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I created/run a couple web apps ( http://w3counter.com http://w3roi.com and a few more). Everything is profitable and I've lived off it for the past 6 years. All bootstrapped, no outside funding.
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If having a niche is your main competitive advantage, I'm not sure success will last long anyway.
That's not necessarily the case. There are many niches that aren't obviously profitable. From the outside, it seems like they'd be a waste of time until someone discovers a way to make money with them.
I am living off http://www.AwesomenessReminders.com and http://www.CustomerFind.com . For AwesomenessReminders, you can use the referral code HACKERNEWS to save money.
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It's awesome when anyone can make a living doing what they choose. But for practical purposes, I think most people think of "living off their start-up" as making money from things other than an individual doing contracts/hourly work; in other words, a product or service that can scale in some sense. If you were making money by paying others to do the work, that would be a different story!
I actually agree, and i'm taking steps to make that happen and move from a freelancer to a sustainable boutique iOS development shop. That's more startup-y, right? :)
S3stat ( http://www.s3stat.com ) brings in enough to live on, and funded me while I was traveling last year and bootstrapping the next thing. It also has the advantage of pretty much running itself on autopilot, so I can sometimes go entire months without opening the IDE or doing anything beyond responding to the odd customer email. I'd highly recommend building something like that (a low-maintenance income generatin…
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I actually agree, and i'm taking steps to make that happen and move from a freelancer to a sustainable boutique iOS development shop. That's more startup-y, right? :)
Only if you're building your own products that you can sell in a scalable way - not just becoming a larger consulting shop. That's not to say it isn't a good idea -- just that building a business is a little different in most people's mind than a "startup".
http://www.facebook.com/amznwishlist was pretty profitable up until about mid-October when Amazon decided to disable some of its Product Advertising API calls for getting Wish List data. If the app still worked and ran through the holidays, it probably would've paid for rent (and then some).
http://www.fatearthmedia.com/ - My browser extension for shopping sites is also profitable. If the Mozilla add-on policy was less strict about affiliates earnings, then it'd probably be paying for rent as well.
http://usabilityhub.com (including http://fivesecondtest.com ) was originally a free app. We introduced subscriptions in August. It's now getting close to being able to support two of us full-time. At the moment, we're both still doing consultant work to fill the gaps. I would certainly think in the next 6-12 months it'll be covering both of us. We're entirely self-funded from 3 years of contracting/consulting. If I…
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yes please share that info with 1000's of would-be competitors with the right skill sets and entrepreneurial drive ;)
If having a niche is your main competitive advantage, I'm not sure success will last long anyway.
If domain knowledge is the main barrier to entry, the competitive advantage is not the fact that it's a niche, but the fact that you know something that your competitors don't about that niche.
ThatHigh.com pays my rent in SF. Currently working on Djangy.com, hopefully that will "supplement" thathigh :-)