I created a push notification service called Pushover (https://pushover.net/) and wrote its iOS and Android apps. I started the project in January and launched it in March (https://jcs.org/pushover).
In contrast to some competing free apps/services, the Pushover mobile apps are $3.99 which pays for the monthly hosting costs to keep the service running. Both apps are highly rated on both app stores and so far the app sales have paid for the domain name and other tangible development costs and are continuing to generate profit. I just purchased a Blackberry phone for development and plan to create a Blackberry app for the service.
Have worked out the math behind one-time purchases supporting unlimited perpetual service? I suspect it is possible if a substantial amount of users leave the service after the purchase, but I can't see how this is not a form of pyramid scheme - new users effectively cover obligations made to eariler users. How is this sustainable with a non-trivial volume? Or do you (plan to) charge API users?
I'm curious how people are finding, and then using your service. Are most of the users people who use another app that provides pushover notifications, or are they developer or power user types who want a way to push notifications to their phones? (I would assume the former, I suppose.)
This is excellent timing for $work. We'll be needing push notifications for a mobile app we're building over the next couple months. How do we integrate Pushover in our app? Is there an SDK we include in the app, or would users have to purchase and install the Pushover app? Our app will be free, so we'd like to avoid pushing costs on to our users. But we would have no problem paying a monthly fee to you, in addition to any usage over 5k messages. The continued survival of your service is certainly in our best interests!
My email address is on my profile, or I can email your support address if that's better.
I have your site bookmarked reminding me to buy it when I have a good project that would use it. Really need to come up with something, it's a fantastic idea :-)
I created a few javascript card games, most of them in late 2011, but they really started earning this year. So far have made Spades, Hearts, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Shithead and a couple of solitaires. Revenue has been steadily rising, and is a nice little side income now. http://www.spades-cardgame.com is one, the rest are linked from there.
As am aside, I think your freecell rules are wrong. As I recall, you should only be able to move a stack (pile?) of cards if there's enough free space to place them all. Another way to stay it is that you can only actually move one card at a time, but the game will assist you if there's enough free cells.
I am one random comment, in a LONG list. And all night, we have been seeing a new user every 15-30 seconds. WOW.
I also saw a bug prevented some of your reports to complete, which is perfect on a HackerNews day, haha #not. It's fixed, everything will proceed automatically.
As a thank you (to the community for finding that bug) and being so MANY, I've decided to create a promo code that upgrades all of your accounts to premium. I'll leave it running until tomorrow or so.
It's 'hackernews'. Wow, amazing community right here.
I created ExportMyPosts after the Posterous acquisition so people could export and backup their blogs' data - http://exportmyposts.com/ - it has made more revenue than it costs for the hosting and servers, but not enough to pay a salary or anything. There are a few promo codes left, use HACKERNEWS at checkout.
I also made StepStats - http://StepStats.com/ - for better FitBit data visualization; it's free, but enough people have donated money that it has covered all costs involved.
I launched a paid version (http://amon.cx/plus ) of my server and web app monitoring toolkit - Amon ( http://amon.cx ) back in February and have made something like $3000. It took me 2 months working full time to build it.
After briefly looking at your website, I think that mailinator.com looks to have superior features.
1) You don't even need to go to Mailinator to get an email address. You just know that any time you have any address you want on hand.
2) With Mailinator you just use any name when you register on some website. (generated names are suspicious)
3) Mailinator has different domains to avoid blacklisting (domain name doesn't matter. You just need to know the username to check your mail)
4) There are websites that try to you using Mailinator by trying to log is with the name of your e-mail. For these services you can use another generated name that can only be used for sending mail, not for logging in.
5) Mailinator does not retain your messages for long. Also everything is stored in memory (as far as I heard), so the messages cannot be stolen.
Launched http://cull.io 20 days ago. Revenue made till now $150. Spent: appengine $10, musicbakery: $47. (I don't really know how to cost my time, it's around three weeks to build).
I created a simple website alert-if-down service (http://pingdipong.com), and it's just started paying for its own hosting. I wouldn't call it profitable. It's not paying anybodies wage. It's not covering the cost of advertising. It's been an interesting and turbulent couple of months. I went into it thinking there was only big name players in the market (pingdom, etc), that it would be an easy market to break into and found out much later that there are a host of similar products out there. And it's really, really hard to sell simple / boring stuff to people.
