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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?

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this makes money, then anyone can make money.

Not quite true. This app makes money because anyone that owns a cat and an iPad looks for apps that their cat(s) can play with. The same is true for baby apps. There are some super simple apps that babies enjoy, and those apps make very good money considering the development effort. That being said, not everyone can pull it off. This particular cat app is fairly well done in my opinion. One must also keep in mind tha…

As much as I like cats, I am rather surprised people have no problem with cat claws on their >$500 touchscreen...

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

#242
post #16

I average about $300 a month from app sales of a paid app and an ad-supported app. (This month is looking better, for some reason) [Edit: I didn't actually say it, but these are iPhone apps] On average, almost all of my income is from app sales, and not from ads or In-App Purchases. I had a Lite version of the paid app, but that seemed to do more harm than good. I have In-App purchases (both to unlock some extra cont…

Thanks for sharing Larrik... Or should I say "Professor" :P

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

#243

$1,000 per month from two ATM's I own. The money is easy, but finding good locations that don't already have one is a complete bitch.

I looked into this a while ago, but if I were to fully outsource it, it didn't make sense financially. Out of curiosity, do you use your own money in the machine and service it yourself? Do you own the machine or lease?

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of my customers are on the online version now, since I've exiled the downloadable version to electronic Siberia. If no customer ever found it again I would be happy. With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.

Can you describe what you mean by "scalable content generation"? Sounds very interesting!

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

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

#245
post #230
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer who tore my right distal radial biceps tendon and had surgery to repair it, I approve this message.

Exactly the kind of person I'm trying to reach! How did you manage while you were recovering? Did you search for any alternative layouts or guides?

I did and I found some options that have to do with alternative keyboard layouts, usually folding the keyboard in half using a hot key. I was lucky in that I had partial use of my hand and since my injury and surgery were so high up on my arm (as opposed to a direct hand injury) I wasn't as held back as I might have been otherwise.

I also looked into hardware solutions, but those are expensive and more for a person who isn't going to recover (longer learning time, more $$). At the time I also considered seeing if I could write something for my cell phone that would make using the keyboard on it with one hand easier too.

At the time, I certainly would have purchased a software solution if it was reasonably priced (maybe 33-50% the cost of hardware solutions).

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

#246
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite true. This app makes money because anyone that owns a cat and an iPad looks for apps that their cat(s) can play with. The same is true for baby apps. There are some super simple apps that babies enjoy, and those apps make very good money considering the development effort. That being said, not everyone can pull it off. This particular cat app is fairly well done in my opinion. One must also keep in mind tha…

As much as I like cats, I am rather surprised people have no problem with cat claws on their >$500 touchscreen...

Gorilla Glass. If my keys don't scratch it, a cat claw definitely won't.

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

#247
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite true. This app makes money because anyone that owns a cat and an iPad looks for apps that their cat(s) can play with. The same is true for baby apps. There are some super simple apps that babies enjoy, and those apps make very good money considering the development effort. That being said, not everyone can pull it off. This particular cat app is fairly well done in my opinion. One must also keep in mind tha…

As much as I like cats, I am rather surprised people have no problem with cat claws on their >$500 touchscreen...

Even more surprising is that cat claws can't scratch those screens.

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

#248

I make ~$2,000 a month with an iPad game for cats. My co-founder and I were working on a "more serious" game and it was taking a long time. We needed a quick win, so I agreed to do it if we spent less than 4 weeks on it. We completed the game from idea to app store in 3.5 weeks and it is now, by far, our most popular game. * face palm * EDIT: We split the revenue 50/50, so the revenue (after apple's cut) on this game…

Were you at the LA iPad hackathon event right after the iPad's release? There was a team that worked on something similar.

No but I'd love to talk to the guys who did it. Do you happen to know who they are? My email is in my profile.

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

#249

Around $1000 a month from Android app sales: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dozingcatsoftware.... . (After Google's cut, before taxes). A few weeks ago I applied the common HN advice and raised the price from $0.99 to $1.99, which so far has increased revenue by about 50%.

Hey - good to see you're on HN. This app never fails to amaze people I show it to (especially The Matrix mode)

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

#250

I'm using a throwaway account here to protect my privacy. I'm currently making between 90k and 110K a month in revenue as a sole employee running a fairly large active Web community ( Our revenue sources breaks down as follows: * 40/50K/month in subscription revenue * 25K/month in adsense revenue * 4k/month in other ad revenue (Ebay, Amazon, Viglink etc) * 30K/month in license and royalty revenue As the sole employee…

What would you say your monthly outgoings are on hosting, staff etc?
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