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Who is living off their startup fulltime?

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Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#131

Post by kloc »

eurohacker wrote: post #126
jasonkester wrote: post #32

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…

what technology you are using for it - Ruby , Python etc,

It is clearly written in asp.net.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#132

Post by tyn »

jasonkester wrote: post #83
checker659 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you talk about how you go about finding customers for the site?

Mostly it's word of mouth, SEO and the occasional writeup on Amazon's Web Services blog. And this: http://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan.ashx It's a strange niche to be in because it's something people are looking for but there was basically nobody doing it when I started out. It goes squarely against the two most fundamental pieces of business advice you can get: "Never build a business based on a missi…

"Never build a business based on a missing feature of a popular software product"

First time I see this, is it really a fundamental piece of business advice?

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#133

Post by siong1987 »

bearwithclaws wrote: post #11

Hacker Monthly ( http://hackermonthly.com ), self-sustaining so far and doing everything to keep cost really low: - Only 1 fulltime employee (um...me) + 3 remote freelancers. - Works from home. - Based in Penang island (somewhere between Bangkok and Singapore with its living cost much lower than both of them).

And, Penang is a state in Malaysia. : ) Proud to be Malaysian.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#134

Post by siong1987 »

libpcap wrote: post #44
bearwithclaws wrote: post #11

Hacker Monthly ( http://hackermonthly.com ), self-sustaining so far and doing everything to keep cost really low: - Only 1 fulltime employee (um...me) + 3 remote freelancers. - Works from home. - Based in Penang island (somewhere between Bangkok and Singapore with its living cost much lower than both of them).

Do you speak the local language? Malay?

In fact, all Malaysian speak Malay. It is a must-learn language in our public education system.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#135

Post by devinfoley »

tyn wrote: post #132
jasonkester wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it's word of mouth, SEO and the occasional writeup on Amazon's Web Services blog. And this: http://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan.ashx It's a strange niche to be in because it's something people are looking for but there was basically nobody doing it when I started out. It goes squarely against the two most fundamental pieces of business advice you can get: "Never build a business based on a missi…

"Never build a business based on a missing feature of a popular software product" First time I see this, is it really a fundamental piece of business advice?

It's something I've heard many times, and something that I agree with.

You want to build a business, not a feature. Unless you can come up with more features, it's difficult to grow the business.

Then of course there is the risk that your feature will come standard in the next version of "popular software product." If your audience is niche, then you are likely safe, but if your feature appeals to all users of the product, it's inevitable that it will eventually be included in a future version of the product. You end up doing the R&D for free.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#136

Post by jasonkester »

eurohacker wrote: post #126
jasonkester wrote: post #32

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…

what technology you are using for it - Ruby , Python etc,

As somebody else deduced, the public site is ASP.NET.

The heavy lifting is done in C# as well, on a pile of EC2 machines that gets spun up each night. Back before EC2 Windows instances came out, it was running under Mono, with the help of a bunch of Ruby scripts to handle everything that Mono let me down on (such as ALL the downloading, uploading, talking to webservices, etc. that require pieces of .NET that is hard to implement and non-sexy and thus didn't get implemented by the Mono team).

Now it's all C#, leveraging a half dozen Amazon Web Services and running on EC2 Windows instances.

Re: Who is living off their startup fulltime?

#137

Post by inovica »

All my outgoings (including staff wages) are paid for by a number of small sites that I have run. They are quite diverse, but I love creating different things. Here's some of what we do:

www.sourceguardian.com - encryption software for PHP. Have been running this for around 10 years. This alone would be a very good 'wage' for someone

www.europeantenders.com. This provides leads for european government contracts

www.ukscrap.com. This is a referral site that we created for people who's car is 'end of life'.

www.rubyencoder.com. Similar to SourceGuardian. It's for encrypting Ruby source code. We had a need for this ourselves so created it

I run a few more also. I love the freedom that this has given me and the regular income allows me to play with what I'm interested in

Feel free to message me privately if you want any details or just some advice

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