It's utterly true that the development is only a small fraction of the process. People told me before, but I didn't listen. It's also true that the funnel between getting a clickthrough and getting a payment narrows frighteningly quickly. It seems to cost me a fortune to get a paying customer.
I wanted to make something useful that wasn't built on VC money, and although it's possible, I'm not sure that there's much success to be had for small players in the web development arena. It's heartening to hear other peoples stories though. Another reason to keep trying. :-)
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that website development is coming to the end of its homebrew phase (much like games and desktop software previously), and it's becoming almost impossible for tiny teams to make anything useful. There still seems to be some space in the mobile market, but that appears to be being swallowed by larger development teams with VC money.
And yes, I'm obviously making this post with the intention of also plugging my own service. I hope I've added something extra to the conversation though.
It's been a blast working with startups and existing brands creating new products, marketing them, and generally creating success through precise user experience.
Very profitable already and showing impressive growth.
Not a "web app" or socially networked, real time diet planner but we're a business and we're profitable!
This year has been an exciting one from the very start!
I've had several successful (read: awesomely profitable) new ventures this year, such as an ad network that I established and sold to a private party for a solid 5 figure amount within a month.
On one of my more established networks, I was able to grow the unique impressions by over 100k a day within 2 weeks of focusing on it. I also established a domain parking system that already has over 500+ domains parked on it and growing quickly.
During a random latenight coding session, I created a unique new channel/model of selling category related emails to advertisers bidding on a CPM basis real-time, and lining up another venture to integrate with this platform.
These are but a few of the cool things currently being worked on by myself and my growing staff. Hoping to be hiring on more talent on soon and probably getting a swanky office in La Jolla, CA soon.
Hi, I've launched a website in January to find all your bills in one place sponsored by big french brands and it became profitable in may
http://greenbureau.fr
Ha, I realize now I've talked with you (or some other colleague of yours, Florian) for some eventual Django freelance work. Glad to hear it's working well, seems like a crowded market in France at least.
Great thread! I love seeing actual projects people are working on.
I wrote a 55-page eBook on starting a profitable drop shipping business which has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month (http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/). I started writing in late April and released it May 15th.
Since I'm giving the eBook away and my monetization goals are mostly long term, revenues have been very minimal - less than $100 in affiliate commissions so far. But in 2.5 months since I launched the blog, I've received nearly 10,000 visits and almost 600 subscribers which I've been really happy about...
We (littleheroes.com) launched an iPad app to read kids books purchased on our site. We were fortunate in that we already had a customer base to market to.
I launched a service recently that sends people a new technical interview question every other day (www.InterTechTion.com). Subscribers are slowly growing daily and people seem to really like the service. I'm a first-year college student (so I'm new to this stuff) and am trying to figure out how to get advertisers to sign up. Any advice?
[+] [-] markchristian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnroescher|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jc4p|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] house9|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] there|13 years ago|reply
In contrast to some competing free apps/services, the Pushover mobile apps are $3.99 which pays for the monthly hosting costs to keep the service running. Both apps are highly rated on both app stores and so far the app sales have paid for the domain name and other tangible development costs and are continuing to generate profit. I just purchased a Blackberry phone for development and plan to create a Blackberry app for the service.
[+] [-] eps|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajtaylor|13 years ago|reply
My email address is on my profile, or I can email your support address if that's better.
[+] [-] hamax|13 years ago|reply
I took the opportunity to hack together a notification plugin for irssi.
https://github.com/hamaxx/irssi-pushover
[+] [-] kaolinite|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einaregilsson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallawe|13 years ago|reply
"Hi there
You are here for one of two possible reasons:
1. You are creating a card game yourself and want to look at the source to see how it's done.
2. You're trying to figure out how you can cheat. . . . . "
http://www.spades-cardgame.com/scripts/spades.min.js?1338670...
[+] [-] withinthreshold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sejje|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benwan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danneu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angry-hacker|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mittermayr|13 years ago|reply
This was a weekend project and it performs already way better (a few weeks in) than my 1.5 year startup (which is something completely different).
