These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work.
I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket. Consulting does (egads), but distracts quite a bit from working on AR.
Patrick, if BCC pays you more than your old salary, did you consider giving up consulting and working solely on your startup business (i.e. Appointment Reminder or new product)
It seems like that would accelerate growth of your startup - while BCC revenues ensure that you have enough runway to grow the business.
Of course, it is possible that consulting adds in more value to the business (e.g. new domain knowledge, useful contacts ) besides pulling in revenue.
It may just be my setup but on your http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart page the yellow text on the yellow background isn't even readable. Is it the same for the rest of you?
Update: Looks like it rotates through colors for every refresh... So, if you refresh enough you can read all the sections of the pie chart.
With such a vast shift away from desktop downloadable applications, I'm curious to see what you've done from a marketing standpoint to get those numbers. How did you promote your application and drive sales?
I make ~$2,000 a month with an iPad game for cats. My co-founder and I were working on a "more serious" game and it was taking a long time. We needed a quick win, so I agreed to do it if we spent less than 4 weeks on it.
We completed the game from idea to app store in 3.5 weeks and it is now, by far, our most popular game. * face palm *
EDIT: We split the revenue 50/50, so the revenue (after apple's cut) on this game is around $4k/mo.
I launched TikiToki Timeline Software (http://www.tiki-toki.com) in March. It is currently making about $250 a month from subscribers. This month I have also sold a $1500 single timeline license. Hopefully more of them in the future!
I am currently operating TikiToki as a side project from my main business as a freelance web developer. Aim to go full time with TikiToki at start of July.
This will be a bit of a gamble, given that what I earn from subscribers via TikiToki for a full month is less than what I would earn in half a day as a freelance developer!
We do it for love as much as the money!
Edit:
If we want to go into detail, I should also add that I also earn about $80 a month from Adsense for a blog my wife and I run (http://www.casualgirlgamer.com) and about $25 a month via Big Fish's affiliates scheme. Peanuts really but it all adds up...
I'm using a throwaway account here to protect my privacy.
I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community (< 2500 Quantcast). The focus of the community is a niche market with very little competition but we fare well by providing good value to our community.
Our revenue sources breaks down as follows:
* 40/50K/month in subscription revenue
* 25K/month in adsense revenue
* 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc)
* 30K/month in license and royalty revenue
As the sole employee, my primary responsibilities are all of the development of the platform, all system administration, all marketing and business activities, financials, and I also provide all the primary user support for the site. We have approximately 120 administrators and moderators who are volunteers, and we also have 4 individuals who are independent contractors who receive a set amount every month to lead different parts of our site and lead those volunteers.
Our platform is primarily based on Amazon Web services but includes physical servers from other hosting platforms. Platform as a service providers that we use include Cloudkick, Chartbeat, Geckoboard, Dynect, and SendGrid.
The reason why we have been so successful is we cater to a hobbyist market and operate on a very generous freemium model. Our subscription revenue is solid and predictable, and we experience very few chargebacks because we have consciously decided not to do automated renewals. Our license and royalty revenue is due to licensing agreements we have with third parties who utilize our content and services and APIs, as well as mobile device makers who serve our content (primarily to the Android and iOS market).
All of the above is a full time job and I rarely ever have a day off, although I have a tremendous amount of flexibility with my schedule.
I set up a web dev blog in 2003, at ILoveJackDaniels.com, and after a few months of rubbish blogging starting doing free cheat sheets to download. At its peak, from AdSense and text link ads, it made about $1200 per month. I had to move domain (trademark heat), and moved to AddedBytes.com. Lost lots of traffic and links, unfortunately. Ad revenue dropped over time (around $100 at its lowest), and I recently ditched the text links and adsense to go with CarbonAds.
Dude. Your cheat sheets were amazing back in the day (2004) when I was first getting into LAMP. The HTML entities sheet and CSS sheet were lifesavers. I had them all printed out and hanged up on the wall above my monitor.
