Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business • Hacker News Board

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#11

Post by axelut » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:34 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

Glad that you like it! In Romania, the minimum monthly wage is 250$, then programmers start with 400$/month. Depending on experience and what they do inside a company they can grow to 2-3k/month in a couple of years. We are growing the salaries according to the experience and the position inside the company too. 100% of our employees started with 0 experience because it was their first job. Everything was learned inside our company.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#12

Post by axelut » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

wheelerwj wrote: post #6

axelut wrote: post #2

Hi everybody, here is Alex, the co-founder of Creative Tim. Hope the information from this interview will help you achieve more with your current business or give you the courage to start your own business. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would be glad to talk with you. Best, Alex

Hey Alex! Thanks for sharing about creative-tim! You have an excellent business on your hands.

Thank you! Glad that you like it :D

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#13

Post by 20years » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

That stood out to me too. Not great at this stage but if they can continue to grow it, I suppose the pay will increase too. They started 2 years ago though. 17k in 2 years for 6 people is pretty low imo unless they are very part time.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#14

Post by axelut » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

jim_d wrote: post #5

axelut wrote: post #2

Hi everybody, here is Alex, the co-founder of Creative Tim. Hope the information from this interview will help you achieve more with your current business or give you the courage to start your own business. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would be glad to talk with you. Best, Alex

Hi Alex, Great work. I'm curious how did you get your affiliate programs in place, did you reach out to folks or did they reach out to you?

Thank you for the kind words! In the beginning, we started to talk with different bloggers or website owners that were sharing content for our audience, then with github repos' owners in order to get some of our affiliates, then we created a dedicated page on our website where we receive affiliates requests.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#15

Post by emilburzo » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

eugeneionesco wrote: post #4

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

>Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? It's a very good living wage for Romania but low for what other IT people are earning, ~$2k monthly.

> It's a very good living wage

It's a very good wage for _surviving_.

After taking care of rent/utility bills there's not much left to go around for actually living.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#16

Post by JamesSwift » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:39 PM UTC

axelut wrote: post #2

Hi everybody, here is Alex, the co-founder of Creative Tim. Hope the information from this interview will help you achieve more with your current business or give you the courage to start your own business. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would be glad to talk with you. Best, Alex

I came across your site a couple months ago and was really impressed with the design. I was also pleasantly surprised at just how permissive your licensing was.

I'm now happily using paper-dashboard for some internal admin areas. Thank you!

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#17

Post by axelut » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

rahrahrah wrote: post #10

axelut wrote: post #2

Hi everybody, here is Alex, the co-founder of Creative Tim. Hope the information from this interview will help you achieve more with your current business or give you the courage to start your own business. If you have any suggestions or feedback I would be glad to talk with you. Best, Alex

Hi Alex, thanks for sharing. I was wondering, what you pay your affiliates is missing from the break down of costs. Why is that?

Glad that you like it! It is missing from the cost because we use a payment processor (Avangate) who is taking care of all our payments and also the affiliates commissions + European VAT and other taxes, what we have there in revenue is our net revenue after we pay all the VAT, affiliates and commissions of our payment vendor. So the Gross revenue is bigger than 17k/month, around 20-21k/month.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#18

Post by axelut » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #7

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

from the article it seems like they are a consulting company and that this is a side project for them almost. So im sure they make money from their clients on top of the money from this

Thank you for reading it. We used to be a consulting agency, then when our side project (creative-tim) started to generate enough to pay our office and salaries for 3 persons we switched to it and then it was growing so we could get more people onboard.

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#19

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 6:53 PM UTC

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

[deleted]

Re: Creative Tim: Growing a side project into a $17k/month business

#20

Post by kkt262 » Thu, Dec 29, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

eugeneionesco wrote: post #4

rfrey wrote: post #3

I devour indiehacker's interviews and I love the transparency - thanks to both sides of the table. According to the numbers here, 42% of the 17,000 monthly revenues are spent on 6 people. That's $1190 per person per month if everyone is paid equally. Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? If not, how are your employees making ends meet? Edit: that last sentence sounds accusatory - I don't mean it to…

>Is everyone in Romania, and is that a living wage there? It's a very good living wage for Romania but low for what other IT people are earning, ~$2k monthly.

Why don't Romanians just get remote jobs?