and made it into a desktop app with Electron. Initially sold it for $25 per user (one-time cost), which made about $750 a month. Then some professors told me it was way too cheap, so I increased the price to $100. Since then, it has made about $1,500 every month for the last year. This week I started to add some new features and will soon make some more demo videos to see if I can increase that number. :)
I think it has worked this well so far because building circos plots is a well-known painful problem in the genomics field. And it was one that I had experienced myself during my PhD work. I was surprised at how many academics actually are willing to pay for software, but still unsure how big that market actually is and how much of it I am already covering. The nice thing about a tiny niche like this is that when you Google "circos", Circa's tutorial and demo videos show up on the first page.
That's pretty cool—congrats. Especially interesting for me to see, because it's the kind of tool and business model that interests me. One thing I wonder though is how it can be sustainable using the one time cost model. I suppose if the market were large enough, then you could just charge for new major versions every couple years and that might be sufficient. But maybe some kind of more expensive licensing for specific types of customers?
A site I built to teach myself bodyweight fitness (from a routine I found on reddit) -- grew a userbase and built up more detailed tracking, configuration, and usability.
The MRR is a bit hard to calculate right now (since I charge annually), but somewhere in the $500 - $1000 range.
Edit: This app grew from feelings of being stuck / burned out / almost depressed that can come from being in front of the computer too much. I was trying to build another startup out of college from my parents' house, and was having little progress or social interaction. There's been a number of threads about depression on HN recently, I felt the same. I realized I needed to be able to work out, but had no good gym accessible at the time, thus this little project was born (and went on to be more successful than the app I was initially trying to work on).
Brings in around $500-$1000 per month of revenue (when in stock haha). I started just to learn how to lay out a circuit board and make my own embedded device, just kind of took off.
Using the U2F protocol is nice, since it's a standard and the PC side infrastructure is all there for the users to use it. I just have to do the hardware development :)
Also, I'm working on a new U2F token. It supports FIDO2 (password replacement protocol, upgrade to U2F), NFC, USB-C, and will have a nice case. If you're interested, sign up here, we'll be releasing more news soon :)
Makes ~$1,000 a month gross, lot less after AWS costs.
I've had it for a long time, but haven't done much with it because of my primary business. After I sold that I spent the last year playing with some ideas and testing. I am working to get a new design up and just partnered with a friend to redo the arch and let him see what ideas he has to better monetize it.
I started https://usebx.com/app just under a year ago. We now do a few hundred thousand GBP per month in revenue. Nothing fancy, just a solid accounting and project management app, solid service, and good sales to corporate customers (we look after the smaller customers too, but only actively market to larger corporate clients, where the returns are significantly better).
We've just invested more in the code base to offer more features within our app, but kept things pretty simple at the start. Releasing in a couple of weeks!
Looks amazing and fast, congratulations. If you don't mind sharing, What is your tech stack ? How many developer hour were consumed developing it and how many to maintain it ?
Probably not what you're asking, but my side project is working on software projects for a couple local businesses. I work about 12 hours per week on the side at $150 per hour so I make about $7,200 per month.
Having W2 and 1099 income like this is advantageous as well. First, I max out my social security tax at my main employer which means my side income is social security tax free. Second, I max out my 401k employee contribution of $18,500 at my main employer. I then have an Individual 401k with Vanguard where I take about 20% of my profits and deposit that as the employer portion which lowers my federal taxes substantially. I take a good portion of what's left and deposit that in a 529 account for my kids which my state gives a tax deduction for that on state taxes.
My smaller client was just a friend that I met through my kids' school. My larger client I met while studying for a programming certification at a baseball clinic my oldest son attended. A guy who owned a local business saw me with a thick book and approached me with, "Are you in IT?"
I'm a php dev (5 years laravel), and vue+vuex (1-2 years)... primarily, is 150/hour really do-able for someone in php/vue stack? Is there a specific type of coding you do?
I've got some imposter syndrome/esteem issues I find it hard to pitch > $50/hour for my services... (I'm in utah)..
Average pay around here is also like $70-80k which I think is something like $35-40/hour, so again $150/hr just seems really high... I'd love to get $100/hour freelancing..
I saw your comment, liked the idea / design of your site, and signed up since we're in need of designers.
Some feedback:
- There's no way to see full resolution designs. Looking through the blog where your portfolio links to, there are _some_ samples, but some are pixelated and low-res.