I can attest that Jack Daniels is litigious and they will actively defend their trademark. Jagermeister will also. And Chuck Norris. I speak from personal experience.
I LOVE jack daniels. Your site was incredibly helpful, I think I have 100 copies of various cheat sheets across all the computers I've used over the years.
Over the year I average $30 a month - but only with about 30 minutes of work a month. It's sad, but I bet I spend more time checking on that income than I do making it. These are mostly old learning experiences and playgrounds for me and I rarely update them.
60% is from Adsense on a sports-related niche website. I make most of that during a couple bursts related to sports seasons - playoffs, spring training, opening day, March Madness, etc. I absolutely stumbled upon that niche from seeing traffic on a related blog post I made. If I really did the SEO and worked on the site I could probably make 5-10 times as much, but I couldn't really grow to other niches.
39% of that is from Amazon affiliate links on a niche gift shopping site. That occasionally lands a sale throughout the year, but it booms from October to early December. This is something I could easily grow to lots of other niches - if I built out the automation. It doesn't really excite me, but shoveling Amazon affiliate links onto dozens or hundreds of niche shopping blogs should be lucrative. I would only focus on the Christmas shopping season though, unless you targeted different holidays like Mother's Day.
1% of that is from a few photos on iStockPhoto. That's where I actually want to put more of my effort going forward. I like the challenge of taking good photos and I like the idea of making my photography hobby self-supporting. But I also think the stock photography (and video) I produce will have a longer sellable life than anything else.
Until about 2 weeks ago I was the largest creator of stores on CafePress. I was earning decent residual income on existing stores that I had put up, but due to some external forces (some in my control, some out of it) I got my accounts shut down by CafePress. I still expect to earn some residual income for the next couple months on things I had already sold.
I had just started to seriously follow this path but I was earning between $100 and $375 per month in commissions from the test runs of my software that creates stores. I am in negotiations with them concerning turning my accounts back on.
I plan to expand this into a series of blog posts about lessons learned both business and technological. Upvote if that sounds like something you want to read.
Your software sounds clever. Are you confident CafePress will let you use it? How automated is the process? You're planning to use it yourself, correct, not sell the software? A blog post on your lessons learned sounds interesting, definitely.
Until 5/1 I was making about $1,440/mo from google adsense on my site dodgit.com and a network of other sites I had purchased from flippa. Then I received an email 'your google adsense account has been disabled' and Google seized about a thousand dollars from my account. I had been using a personal account and a brand new account I set up for a business I wanted to build and sell (acceptable, per google's TOS) but they shut down both. Google's claim was that the website content was lousy and the multiple accounts were forbidden.
To be honest, the blogs did have some crappy content. I would be happy to pull the ads off the bad blogs and put them back on dodgit, a service I have lovingly maintained for 7 yrs. Sadly there appears to be no way to appeal to Google once they drop the axe.
I'm pondering next steps. I know a few people who work at Google but haven't contacted any of them yet. I've played around with adbrite and some other ad networks, but none of them seem to generate money the way adsense can.
I've also created a number of websites that generate revenue over the years, that aren't dependent on adsense in any way. I'll definitely make more!
It took a while, but I've come to realize that affiliate/product marketing can make a lot more money. Think about your audience, can you sell them a book explaining how to do something, and what existing affiliate products like those on Clickbank could you sell them?
I looked into this a while ago, but if I were to fully outsource it, it didn't make sense financially. Out of curiosity, do you use your own money in the machine and service it yourself? Do you own the machine or lease?
Short Version: Hosted Web App making just under $10,000/mo.
Using a throwaway account for this because I'd rather not share our numbers publicly yet, but in about 2.5 years since our hosted web app went live, we're generating just under $10,000 per month in revenue. That's working on it part-time for the first couple of years and, more recently, full-time.
It's targeted at developers/designers, and the growth has been very slow and steady. There's never been a break-through moment as revenue has grown at an average rate of about 3.5% per month since we launched.
Are you referring to business income/revenue or personal income from those businesses?
