Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

First, sorry by my English (i'm Brazilian)

Last year i recorded an Joomla course (video) by myself and sold it successful on Google. Made around $500 per month (R$1.000,00), for around six months. Than a new version of the tool was available and my course was out of date. So instead of recording a new one, i build an entire site with PHP and MYSQL (www.cursos7.com.br). There my students can watch the courses online. Right now i have one course, the Joomla one, but it's up to date. It's selling good, around $500 (R$1k) last month (august). Now i'm recording the WordPress one. You see it's not passive income, i have to record a lot of videos, but i'm doing this at my free time (do IT Consulting to eat and i'm finishing my graduation in CS).

My wife have a small food blog, delicie.com.br that's generating $20 per month. I help as web designer.

Everything is very small and new right now, but i think in two or three years we will have bigger numbers to show.

I know little about golf.

I know a bit more about selling software -- I can tell you, for example, that "Facebook integration" is not a benefit for most people (you mention it prominently like you believe it solves problems, but no golfer wakes up in the morning and goes "You know what was missing from my last golf game? Facebook!"). You're not making economically rational decisions trying to sell ad networ ads against a userbase smaller than X00,000 to X million. (You can have one-off ad deals which are viable much smaller than that, but that gets you into ad sales.) You're probably not going to have success with AdWords unless you can get people to a 3 figure LTV -- "make it mobile" does not strike me as getting you there given what I know about app store economics.

But help me on the golf front. Does this solve an actual problem real people actually have in their lives? Have you talked to avid golfers and have gnashed their teeth about how not knowing Average Score By Hole Distance is just crushing their enjoyment of the sport? Are these customers willing to pay for better golf scores, for example because it helps them invite more clients to more golf games and hence close more real estate sales, which is the reason they golf in the first place?

Talk to your customers. (Or the people who should be your customers if you were actually charging for this, which -- by the way -- is a great discipline to have from day 1 since it focuses you on reality.) If they're not wildly hair-on-fire enthusiastic about this, I don't know that I would spend lots of time on this when for the same effort of getting you from 150 non-paying users to 300 non-paying users would let you write software people that people would passionately care about.

The problem is that $600/month, in its own small way, strengthens and legitimizes Apple as a platform. Living in Vietnam I definitely appreciate the dire needs of some people in the world but I also think that the stakes in these cases are very high.

I expect to have a similar Android portfolio in the next six months anyway.

What's the website called?

Curious what ad network you use? I just created an Android app and experimenting with a few.