I've been working on CallGraph.Biz (http://callgraph.biz) and living off it for around two years now. The work's pretty hectic though and recently I hired two contractors in Phillipines to take the load off me. Work from home, live in Bangalore, India.
Who is living off their startup fulltime?
111–120 of 190 posts
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#112Do any of the operators of the sites mentioned here need design or logo work? I'm revamping my portfolio page and wanted to offer it to hacker news entrepreneurs. My about section has my old portfolio page, I've also done some work for hacker news entrepreneurs already, so you can email me if you want to see the absolute latest.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#113Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#114S3stat ( 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…
I love how clean and concise this is. Also the great use of humor in the right places. The "Cheap Bastard Plan" idea is awesome.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#115NerdKits ( http://www.nerdkits.com/ ). Started with roommate co-founder in senior year of college with $200 of parts, continued part-time while I still in school / doing Masters degree, and now full-time since graduation (almost a year and a half now). Profitable and a lot of fun.
Heh, I remember reading a shameless self-promotion post from you on Slashdot a few months back. Looks like things have turned out well, and I'm considering getting one myself. Nice work!
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#116I live off of TekPub ( http://tekpub.com ) and Adzerk ( http://adzerk.com , http://theloungenet.com , http://rubyrow.net ).
Awesome! AdZerk looks like a great product - great presentation at the Internet Summit Demo btw.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#117Signal ( http://www.signalhq.com ) supports 13 including myself, co-founded in 2006. First few years as a founder we're incredibly tough (paid others but not ourselves), but we're doing great now.
I love the design - did you do it in-house?
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#118TinkerCAD ( http://tinkercad.com ). Self funded and in soon-alpha mode, 3 FT founders. Quit Google a few months ago after five great years at the place.
OOOOHHH -- If tinker cad is like the Lego+Sketchup of CAD, then I am excited. Sounds great (based on what I can surmise from the pic and the name) -- hopefully it is easy enough to use that my 6 year old can use it too!
I signed up for info...
(Did you work on the SketchUp team at Google?)
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#119I am with my startup Codesketch ( http://www.codesketch.com ). We've been designing and coding apps (mostly iPhone, but some web apps too) for various companies. We are also working on some apps that we will sell directly to consumers on the App Store. - 2 partners (one of them is me) - 3 board member who contribute several hours a week gratis I took some funding at the beginning, but we are now completely self-susta…
>> Our downtown office we rent we got for next to nothing (thank God for karma) I'm curious to how you got a free office. Would you mind sharing?
Between high school and college I took a year off. I decided to spend 6 months in South Africa to help people help themselves out of poverty.
I did this by writing a curriculum that covered basic computer office skills. We got about 15 laptops donated from the states and began our mobile lab. Our first 2 class rounds were people that we hand picked to be teachers in later classes.
The next round of classes launched with the teachers that we just trained running the show (we still attended all of these sessions just to help out). The classes were self sustainable (teachers got paid a small amount from students, and the students were then committed to the program).
Jason (the guy who hooked me up with the downtown office) was a part of my team.
Moral of the story: Be nice and help people.
Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Really, the goal is both. Consulting is a much more reliable way to generate income in the iOS market, but the app store is steadier if you can get a good performer out there. I'm trying to use consulting (and grow the business that way in the short term) until I can get a serious product in the app store that can support the business.
In our case we were able to convince some of our clients to let us keep ownership of the iOS code developed for them as long as we didn't sell it to their local competition. We basically gave them a license to do whatever they wanted with the code while we kept all ownership/IP/ability to create a product with it.
After 5 months developing a fairly complex iOS app for a local cable company (think i.TV + Netflix like vod recommendations) it sure feels that we have created some value as we can go out and create spinoffs or repackage the same solution to other (non local) cable providers.