451–460 of 666 posts
Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…
How can you afford to be full-time on $2239/month? O.o
I launched http://ipinfo.io a few years ago. The API gets over 250 million requests a day, and is profitable. I left my job at CTO of calm.com at the end of last year to focus on it fulltime. There's more of the backstory here: https://getputpost.co/from-side-project-to-250-million-daily...
if I understand this correctly, ipinfo is basically a lookup in a db? What is the advantage of this over a local lookup, say with maxmind or similar? edit: also, when I press the back button from this page: http://ipinfo.io/AS6830 all I get is a json
Funny you mention that, because I've had the same issue with regular IPs. I use ipinfo.io a lot for my job and have noticed this intermittently.
I run two SaaS analytics services on my own, https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com . Improvely is 4 years old, W3Counter is 12 years old, and together they earn $45-50K/month.
After launching in January last year, I saw a relatively significant level of interest from early users (relatively significant = much more than I had in all my previous side projects). 10-20 active early users are very good for the ego when you are usually met with polite indifference. I can't thank them enough.
After a bit from traction fro Product Hunt, I started monetize in May. After a few months, I have about 20 customers, for about 300€ /month revenue. I changed pricing in November (cheaper, but without free plan), and I start to see some promising growth.
Smooz being a side project, and the first one I take from idea to shipping to scaling issues, and from early users to actual customers, is an incredible success for me in itself, if only for the learning. Success on the financial side will be when I reach 1000€ / month (recurring, passive) with it.
I'm running two of the same ones from that list 3 years ago ( http://www.twiddla.com/ and https://www.s3stat.com/ ), and have just launched another one ( https://unwaffle.com/ ). Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides. It's…
How are you promoting your products? I am part marketer and part developer, but I am finding it difficult to market to developers :) I recently launched http://www.smsinbox.net for Twilio devs, and am slowly gaining some users, but finding it very difficult to reach the target audience, and/or get visitor/user feedback.
I run Pinboard, $257K in gross revenue for 2016. A ton of money for one person, not quite enough for two people.
I run https://mapchart.net . It is a simple tool that lets you create custom maps of the World, USA, Europe, UK, France and more. I treat is as a side-project, but I am constantly adding new maps or expanding some features. The biggest advantage is that it costs almost nothing to maintain it, as it is completely client-side, so the only cost is the basic hosting plan. I launched it almost 2 years ago and right now it…
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fyi, I did a small edit: I forgot to mention "support" which is arguably the most important role once you have an actual product. I solicit users to email whenever they have a question/comment/issue and reply to everything. Overall I think I have provided email support to aprox 50% of my paying customers, and maybe half of the support was provided before they decided to pay, so it is very important :)
Yes! Support is also the part most potentially terrifying to me, considering starting something while still employed at a full time job. Seems like it could quickly become a massive time sink and source of stress.
I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it. The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable. The biggest surprise…
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Indie Hackers is great. Two comments/requests. It would be great to have some business and entrepreneurship books reviewed by the community. Some are worth reading, but many are not and Amazon type reviews are not reliable indicator or hype vs. value. Another great feature would be to have a small follow up with some of the showcased businesses. Especially the ones that just got started. Great work and good luck!
1. Been thinking about doing book reviews on the blog actually. Any tips/ideas for crowdsourcing it and getting the community involved? Maybe I'll try using the forum for that. 2. Will try to do updates every few months or so in the future, don't want the interviews to get stale!
Don't do book reviews and the value of your site is in the data. What you should do is, for every interview, add a question in the form of "what books do you read" or "what do you recommend people should read?". Then for every book listed, add an amazon affiliate link (don't forget to be transparent about this - honesty is the best policy!) so that it provides some revenue and diversifies your income.
Now here is the kicker -> Add every suggested book as a data point and collate it all into a table(s) as a separate page on indiehackers! You can use all sort of filters such as number of times suggested, genre based on founder types, etc. For the sort of audience you have, there will be very interested in the number of times a book has been suggested rather than the book review itself.
Hope that helps. If you need a sounding board and perhaps a hand, my email is in my profile.