Of the 4 businesses I've founded or co-founded (BIG Folio, APF, NextProof, and 2 Tablespoons), the first two generate approximately half of their revenue from recurring fees (we also have setup fees). That adds up to high 5-figures per month for each (more in a good month). Of course, they both have the highest overhead in terms of labor and servers. For me personally, the recurring revenue results in a monthly draw/dividend that is now higher than my (good) salary. I spend most of my time (40 hours between the 2) on these two.
NextProof is a purely recurring/transactional revenue business. It currently makes in the low 5-figure range per month on subscription fees + about the same in transaction fees. User base is growing at about 3% per month. Overhead is fairly low (mainly hosting at EngineYard) and I work about 5-10 hours/week on it. I take a quarterly draw/dividen on this (not too big). As someone else said, if I really worked on some SEO and properly ran some campaigns/tests, it could probably grow at 10% or more.
2 Tablespoons is my newest venture and, so far, generates about $30 a month from one iPhone app (epic, I know). Launching a restaurant website service this month. Hoping to take everything I've learned from these other businesses–and from HN–and generate some solid recurring revenue without too much overhead. Haven't thought about goals, but getting to $2k/month by the end of the year sounds reasonable.
I generate about $1000/mo from an iPad app I wrote (that I haven't updated in a long, long time) and then between $5-10k from iPhone user interface design/development tutorials that I sell.
I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROMs have been long removed so traffic has obviously fallen, however due to the links and still decent search engine rankings it gets roughly 100k page views per day. End result is that the ads give me around $2k to $3k a month. Pretty happy with that since I no longer work on it and it's basically just rotting away.
(EDIT: Was at $15k per month last October before the competition started getting crazy)
About $2.5K per month hosting websites.
Then consulting income - I keep consulting because I feel like at any moment, the Android Market ranking algorithm will change or competition will wipe me out, etc, it's just to day-to-day to walk away from good old consulting.
$300-$500/month for a Windows desktop application. I wrote it to help out my mother-in-law since she found Photoshop too complicated to do what she wanted: placing text on pictures. Turned out to be a great learning experience on how to sell things online. See it here: http://www.pmesoftware.com
Roughly $1,000 a month in revenue from http://isitnormal.com. Expenses add up to around $300 a month for hosting on linode and paid moderators. Given traffic levels, I feel I should be able to do better than this somehow. Still searching for the best way to monetize all the super-weird (but interesting!) UGC content.
The ads on your site, the ones that show up in a lightbox that you cant close and show a little pre-OS X stopwatch icon for the mouse? Really, really, really annoying. I left your site and don't have a reason to come back.
I co-own a web app which makes about $70k a year total, which I split 50/50 with my partner.
Living in a relatively expensive place, I'm satisfied with that for now as it enables a modest yet comfortable standard of living. The usual benefits - flexible hours, can work in any location with internet access, complete choice of technologies, etc. go a long way.
We could do a lot better, though and I'm aiming to do that. The current business I have can't grow due to the unique situation (it's based on another company's API, and that company is atrocious in every way imaginable - including developer hostility). It's been a blessing, though and I'm looking to build some great new stuff this year.
$0 per month for my one-hand keyboard layout software, blah. Recently switched from a 'branded' domain to a exact-match domain, looking forward to seeing how that improves my results. Blog + regular content is next on the list.
It's based on the same muscle memory as two-hand typing, so any two-hand typist can learn to type with one hand in minutes. Good for a programmer with a broken arm, for example.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work.
I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket. Consulting does (egads), but distracts quite a bit from working on AR.
[+] [-] credo|15 years ago|reply
It seems like that would accelerate growth of your startup - while BCC revenues ensure that you have enough runway to grow the business.
Of course, it is possible that consulting adds in more value to the business (e.g. new domain knowledge, useful contacts ) besides pulling in revenue.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|15 years ago|reply
Do you think that, given enough time spent developing/marketing it, AR will provide as much recurring income as BCC?