- After signing up there's only a link to the customer portal via email, but there's no way to submit a design order nor are there any instructions on how to do so.
- I've been billed for a subscription, but no services have been or began to be rendered. Since I haven't submitted any design requests or any services have started, this is disappointing.
- The billing invoice is really confusing. I signed up for one month, but see two line items and "MANYPIXELS SPECIAL OFFER (2 for 1)" and two invoice line items for "PAID" and "ATTEMPTING"
I assume that since this is still a young product and you're still building the business out; however, I would expect the main site, manypixels.co, to know I've registered, be able to show me some information about my design request, and to download completed assets from it.
FYI I get an error when I try to visit the page (on Firefox) and have to add an exception. I think it has something to do with SSL? I tried to recreate it, but after I added the exception it's not appearing again.
Simple website for sending reminders. It didn't make any money for 4 years until I added commonly-requested features (templates, recurring reminders, and variables for recipient names). Now I have about 60 paying customers and it makes about $600 per month after all expenses paid. It's been running essentially autonomously for the past five months.
The iOS app is still difficult to use. I'm slowly rebuilding it. I'd say the main claim to fame at this point is if you Google "text message reminders" it's the first or second result.
https://servicehq.ca Built this over about 2-3 months with the help from a Beta customer satisfying their requirements slowly, but still ensuring that the platform is generic and modular enough.
It’s now averaging about $1000/month with 2 customers. I’m now planning to slowly rebuild the mobile app (need to improve UX and add offline functionality). Once ready, I can start selling to more customers, Also thinking of adding a few integrations with tools like Google Drive, Office 365 & Slack to improve market visibility.
$1000/month with 2 customers (for a SaaS) is impressive. Any tips for other SaaS-devtrepeneurs to achieve the same, without needing 100 customers per $1000?
Pretty cool! How about turning this into a service where other people can lease their own GPU hardware? Either through your website or by offering it as a sort of turnkey solution.
The picture of all ten of those cards together is breathtaking.
With the upcoming consumer RTX launch in a couple days, I really hope you've gotten your money's worth out of them. It's at least been a really long product cycle since their release.
It's an open source GPS tracking solution. We make money on SaaS, support and customisation services. Some of it basically passive income from subscriptions, some is new development.
Sound Shelter is a vinyl marketplace that connects records buyers with small independent record stores.
Revenue comes from a mixture of affiliate sales and subscriptions from records stores listing their inventory.
Building a two-sided marketplace is a lot more challenging than I had expected but definitely rewarding when the users find the rare record they probably wouldn't have ever found.
I believe that in Poland you cannot get a normal programmer's job after studies at universities. New programmers have such big lacks of knowledge that it cost really great amount of money and time to employers to teach them how to code properly.
I started teaching people C++ in January 2018. I choose only those, who have basics of programming. I do not teach from scratch, because there are many such companies. I teach programmers tools (git, make, cmake, vim), scrum, exceptions, objective C++, STL, memory management, testing and TDD, Modern C++ (C++11/14/17), good programming practices, templates, recruitment tips.
After the second edition of my course, I started earning over 8k PLN/month, which is over 2k USD/month. I spend only about 10h a week on teaching and running my business as a side project.
I teach in Wroclaw, Poland. From the next year, I plan to make it a full-time job (it means 20h a week for me ;)) and prepare some good online courses.
http://coders.school
https://teams.cardsync.xyz/, a Trello Power-Up I started as a Trello bot some years ago (I actually "invented" the concept of Trello bots as there were no one doing that at the time, but now all bots are banned).
I just made it because I thought it was a cool feature that was missing. As I started to develop it I realized it was much more complicated to implemente than it seemed, that was probably the reason the feature was missing. Anyway I accepted the challenge, put it live for free on Heroku and forgot about it.
One year later I got back to check it out and thousands of people were using it.
Still, I'm bad at market and monetization, and it's still a side-project to this day, but makes about $1200/mo.
I was trading options for a while and a lot of people kept asking me how I did it, just never had the time to describe everything. Finally decided to setup a website, www.marketgodfathers.com and a Discord channel. Automated reading my entries and exists from my brokerage and posting to discord allowing everyone to enter and exit the trades when I do. Now I just wait for people to sign up and I pay someone to chat with the customers/answer their questions on Discord.
