Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 344 posts

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

#191

Post by icebraining »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #149
jmnicolas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been several years now that I'd like to launch a few side projects. But contrary to the crowd here I'm just a normal human : when I come home I'm just exhausted and / or want to do something else than coding. I could use the extra cash though. This month I even tried placing bets on soccer and tennis and failed miserably.

If they're not normal humans, it's only because they have more willpower than you. That's the best news ever, because it's been proven in studies time and time again that willpower can be built up just like muscles through exercise. Conquer your will, and you'll be able to use it to build what you want. Start with meditation if you're not doing it already. Regular physical exercise and meditation are excellent ways t…

How do you get the willpower to start meditating and doing regular exercise? :P

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

#192

Post by gravitronic »

jonahx wrote: post #96
gravitronic wrote: post #12

100-200 a month from having an android app. The free version has had 483k downloads, makes ~5$/day advertising (admob/adsense). ~250 downloads a day, been on the market since 2011. The paid version ($2.99) has had Unfortunately I've no time to keep it updated so last update was in 2012.

thank for sharing. it's surprising that nearly half a million downloads translates into such a small amount of revenue. is this the nature of in-app advertising, or is this because the number of active users of the app is much smaller than the number of downloads?

my app's a bit special - it's purely SDL / opengl / C with a tiny java wrapper just to get going. TBH, there's some key technical problems with it with respect to onboarding, and because of those problems and likely technical problems there's It's DJPad, feel free to try it - the library functionality is embarrassingly bad but the audio engine and UI's half decent.

Probably the biggest feature is that it's lower latency than the competitors written in java. It doesn't hold a candle to any of the DJ apps on iOS whatsoever though.

I started a new job/career 2 years ago, and now I'm a dad - suffice to say my free time is gone. If I had stuck with this project I would have rebuilt the library and built a dedicated onboarding walkthrough.

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

#193

Post by joeframbach »

psobot wrote: post #38

On average, $400/month from https://the.wubmachine.com , an online music remixing app. Split pretty much evenly between Google AdSense and Android/iOS In-App Purchases for the Android/iOS native clients.

That's pretty neat. Although it took me a while to think of a good song to use. If you have insights on "popular tracks" or "recently used tracks", how about a quickstart link on the wubmachine? That would be handy.

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

#194

Post by aembleton »

alokm wrote: post #188

Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.

Which apps did you make?

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

#196

Post by softdev12 »

alokm wrote: post #188

Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.

did you initially launch the app with ads? does the ad hurt the user experience?

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

#197

Post by selamin »

foofoobar wrote: post #184
selamin wrote: post #179

I sell a self hosted web app ( http://duetapp.com ) that generates 3-4k a month. It used to be higher, but I haven't given it the attention it deserves in a couple of months.

Where do you advertise? Is your web page the only selling channel you are using?

I don't do any paid advertising at the moment. I get a decent amount of leads from two other apps that I distribute for free (http://theanchorapp.com, http://getsoloapp.com), google, and word of mouth.

Yep, the website is the only sales channel...

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

#198

Post by yesimahuman »

softdev12 wrote: post #189
yesimahuman wrote: post #187

A few years back my friend and I had bootstrapped a simple SaaS product to over $30k/mo in recurring revenue with insane margins. We turned it into a bigger business after that, but I sometimes can't believe how much we made with just two people.

that's amazing. was there much of a sales effort involved?

No sales or marketing spend. We built developer tools (still do) and just found really passionate communities that were willing to pay for things. We did spend a good amount of time on "virality" (just making sure we were utilizing organic growth on Twitter), and also tweaking and testing pricing models. We probably tried 5+ pricing models for new customers in a given year.

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

#199

Post by breischl »

abrugsch wrote: post #166
breischl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule of thumb is that the monthly rent should be at least 1% of the purchase price. More specific ROI calculations are good, but people typically forget a lot of expenses (repairs, vacancy, time spent managing, etc) and end up calculating an unrealistic ROI. After accounting for all that stuff, at least 8% cash-on-cash, plus more in debt repayment.

wow... that rule of thumb makes it virtually impossible to buy-to-let in my neighbourhood. a "Cheap" 2-bed apartment is £150,000 and MAX rent for that kind of place here would peg somewhere about £600, but definitely nowhere near £1500. Even at a liquidation auction or lowballing a desperate seller, there's no way to buy anything habitable for under 60K

To be specific, it's a rule of thumb in the US. I would not be at all surprised if UK real estate works differently. But yeah, in some markets you just won't find things that reach that return. Then you'd have to decide if it's worth buying those properties, or buying in a different market, or just doing something totally different with your money (stocks, bonds, startups, whatever).

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

#200

Post by justinmares »

I'm around $5500 a month total from 2 Udemy courses and a launching Traction book. It breaks down like this (all links below):

My SQL for Marketers course on Udemy does about $1500 a month, and has been pretty steady since launching the course on Udemy in late April. This takes almost no maintenance, though I am starting to work on improving it in response to student feedback.

My other course, Productivity for Mac Users, is a simpler keyboard shortcuts one can use to be more productive on Mac. This one makes $400-800 per month, though average over the lifetime (launched in May) has been around $500.

Lastly, we launched Traction book 3 months ago, and it continues to sell really well. Even after splitting with my co-author, I make about $3500 a month from that. You can see full numbers breakdown in the blog post we wrote summing up our launch.

https://www.udemy.com/sql-for-marketers/#/

https://www.udemy.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts/#/

http://tractionbook.com

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2014/10/getting-traction...

Post reply on HN