Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

[1hakr]

Hello everyone,

I’m Hari, and I’m a serial Microstartup Maker. 2021 has been an amazing year despite the pandemic where I reached my recent goal of $500/day. Compounding works everywhere, even in microstartups. It took 3 years to reach to $300/day but just 4 months to $500/day. The business model of my microstartups is a mix of App sales, subscriptions, affiliates and ads. I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs. My next goal is to reach $600/day.

My Microstartups Rewind 2021

* Revenue - $117K/year (67% ▲)

* Expenses - 3K/year

* All time high revenue - $15K/month in Dec (18% ▲)

* Daily goal - $500/day reached in Dec

Visa List - https://visalist.io

* Revenue - $50K/year (39% ▲)

* All time high revenue - $8K/month in Dec

* Total Users - 2.6M/year

* Active users - 250K/month

AnExplorer - https://anexplorer.co

* Revenue - $50K/year (95% ▲)

* User growth: 130% ▲ yoy

* Active users: 350K

ACrypto - https://acrypto.io

* Revenue - $10K/year

* Active users: 30K

Tech Stack i used: Android - Java Firebase VueJS GoLang

[bArray]

Related:

"Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping" (this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964

"AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups" (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132

"Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup" (2020): https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969

"Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to keep your desk job away" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674

"Show HN: I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr

And so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr

To answer the question "how do you advertise your products?", clearly it is to spam Hacker News until you get lucky.

[AlchemistCamp]

Looking at the OP's history over about the past year and a half, 100% of the submissions have been to his own sites and 100% of his comments are on those threads or in one case linking to one of those sites.

Your comment isn't the first one on these threads to point out the pattern, either, so it's very likely the mods have seen his pattern of using HN exclusively as a marketing channel and are okay with it.

[melenaboija]

Also seeing the title and the upvotes tells this is one of the topics that matters to the HN community, simply how to make money.

Not saying it is bad, just an observation.

[oasisbob]

I miss the days when visalist wasn't full of hostile anti-patterns.

Back in 2019, it was easy to recommend to fellow travelers as an accurate source of information. Not so much, now.

I'm sad to see that it funnels users away from official government sites. eg, a US citizen traveling to India is eligible for a cheap e-Visa which generally issues in ~72 hours here:

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html

The big green "APPLY FOR VISA" button on visalist sends traffic to iVisa.com, which is much less useful.

[earksiinni]

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?

I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.

Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.

Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?

[halpert]

Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

[1hakr]

When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.

You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.

[throw_me_up]

Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.

[blamazon]

I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

[IndexPointer]

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

[YounesDz]

Not the OP.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.

[catchmilk]

There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least.

What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.

Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?

[badestrand]

You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment.

This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.

I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.

[kingcharles]

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year.

The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)

The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.

[kqr]

I mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time.

If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.

[stanislavb]

I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.

[pcbro141]

https://www.indiehackers.com/

[bemmu]

I’ve made a living online from a bunch of different things, and there’s always something in the world that changes in a way that forces you to change your thing as well. Sometimes quickly, when an API changes, sometimes more slowly as you get more competition for example.

And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.

I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.

[AussieWog93]

I'm one of these "inspiring" people. :P

You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.

[djacob93]

Hey Hari,

this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know. I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website https://visalist.io, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid

[monsieurbanana]

3 possibilities I can think of:

- automatically scrapping websites - paying someone to do the work manually - who knows, there might be a database that someone else maintains, free or paid, and the website just displays the information

Or a mix of all that.

[kqr]

Well, how would you operationally define updated? Would you, as a traveller, be satisfied if it's no more than two days out of date?

How long does it take to check and update the information for one country? Let's call it 90 seconds when you have the routine in. (Maybe every tenth time you check you have to actually change something in your database and that takes 10 minutes, the rest of the time you change nothing and that takes half a minute.)

There are about 200 countries in the world, so updating them all takes on average five hours. If you only need to do that every other day, that's quite literally 10 % of your time to do manually.

Now it could probably be optimised -- some countries might not be as popular destinations, and others might not change their rules as often. This is data you get for free from the effort of maintaining it. You can use that to adjust frequencies and I'm sure get it down to just 3 % of your time or less. That's while still doing it manually!

Then if there are some places that are really popular or change really often, you can start automating the updates for those countries. Since they are the ones you'd spend the most time on updating manually otherwise, you can probably get it down to less than 1 % of your time.