Need to work on automatically posting my plans to other locations, or maybe find a service that does it for me, if anyone has recommendations. Looking to private message Discord users, Facebook friends, Facebook groups, Instagram posts, and Reddit subreddits/daily threads.
Interesting! Given the uncertainty in options markets and a rather tough job of following trades of others ... are you able to keep users going?
Also, your pricing seems quite steep ... just curious how many active users you have and revenue / month? (a single user on your monthly package gets you too $500! :))
If you can hack it together in a week then there are probably already a bunch of competitors. As has routinely been pointed out, many of the most popular apps can be readily copied in a fairly short time. The app is the easiest part.
I specifically look at these threads for business ideas. I probably wouldnt straight copy any of them, though. Better to differentiate. A side benefit is that the new offering might not even negatively impact the person I got the idea from.
I'm a mechanical design engineer. I "accidentally" ended up as the solo owner and operator of a CNC machine shop. Instead of buying gifts for friends, i would design and machine some sort of a trinket. I was constantly told I should sell these trinkets. It never occured to me that people would buy something I made. I started SmallBatchMade.com a little over a year ago. To my suprise, I sold $700 worth of product the first month. I now pAy my shop rent with this "side" income
[+] [-] roybarberuk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marianattestad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westoncb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zygotic12|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _august|7 years ago|reply
A site I built to teach myself bodyweight fitness (from a routine I found on reddit) -- grew a userbase and built up more detailed tracking, configuration, and usability.
The MRR is a bit hard to calculate right now (since I charge annually), but somewhere in the $500 - $1000 range.
Edit: This app grew from feelings of being stuck / burned out / almost depressed that can come from being in front of the computer too much. I was trying to build another startup out of college from my parents' house, and was having little progress or social interaction. There's been a number of threads about depression on HN recently, I felt the same. I realized I needed to be able to work out, but had no good gym accessible at the time, thus this little project was born (and went on to be more successful than the app I was initially trying to work on).
[+] [-] conorpp|7 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L9DUPK6 https://conorpp.com/designing-and-producing-2fa-tokens-to-se...
Brings in around $500-$1000 per month of revenue (when in stock haha). I started just to learn how to lay out a circuit board and make my own embedded device, just kind of took off.
Using the U2F protocol is nice, since it's a standard and the PC side infrastructure is all there for the users to use it. I just have to do the hardware development :)
Also, I'm working on a new U2F token. It supports FIDO2 (password replacement protocol, upgrade to U2F), NFC, USB-C, and will have a nice case. If you're interested, sign up here, we'll be releasing more news soon :)
https://solokeys.com/
[+] [-] leetbulb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lysp|7 years ago|reply
Either a month or a quarter would be fantastic (Nov 18 or Q3 18).
[+] [-] bwb|7 years ago|reply
Makes ~$1,000 a month gross, lot less after AWS costs.
I've had it for a long time, but haven't done much with it because of my primary business. After I sold that I spent the last year playing with some ideas and testing. I am working to get a new design up and just partnered with a friend to redo the arch and let him see what ideas he has to better monetize it.
[+] [-] osrec|7 years ago|reply
We've just invested more in the code base to offer more features within our app, but kept things pretty simple at the start. Releasing in a couple of weeks!
[+] [-] iamgopal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quakenul|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] highace|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingemote|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 300bps|7 years ago|reply
Having W2 and 1099 income like this is advantageous as well. First, I max out my social security tax at my main employer which means my side income is social security tax free. Second, I max out my 401k employee contribution of $18,500 at my main employer. I then have an Individual 401k with Vanguard where I take about 20% of my profits and deposit that as the employer portion which lowers my federal taxes substantially. I take a good portion of what's left and deposit that in a 529 account for my kids which my state gives a tax deduction for that on state taxes.
My smaller client was just a friend that I met through my kids' school. My larger client I met while studying for a programming certification at a baseball clinic my oldest son attended. A guy who owned a local business saw me with a thick book and approached me with, "Are you in IT?"
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|7 years ago|reply
I've got some imposter syndrome/esteem issues I find it hard to pitch > $50/hour for my services... (I'm in utah)..
Average pay around here is also like $70-80k which I think is something like $35-40/hour, so again $150/hr just seems really high... I'd love to get $100/hour freelancing..
