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

361–370 of 441 posts

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

#361

Post by pjbrunet »

tluyben2 wrote: post #355
pjbrunet wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you?…

These ideas were not original to start with; 4 pics 1 word (which is, imho, incredibly boring) somehow got a lot of attention, downloads and money but was never original. Then 100s of devs copied it in some way or another. All these 'games' look / work the same. I made one for a client and the 24 hours sounds plausible including artwork but excluding the actual levels. That would take around another day. Making a few…

Seems to me someone with this much skill/ability could easily make $100k/year ($100 x 1000 successful app months) plus pension/benefits just working for the government. 10x easier work with 10x the pay and more stability. And "mobile apps" is supposedly the promising, high-tech growth segment of the economy everyone is harping on. What's wrong with this picture?

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

#362

Post by Shpigford »

Making around $5000/mo between http://popsurvey.com and http://temper.io (recently launched).

But that's rising a bit more rapidly now: http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-free-how-to-increase-revenue...

Slow, but steady, growth. Definitely a prime example of the "Long, Slow, SaaS Ramp of Death." http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-long-...

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

#363

Post by n1c »

masonhensley wrote: post #244
n1c wrote: post #75

I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss? http://dressed.so I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over. For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page http://drsd.so/15Yx…

Neat, I've seen your site on /r/malefashionadvice. Since your site is focused on men, you should try and filter out women's products in your shop section. Example for a search on "sperry" topsiders: http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry I'm guessing that mixing in women's products will hurt your conversion rate for affiliate products. If your affiliate network can't filter like that, you may want to check out http://prospe…

Yeah I've been quite slack about optimising the search stuff. It should just default to 'male' and have a radio to change.

Thanks for the links; just yesterday I put 'investigate alternate affiliates' on the top of my list.

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

#364

Post by asenna »

23andwalnut wrote: post #62
nish1500 wrote: post #58

21, drop-out, profit ~ $7k a month, working part-time, and no partner. Up from $31/month last December. Comes from sale of plugins. Not recurring, but stable.

Sounds great. What kind of plugins? Where do you sell them?

I loved your Duet app. I have a question regarding CodeCanyon. The most popular things selling on there seems to be Wordpress plugins and stuff. Do you see a pattern of some kind? I was thinking of making some templates for Android Apps but those don't seem to be popular for some reason.

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

#365

Post by snoonan »

jdlshore wrote: post #255
snoonan wrote: post #253

Interesting point against recurring revenue for some products: We increased overall sales by charging a fixed price for permanent access vs. recurring billing. The lifetime value of the customer turned out to be less in the recurring model. It took us about 2 years to discover this. Just something to keep an eye on.

Very interesting. I've gotten a decent number of requests for a la carte purchases on my site, so I'm strongly considering doing it. (It's a big change, though, which is why I've held off.) Can you say more? I'm particularly interested in how you set your prices, whether you kept the recurring model alongside the permanent model, and how you saw customer behavior change. Thanks!

I'm reluctant to give harder details since I am in what could be a "passive income" niche, but I will try. We originally set our monthly prices in line with comparably similar produces - about $20/mo, with discounts to purchase 6 & 12 months in advances. The final fixed cost (lifetime access) account ended up costing less than a 12 month discounted subscription.

The feedback was that a) some people bought precisely because they didn't have a recurring bill hitting their account, even a small one. b) some people found the fixed price too expensive to buy and were disappointed they couldn't buy it. c) The ones that did buy the fixed price were happy with their purchases. Overall, however, we ended up with fewer total buyers each paying above the average lifetime value of the monthly buyers.

When we offered BOTH subscription AND fixed price access for individual units for a period of time, people tended to buy the lowest cost subscription instead of the lowest cost unit. They shopped on price. They were not as happy with their purchases in either case, though more so for the cheapest subscription.

In the end, it was counterintuitive to what is commonly considered "good business" to have recurring revenue from customers. We still think there's a place for monthly recurring billing somewhere, but we don't have the catalog or products to support a mix. It would be great to provide Level 1 at a fixed price and Level 2 at a lower monthly fee because we know they are the "stick with it" customers and so will likely have a better lifetime value.

Sorry to be vague here. The numbers vary over the years, but started about $2500/mo and grew to about 10k/mo over about 6 years. It is for a learning endeavor that people SHOULD commit a year+ to learning, but tend to quit for very human reasons. We think people who make commitments are happier because a) that cool TED talk about irrevocable choices that everyone talks about and b) Committing to putting in the time on our product DOES result in a new skill set, so it has tangible personal improvement if it is used as directed.

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

#366

Post by asenna »

benhirashima wrote: post #164

i make around 1300 USD a month from this android app i made two years ago. i have to update it every time a new version of android is released, and i spend maybe 5 minutes a day on email support. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...

The app looks pretty cool. Could you please share some of your thoughts on how you settled on the price?

I am about to launch an App and this app would later have a web backend to go along. I am not sure whether to launch the app for free and have some kind of subscription on the website or make the app paid.

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

#367

Post by simonswords82 »

benlarcey wrote: post #300
simonswords82 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we know, happened yesterday. Thanks for the heads up.. To explain: I was experimenting with an app that it turns out breaks the twitter rules and so they've suspended us. I'm talking to Twitter now about getting us unsuspended.

Followgen? Experimented with it and although provided some value it ultimately got our account permanently suspended.

Holy shit really? Yeah it's followgen...I've e-mailed the owner and revoked his access to our twitter account.

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

#368

Post by darkcatstudios »

I WAS taking around £1000 PM through an online printing service which i sold off about 3 years back as i hadnt got time to put the effort into it that it involved. I am now looking at re-launching that as the new owner disolved it and let the domain lapse (www.a2prints.co.uk) (i didnt sell the IP) As you'll see the site is very dated now so im in the middle of a compete rebuild, hope to launch again in a few weeks. Currently adwords is basically paying for itself, but the bounce rate is understandably very high due to the very dated nature of the site.

Should turn around £7k pm after relaunch with a realistic initial estimate of 10 1-print jobs per day.

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

#370

Post by wusatiuk »

jdlshore wrote: post #308
jdlshore wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Oh, wow. I just discovered that my demo video is recorded at too high a bitrate. It's at 2.8Mbit/s, compared to 1.3-1.8Mbit/s for subscriber videos. That's probably because I used my standard screencast encoding settings (which are set nice and high) for a video that has a lot more motion than my standard screencast. Fixing this alone will probably do wonders for my conversion rate. Thanks a million to tankbot f…

So, for anyone following this saga... In researching this issue, I found recommendations that 2.5mbps is probably the most you should plan for in North America. I'm not sure how accurate or current that recommendation is, but since I was seeing problems at 2.8mbps, it seems reasonable. (It also might explain why I have such a large proportion of international subscribers.) That said, I'd really love to get my bitrate…

it would be awesome if you could share some details about your screencast setup.
Post reply on HN