But never forget to start by doing things that don't scale. You can get very far with a good manual process. Automate only when you have a good manual process and you've driven the last inefficiency out of it.

[u2077]

Obviously everyone’s path is unique, but could you tell us the most important things you learned along the way?

For example, my side project was not built for scale (was just a hobby at the time) and now needs rebuilding. I also wasted too much time perfecting things I thought mattered, but didn’t affect customers.

[1hakr]

One thing which worked for me when i look back is, i spend less than 4 weeks to validate an idea, if it got traction, i worked on it more, if it didn't then i moved on. Validate and fail fast.

[quickthrower2]

Thanks Hari for the inspiration! I am a fan from Australia. As well as the success, Hari does give a lot to the meetup community here and I got the impression he has a very strategic mindset.

[1hakr]

Cheers mate!

[MattGaiser]

What was your process to monetize these? As to me they seem to be in very competitive verticals.

[teaearlgraycold]

Also very curious about this. I went to his websites with the goal of finding out how I could give him money. It was incredibly difficult for Visa List - and all I got to was a buymeacoffee page that couldn't possibly be the only source of income. If OP is making money off of these from users then they could make way more by having an obvious CTA in the nav to give him money.

[1hakr]

Its different for different for different microstartup. Everything i did is through organic channels for Visa List it SEO for Apps its ASO. Once i got the users, it was easy to tweak and optimise revenue generation.

[beningrad]

Addendum to this question, if you don't mind: How do you choose what your next microstartup will be?

[TuringNYC]

Thanks for the share. I'm curious if you have a favorite best-of-breed vendor stack you use? Do you try to optimize much on the tech or just do whatever works? I'm curious about several things specifically: who do you host with? SSL certs? CDN favorites? automation tool favorites? which hosts do you use to scale out?

[1hakr]

i use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.

[potamic]

Got blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.

[suifbwish]

If companies made their ads informative/interesting in some way instead of pure propaganda mind poo with dumb jingles, puns and foolish attempts to sound humorous perhaps I wouldn’t black hole them all so much with Adblock and pihole

[trishmapow2]

uBlock Origin's element picker (not zapper - that's temporary) is your friend here. Works to get rid of basic overlays.

[andrewf]

Congrats! You mention compounding - what input to your success has been compounding? Eg revenue per user, success with SEO or other marketing channels, increase in underlying demand for travel/crypto, number of products shipped, something else?

[herpderperator]

Damn, every single one of those websites load literally instantly. 8ms latency from me. Cloudflare does wonders if you set it up well.

[1hakr]

cloudflare is a life saver!

[reneherse]

Thanks for sharing this update and being so transparent about your earnings! I've found your posts inspiring and it's great to know your projects continue to grow.

[Flankk]

You must be terrible at business. Your companies only make money while you're sleeping.

[dkersten]

Simple solution: just sleep more!

[falsenine]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

I have two questions:

(1) What learning pathway would you recommend a total beginner in programming to follow in order to develop their own microstartups or side projects?

(2) How do you come up with an idea for a given microstartup? Is it an organic process, or is it more about thinking actively of potential business plans? Do you have any advice regarding idea generation?

[Glench]

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

[wly_cdgr]

I notice that your AnExplorer file explorer app is a hefty $9.99. How do you get sales at that price point? Word of mouth over time?

[phreack]

How does Visa List make money? I'm not sure I can find its business model besides ads, though that might be it.

[Uptrenda]

What is your long-term approach to growing your businesses? Feel free to share what you've learned about customer acquisition for micro-startups. Sure people would find that knowledge VERY valuable - and nice work dude. You're successful. I plan to do a bunch of stuff myself this year. Cheers.

[1hakr]

My general approach is t make my business fully automated. Once i do that, i have time to thing in different directions.

Organic channels are your lifesavers, the ones which will make your microstartup successful, so start working on them from day 1.

I have few things planned for 2022.

[westoncb]

Out of curiosity, how do you have 350k users for AnExplorer and only earn $50k/yr if it's selling for $10/copy?

(I'm just wondering if there are some unseen costs or something to selling an app for a fixed cost like this.)

[icco]

If folks enjoy these types of posts, check out https://www.indiehackers.com/, which is an entire community of folks like this.

[huksley]

Anyone have invite code? I would love to join. Email address in about.