That's some scary shit right there. Purely fascinating.
[+] [-] mittermayr|13 years ago|reply
I am one random comment, in a LONG list. And all night, we have been seeing a new user every 15-30 seconds. WOW.
I also saw a bug prevented some of your reports to complete, which is perfect on a HackerNews day, haha #not. It's fixed, everything will proceed automatically.
As a thank you (to the community for finding that bug) and being so MANY, I've decided to create a promo code that upgrades all of your accounts to premium. I'll leave it running until tomorrow or so.
It's 'hackernews'. Wow, amazing community right here.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] c0balt279|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jazzychad|13 years ago|reply
I also made StepStats - http://StepStats.com/ - for better FitBit data visualization; it's free, but enough people have donated money that it has covered all costs involved.
[+] [-] sebg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin_rusev|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oron|13 years ago|reply
http://getairmail.com
wish I had a cent for every email it processed ;-)
[+] [-] Ark-kun|13 years ago|reply
1) You don't even need to go to Mailinator to get an email address. You just know that any time you have any address you want on hand. 2) With Mailinator you just use any name when you register on some website. (generated names are suspicious) 3) Mailinator has different domains to avoid blacklisting (domain name doesn't matter. You just need to know the username to check your mail) 4) There are websites that try to you using Mailinator by trying to log is with the name of your e-mail. For these services you can use another generated name that can only be used for sending mail, not for logging in. 5) Mailinator does not retain your messages for long. Also everything is stored in memory (as far as I heard), so the messages cannot be stolen.
[+] [-] huhtenberg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HarrietJones|13 years ago|reply
It's utterly true that the development is only a small fraction of the process. People told me before, but I didn't listen. It's also true that the funnel between getting a clickthrough and getting a payment narrows frighteningly quickly. It seems to cost me a fortune to get a paying customer.
I wanted to make something useful that wasn't built on VC money, and although it's possible, I'm not sure that there's much success to be had for small players in the web development arena. It's heartening to hear other peoples stories though. Another reason to keep trying. :-)
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that website development is coming to the end of its homebrew phase (much like games and desktop software previously), and it's becoming almost impossible for tiny teams to make anything useful. There still seems to be some space in the mobile market, but that appears to be being swallowed by larger development teams with VC money.
And yes, I'm obviously making this post with the intention of also plugging my own service. I hope I've added something extra to the conversation though.
[+] [-] johnroescher|13 years ago|reply
http://hnd.sm is sincerely 'coming soon' (next week) but you can see how much work we've already done on our Dribbble here > http://dribbble.com/handsomemade
It's been a blast working with startups and existing brands creating new products, marketing them, and generally creating success through precise user experience.
Very profitable already and showing impressive growth.
Not a "web app" or socially networked, real time diet planner but we're a business and we're profitable!
Started in Jan of this year.
[+] [-] bdunn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lesigh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] benwan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaseideas|13 years ago|reply
I've had several successful (read: awesomely profitable) new ventures this year, such as an ad network that I established and sold to a private party for a solid 5 figure amount within a month.
On one of my more established networks, I was able to grow the unique impressions by over 100k a day within 2 weeks of focusing on it. I also established a domain parking system that already has over 500+ domains parked on it and growing quickly.
During a random latenight coding session, I created a unique new channel/model of selling category related emails to advertisers bidding on a CPM basis real-time, and lining up another venture to integrate with this platform.
These are but a few of the cool things currently being worked on by myself and my growing staff. Hoping to be hiring on more talent on soon and probably getting a swanky office in La Jolla, CA soon.
Have some pretty exciting plans for the year!
[+] [-] process|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] demat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toumhi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creativityhurts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] withinthreshold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiredigital|13 years ago|reply
I wrote a 55-page eBook on starting a profitable drop shipping business which has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month (http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/). I started writing in late April and released it May 15th.
Since I'm giving the eBook away and my monetization goals are mostly long term, revenues have been very minimal - less than $100 in affiliate commissions so far. But in 2.5 months since I launched the blog, I've received nearly 10,000 visits and almost 600 subscribers which I've been really happy about...
[+] [-] cheez|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markessien|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arohner|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterside81|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zaheer|13 years ago|reply