[+] [-] stevelaz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suprasanna|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jashmenn|15 years ago|reply
We completed the game from idea to app store in 3.5 weeks and it is now, by far, our most popular game. * face palm *
EDIT: We split the revenue 50/50, so the revenue (after apple's cut) on this game is around $4k/mo.
[+] [-] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
If so, I salute you.
[+] [-] trafficlight|15 years ago|reply
Edit: Is this something for the untapped Crazy Cat Lady market?
[+] [-] joshu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happyrichpinoy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LokiSnake|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkearns|15 years ago|reply
I am currently operating TikiToki as a side project from my main business as a freelance web developer. Aim to go full time with TikiToki at start of July.
This will be a bit of a gamble, given that what I earn from subscribers via TikiToki for a full month is less than what I would earn in half a day as a freelance developer!
We do it for love as much as the money!
Edit: If we want to go into detail, I should also add that I also earn about $80 a month from Adsense for a blog my wife and I run (http://www.casualgirlgamer.com) and about $25 a month via Big Fish's affiliates scheme. Peanuts really but it all adds up...
[+] [-] throwaway1074|15 years ago|reply
I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community (< 2500 Quantcast). The focus of the community is a niche market with very little competition but we fare well by providing good value to our community.
Our revenue sources breaks down as follows:
* 40/50K/month in subscription revenue
* 25K/month in adsense revenue
* 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc)
* 30K/month in license and royalty revenue
As the sole employee, my primary responsibilities are all of the development of the platform, all system administration, all marketing and business activities, financials, and I also provide all the primary user support for the site. We have approximately 120 administrators and moderators who are volunteers, and we also have 4 individuals who are independent contractors who receive a set amount every month to lead different parts of our site and lead those volunteers.
Our platform is primarily based on Amazon Web services but includes physical servers from other hosting platforms. Platform as a service providers that we use include Cloudkick, Chartbeat, Geckoboard, Dynect, and SendGrid.
The reason why we have been so successful is we cater to a hobbyist market and operate on a very generous freemium model. Our subscription revenue is solid and predictable, and we experience very few chargebacks because we have consciously decided not to do automated renewals. Our license and royalty revenue is due to licensing agreements we have with third parties who utilize our content and services and APIs, as well as mobile device makers who serve our content (primarily to the Android and iOS market).
All of the above is a full time job and I rarely ever have a day off, although I have a tremendous amount of flexibility with my schedule.
[+] [-] richardw|15 years ago|reply
Do you enjoy the community? Could you keep running it indefinitely?
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcdowall|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boulderdash|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaveChild|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getsat|15 years ago|reply
Do you have a Paypal donate button/email? :)
[+] [-] jdvolz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohashi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ja27|15 years ago|reply
60% is from Adsense on a sports-related niche website. I make most of that during a couple bursts related to sports seasons - playoffs, spring training, opening day, March Madness, etc. I absolutely stumbled upon that niche from seeing traffic on a related blog post I made. If I really did the SEO and worked on the site I could probably make 5-10 times as much, but I couldn't really grow to other niches.
39% of that is from Amazon affiliate links on a niche gift shopping site. That occasionally lands a sale throughout the year, but it booms from October to early December. This is something I could easily grow to lots of other niches - if I built out the automation. It doesn't really excite me, but shoveling Amazon affiliate links onto dozens or hundreds of niche shopping blogs should be lucrative. I would only focus on the Christmas shopping season though, unless you targeted different holidays like Mother's Day.
1% of that is from a few photos on iStockPhoto. That's where I actually want to put more of my effort going forward. I like the challenge of taking good photos and I like the idea of making my photography hobby self-supporting. But I also think the stock photography (and video) I produce will have a longer sellable life than anything else.
[+] [-] jdvolz|15 years ago|reply
I had just started to seriously follow this path but I was earning between $100 and $375 per month in commissions from the test runs of my software that creates stores. I am in negotiations with them concerning turning my accounts back on.
I plan to expand this into a series of blog posts about lessons learned both business and technological. Upvote if that sounds like something you want to read.
