211–220 of 685 posts
I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live…
Started 8 years ago, developed and published our first website for under $250 (I code, which helps). Learned SEO via trial & error, benefiting from the post-Penguin and Panda implosions that kicked a bunch of spam sites out of our target searches. Started putting together a predictive analytics package for investing in digital content, so we have an idea of how content will pull before we create it.
After that it was scaling and project management. Which has been a real learning experience, since a lot of publishing basically sucks... many people cranking out the same stuff. Very hard to keep "that special spark" in content at scale.
Still have the day job. Digital publishing is an 11 on the hot / crazy scale in terms of revenue stability (50% swings in monthly revenue on established sites aren't uncommon), so have a reliable pay check & health insurance reduces stress substantially. Plus I enjoy the work, most of the time.
One other benefit of having a "cover" day job: it allows you to "stay off the radar" as a small business owner and fairly affluent member of your local society. You've got a socially acceptable answer ("I punch a clock at company X") and don't stand out. Most people have no clue about the true scope and intensity of my side business, which simplifies things...
Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It's continued as a one-person operation, for the time being.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?
Not OP, but some reasons could be: What happens if he gets banned by Adsense? In many countries, people don't understand the concept of lifestyle business (even if it brings multiples of salary in revenue, like this case). It is considered "prestigious" and safe to have a job (It doesn't make sense, but it is how it is).
They makes the same amount from AdSense in one month as they do from 15 months of their job. Assuming this has been going on for a few years, I doubt the money from the job is really effecting the size of their financial safety net. If they're spending within their means from the job they have a safety net that will last "forever". If not their real job isn't enough for them anyways.
Non financial reasons for keeping the job could make a lot of sense though.
I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…
is it a mobile app or a desktop or SAAS? just curious.
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Meeting other humans? Enjoying the work? A regular job with regular income looks good on paper if you want a bank to lend you money, for example. Maybe less likely to appear on tax authority's radar for undisclosed income if people know you as Joe the IT guy who leaves for work at the same time every morning?
Banks are looking for stability in your income. A regular salaried job counts as stability. But proven bank deposits over multiple years also counts. I wouldn't shy away from self-employment just because of banks. Source: I worked at a bank, and wrote algorithms for loan acceptance which evaluated such things.
I would never discourage anyone from self-employment, but right now I'm watching a good friend try to get a mortgage in Germany... and he's been running his own company for 20 years... in a highly volatile industry... and let's say they'd be treating him a whole lot better if he had a boring day job at some big company.
If you're planning on stuff like mortgages and (depending on your passport) visas, "regular old job" is worth many multiples of self-employment. If your self-employment makes enough that you won't need a mortgage (etc.) then great, but I would bear it in mind when thinking about quitting the day job.
I know a successful two-person online cloud provider. One person is hard unless it's a very specific niche market. With two people you can have one with the gift of gab and one with the gift of code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?
Meeting other humans? Enjoying the work? A regular job with regular income looks good on paper if you want a bank to lend you money, for example. Maybe less likely to appear on tax authority's radar for undisclosed income if people know you as Joe the IT guy who leaves for work at the same time every morning?
I actually do think keeping the job is a good idea for exposure to different ways of thinking, but perhaps scaling it back a little (part-time?) in order to invest more time into the primary income source.
I have a UK based e-business, I've turned over between £750,000 and now £950,000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~76% net profit margin) Its just me, I'm a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing for zero cost (time not included) but I've always felt I knew I had what it takes to make a small business successful. Its an online service, we have a web site and apps in the app stores. I'd rather not…
How did you find the product? And how long did it take you to generate your first revenue? (From the initial idea to the first user/euros) Basically how do you get started with such a venture as yours?
I worked on building the website (the apps came about a year later using Cordova so I could utilise my HTML/JS skills) in evenings and weekends for about 4 months. Not all of that was development, some of it was speaking with third parties I needed to get the product working.
The first paying customer got a full refund, because, of course, it didnt work properly, but the most valuable lesson I learnt was just to deploy something and fix it ad-hoc, NOT wait for it to be perfect/feature complete.
I had low expectations, and I didn't quit my day job, so it was low pressure "lets see what happens"
Spending time making the website SEO friendly meant I didn't have to spend a penny in advertising for the first year as all of our traffic was organic. It wasn't until the annual revenues were around £400,000 that I started to spend ANY money on advertising.
I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…
> t pricing models? Is Duolingo / Tinder model (1 month / 6 months / 12 months) the best choice for B2C subscriptions without Spotify / Netflix-like licensing costs? is it a mobile app or a desktop or SAAS? just curious.