Ask HN: Your Non-Glorious Startup Success

I think our story, although not Facebook-famous, is interesting because I believe we significantly improved the web without anybody knowing it.

We started Defensio when we found out that many people were dissatisfied with the only anti-comment-spam solution that then existed: Akismet (owned by Automattic/Wordpress). Your favorites bloggers such as Scoble were complaining that Akismet was blocking way too many legitimate comments and that he simply couldn't go through thousands of blocked comments a day to find the good ones. Other famous bloggers such as Marc Andreessen (if I remember correctly, I might be wrong) were also complaining and about to shut down comments on their blogs. We thought that was terrible and we wanted to fix that. And we did.

We basically built a product that was more efficient and easier to use than Akismet. Although we certainly didn't put Akismet out of business or grow anywhere near as big as they are, we forced them to improve their product in order to stay in the game. Later on, a 3rd contender joined the race: Mollom.

I believe that in many ways, we made the web a better place. In part because of us, user-generated content still flows freely on the web, you can still comment without too much hassle on your favorite blogs. Competition is good, and we created that in a stagnant but very critical market.

By the way, it wasn't easy. It was hell at times. But we didn't give up even when it made absolutely no sense to keep going. That's why we succeeded.

If I'd be more thrifty, I could stop working more than a few days a month. But I'm easily bored, I enjoy growing my business(es), and I really enjoy spending my money. Ex: my husband and I are about to get a second apartment, in another country.

My (first) bootstrapped SaaS is pulling in ~$140k/yr now based on monthlies, with 4x growth year over year, and I expect to do that again in the next 12 mos -- or possibly better, as network effects start to pick up. (http://letsfreckle.com -- you can't get less glorious than time tracking, on the face of it.)

Right now, my husband and a freelancer are in the other room, massaging the codebase to get our second SaaS up and running in dogfood mode. (http://charmde.sk)

I've combined a couple programming learning products (ebook, scripted workshops) and that adds another $130k or so a year of gross. I've also grossed about $65k in 2010 from teaching my fellow geeks how to create their own boring, but successful, products. (http://unicornfree.com/30x500 - now sold out)

Next year, I think I'll try to double the learning product numbers.

In short: I'm 26 now. I figure I can keep on building & have a small product portfolio that grosses $2m/yr by the time I'm 30… and I'll be able to call all the shots.

You might like my blog post on my income breakdown for 2010 so far:

http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/

The thing to realize about "the startup media" is that they are, essentially, tabloids. They cater to what people want to read, and what people want to read are fairy tales.

The funny thing is i am an immigrant with little coding skills, a lazy attitude and live in a big mid western city with almost zero tech startups!...BTB, i live a normal upper middle class life and my friends don't have a clue what i do!