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

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

#151

Post by anon_educator »

slig wrote: post #115
anon_educator wrote: post #101

I have a free website/webapp in the education space that does about $90k/m right now (2012-2013 school year) while school is in session, and grows about 2.5x each year. Revenue is 100% Adsense. I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.

I'll be entering in the "worksheets" space, both free ones made by us and worksheets generators. I have a kind of a niche in a non-English website and I think it's a nice move. Do you happen to work on anything related to that? Thanks!

Nope, nothing like that.

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

#152

Post by mast »

cmaxwell wrote: post #33

-$20/mo from http://www.golfingstat.com . Can't get any traffic and the traffic I do get doesn't click on ads. FML

It looks similar to StrokePlay (http://www.strokeplaypro.com/).

The developer has a really good blog describing his micro ISV experiences, but it hasn't been updated recently.

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

#153

Post by anon_educator »

ryankeiser wrote: post #127
anon_educator wrote: post #101

I have a free website/webapp in the education space that does about $90k/m right now (2012-2013 school year) while school is in session, and grows about 2.5x each year. Revenue is 100% Adsense. I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.

Is the site/app targeted towards educators or students?

It was originally targeted to students, but more specifically individuals not necessarily students who want to improve on our particular skill. Over time we found out that our user base was about 80% students in k-12 schools, so I added a lot of tools specifically for teachers to manage lots of students, and I've also started targeting educators more in my site copy. It was very unexpected, with my thinking being that schools had their own paid solutions and would not be willing to use an ad supported product, but I was definitely wrong!

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

#154

Post by slaven »

codypo wrote: post #86

I have had a few interesting experiments here in the past year. Experiment 0: I bought a hotel affiliate site off of flippa. It did pretty well initially, but I didn't do enough investigation into how the previous owner had been generating traffic. In short, there was a lot of untoward stuff going on. As I was getting all of that straightened out, the site got (deservedly) banned from Google's index for a few key ter…

In defense of Flippa: I bought a site there recently. Checked it out, the owner was a stand-up guy, I even released the escrow early to help him out (he didn't ask for it). He continued helping with the site transition even after he received the money.

So buyer beware but there are some gems in there...

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

#155

Post by coryl »

rdm2234 wrote: post #38

Created an iOS dev company few months ago w/ a friend. We made $50k in August from a successful free iphone app. (around $40k in a regular month). We are only two in the company and we are still college students. Don't know what to say more about this but feel free to ask any question (except what is the app ^^)

Aw man, you gotta tell us a bit more about what your app does. Do you utilize facebook connect?

What is the general purpose of the app?

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

#157

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

ynh wrote: post #35

I make a little over 600$ selling a Newsletter script on Codecanyon http://codecanyon.net/item/newsletter-mailer-v13/149365 Currently I am planing a SaaS Newsletter Mailer.

I use your script. It's very nice and worth the price, but the script setup is more complicated than it needs to be and the smtp is broken and I'm forced to use phpmailer. Two things I've never had issues with from all the other scripts I've installed on my server over the past 7 years.

I'd still prefer it over SaaS Mail because I don't have re-occuring costs every month and I like being in control of my own email lists and the iframe embedded email newsletter signup is awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm the one that asked you about how to check the database to see if a user had already signed up for a specific category newsletter before adding them to it again. That's another thing you should fix.

3 little flaws but the rest of the script is just sooooo perfect. It's sold over 1800+ times because designers/developers like us HATE SaaS newsletter mailers. We like your script.

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

#158

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

I'm the proud Loser of the bunch, behold my magnificent FAILS. (The ironic thing is, I do UI/UX consulting. So I make time to optimize other people's sites but not my own)

http://residentevilradio.com = -$10/month in shoutcast server hosting (will switch to HTML5/Flash jukebox soon)

http://timeforzen.com = $0 no monetization or affiliate links yet

http://tasck.com/2 (NOT finished, PRE-ALPHA) = $0 no monetization or affiliate links yet

===== Dead Links Below =====

http://moviestop.info (success, no income, now offline/sunsetted)

http://humanchan.com (failure, no income, now offline)

http://humanchannel.net (failure, no income, now offline)

http://onenotes.com (failure, never launched)

http://businessgardening.com (failure, no income, no traffic, now offline)

http://extremephotoshopping.com (failure, a little traffic, no income, now offline)

As you can see, I'm a designer (markup, some php, some javascript, some jquery), not a developer. I can hack things together, build original themes, but can't code complex things from scratch. So I have to stick with small projects that I can actually finish. It sucks but I'm working my way up. I've got some really interesting sites, products, and services I want to experiment with in the future as I learn to program as much as I can.

http://chrisnorstrom.com (the best site I ever launched, a small collection of my ideas and inventions (the non-patentable ones anyway) )

BTW, We should start a fail thread where everyone posts all the failed projects/startups they've worked on over the years.

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

#159

Post by cageface »

patio11 wrote: post #117

Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Sales are up by about 40% year-to-date over last year, owing to a combination of increased AdWords spend, organic growth in the business, and a successful redesign (and related conversion optimization) right before summer. Appointment Reminder is doing fairly decently -- monthly recurring revenues (on the publi…

I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far.

Is this a deliberate decision or just a question of sticking to tools/platforms you're more familiar with?

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

#160

Post by matznerd »

the_bear wrote: post #6

A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that. My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the pr…

The site looks awesome and appears to have great monetization with links to amazon and ads from the BlogHer network. I recommend you experiment with "Add To Cart" links and buttons instead of "View On Amazon" because the cookie with a link to Amazon only lasts 24 hours and if they come back later and then buy the item you will not receive credit. But if you use the "Add To Cart" button, the cookie lasts 90 days!

This little known tip can net you a lot more money, it has worked for me... https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/help/t2/a...

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