[+] [-] ricardobeat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinrob92|7 years ago|reply
I started Manypixels as a side project while being a digital nomad in Bangkok.
After a few weeks it grew to $5000/month then $10,000 month and we're now at $40,000/month after 8 months.
Wrote about that story from the early beginning here: https://www.indiehackers.com/@Vinrob/bootstrapping-a-product...
[+] [-] olingern|7 years ago|reply
Some feedback:
- There's no way to see full resolution designs. Looking through the blog where your portfolio links to, there are _some_ samples, but some are pixelated and low-res.
- After signing up there's only a link to the customer portal via email, but there's no way to submit a design order nor are there any instructions on how to do so.
- I've been billed for a subscription, but no services have been or began to be rendered. Since I haven't submitted any design requests or any services have started, this is disappointing.
- The billing invoice is really confusing. I signed up for one month, but see two line items and "MANYPIXELS SPECIAL OFFER (2 for 1)" and two invoice line items for "PAID" and "ATTEMPTING"
I assume that since this is still a young product and you're still building the business out; however, I would expect the main site, manypixels.co, to know I've registered, be able to show me some information about my design request, and to download completed assets from it.
Looking forward to using the product!
[+] [-] hazz99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobwaycott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramijames|7 years ago|reply
It's been a lot of fun and I enjoy focusing on something which is less about computers and more about working with my hands.
[+] [-] aabajian|7 years ago|reply
Simple website for sending reminders. It didn't make any money for 4 years until I added commonly-requested features (templates, recurring reminders, and variables for recipient names). Now I have about 60 paying customers and it makes about $600 per month after all expenses paid. It's been running essentially autonomously for the past five months.
The iOS app is still difficult to use. I'm slowly rebuilding it. I'd say the main claim to fame at this point is if you Google "text message reminders" it's the first or second result.
[+] [-] petra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jasdeepsingh|7 years ago|reply
It’s now averaging about $1000/month with 2 customers. I’m now planning to slowly rebuild the mobile app (need to improve UX and add offline functionality). Once ready, I can start selling to more customers, Also thinking of adding a few integrations with tools like Google Drive, Office 365 & Slack to improve market visibility.
Our stack is Ruby/Rails/React/React Native.
[+] [-] cos_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nautical|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hamishirving|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] freediver|7 years ago|reply
https://woorender.com
[+] [-] amuresan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rl3|7 years ago|reply
With the upcoming consumer RTX launch in a couple days, I really hope you've gotten your money's worth out of them. It's at least been a really long product cycle since their release.
[+] [-] future1979|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tananaev|7 years ago|reply
It's an open source GPS tracking solution. We make money on SaaS, support and customisation services. Some of it basically passive income from subscriptions, some is new development.
[+] [-] siquick|7 years ago|reply
Sound Shelter is a vinyl marketplace that connects records buyers with small independent record stores.
Revenue comes from a mixture of affiliate sales and subscriptions from records stores listing their inventory.
Building a two-sided marketplace is a lot more challenging than I had expected but definitely rewarding when the users find the rare record they probably wouldn't have ever found.
[+] [-] Lukin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|7 years ago|reply
I just made it because I thought it was a cool feature that was missing. As I started to develop it I realized it was much more complicated to implemente than it seemed, that was probably the reason the feature was missing. Anyway I accepted the challenge, put it live for free on Heroku and forgot about it.
One year later I got back to check it out and thousands of people were using it.
Still, I'm bad at market and monetization, and it's still a side-project to this day, but makes about $1200/mo.
[+] [-] marketgod|7 years ago|reply
Need to work on automatically posting my plans to other locations, or maybe find a service that does it for me, if anyone has recommendations. Looking to private message Discord users, Facebook friends, Facebook groups, Instagram posts, and Reddit subreddits/daily threads.
[+] [-] santa_boy|7 years ago|reply
Also, your pricing seems quite steep ... just curious how many active users you have and revenue / month? (a single user on your monthly package gets you too $500! :))
[+] [-] _spoonman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpcan|7 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to also see people simply saying "I do" and maybe the "space" it's in?
That too would be encouraging I think.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farseer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pen2l|7 years ago|reply
There are probably lots of HN users who have really nifty side projects but won't disclose it for more or less the reasons you cite.
[+] [-] harel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hapabrah|7 years ago|reply