[+] [-] systemtrigger|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strick|15 years ago|reply
To be honest, the blogs did have some crappy content. I would be happy to pull the ads off the bad blogs and put them back on dodgit, a service I have lovingly maintained for 7 yrs. Sadly there appears to be no way to appeal to Google once they drop the axe.
I'm pondering next steps. I know a few people who work at Google but haven't contacted any of them yet. I've played around with adbrite and some other ad networks, but none of them seem to generate money the way adsense can.
I've also created a number of websites that generate revenue over the years, that aren't dependent on adsense in any way. I'll definitely make more!
[+] [-] gohat|15 years ago|reply
It took a while, but I've come to realize that affiliate/product marketing can make a lot more money. Think about your audience, can you sell them a book explaining how to do something, and what existing affiliate products like those on Clickbank could you sell them?
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forsaken|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_h|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilom|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lemma|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway9898|15 years ago|reply
Using a throwaway account for this because I'd rather not share our numbers publicly yet, but in about 2.5 years since our hosted web app went live, we're generating just under $10,000 per month in revenue. That's working on it part-time for the first couple of years and, more recently, full-time.
It's targeted at developers/designers, and the growth has been very slow and steady. There's never been a break-through moment as revenue has grown at an average rate of about 3.5% per month since we launched.
[+] [-] Periodic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
Of the 4 businesses I've founded or co-founded (BIG Folio, APF, NextProof, and 2 Tablespoons), the first two generate approximately half of their revenue from recurring fees (we also have setup fees). That adds up to high 5-figures per month for each (more in a good month). Of course, they both have the highest overhead in terms of labor and servers. For me personally, the recurring revenue results in a monthly draw/dividend that is now higher than my (good) salary. I spend most of my time (40 hours between the 2) on these two.
NextProof is a purely recurring/transactional revenue business. It currently makes in the low 5-figure range per month on subscription fees + about the same in transaction fees. User base is growing at about 3% per month. Overhead is fairly low (mainly hosting at EngineYard) and I work about 5-10 hours/week on it. I take a quarterly draw/dividen on this (not too big). As someone else said, if I really worked on some SEO and properly ran some campaigns/tests, it could probably grow at 10% or more.
2 Tablespoons is my newest venture and, so far, generates about $30 a month from one iPhone app (epic, I know). Launching a restaurant website service this month. Hoping to take everything I've learned from these other businesses–and from HN–and generate some solid recurring revenue without too much overhead. Haven't thought about goals, but getting to $2k/month by the end of the year sounds reasonable.
[+] [-] flyosity|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ujeezy|15 years ago|reply
I will definitely be grabbing some of those tutorials this Summer :)
[+] [-] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
I'm curious, what do you do for traffic? Just SEO?
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfjordvald|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpcan|15 years ago|reply
(EDIT: Was at $15k per month last October before the competition started getting crazy)
About $2.5K per month hosting websites.
Then consulting income - I keep consulting because I feel like at any moment, the Android Market ranking algorithm will change or competition will wipe me out, etc, it's just to day-to-day to walk away from good old consulting.
[+] [-] pcestrada|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] udfalkso|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riskish|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmichaud|15 years ago|reply
I sell a combination of e-books and physical books, I have a few dozen titles.
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
Living in a relatively expensive place, I'm satisfied with that for now as it enables a modest yet comfortable standard of living. The usual benefits - flexible hours, can work in any location with internet access, complete choice of technologies, etc. go a long way.
We could do a lot better, though and I'm aiming to do that. The current business I have can't grow due to the unique situation (it's based on another company's API, and that company is atrocious in every way imaginable - including developer hostility). It's been a blessing, though and I'm looking to build some great new stuff this year.
[+] [-] pkamb|15 years ago|reply
http://www.onehandkeyboard.org
It's based on the same muscle memory as two-hand typing, so any two-hand typist can learn to type with one hand in minutes. Good for a programmer with a broken arm, for example.
[+] [-] swah|15 years ago|reply