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Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

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Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#71

Post by bobbin_cygna »

mootothemax wrote: post #47
davidmat wrote: post #35

Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?

I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it might not be that great in, say, London or New York.

> I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month.

A blog post about it would be nice.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#72

Post by bane »

Thanks for writing this up! We're currently going through a similar experience. The good news is that we went from 1 signup a month to quite a few per day (with a few days at over 100 new signups) -- mostly by following things that we've learned here on HN.

A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do with.

Exciting stuff!

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#73

Post by pstack »

davidw wrote: post #16
mootothemax wrote: post #2

Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's about time I started giving something back. None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;) Please feel free…

Thanks for writing it up. I enjoy reading "success stories for the rest of us" sorts of things by people who aren't already famous, backed by VC's, etc... Rob Walling's book, "Start Small, Stay Small" has some pretty good advice for those of us in that boat: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Yeah, I was confused by his article, because he didn't seem to explain the part where he got $40,000,000,00 in investments and hired a team of fifty and deployed a massive server farm and leased the bottom half of an entire building in downtown SF, before actually launching the product. There must have been a second page that I didn't get the link to. I mean, surely you can't start anything these days without several million dollars and a fleet of expensive highly redundant servers, right?! :P

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#74

Post by pstack »

jamespacileo wrote: post #68

Hey guys, not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin panel... I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)

I see nothing indicating that he needs an Extended license.

He is doing this:

The regular license allows you to use an item within a project of your own or on behalf of a client. For example, you could use an item purchased under a regular license in a >>website>single domain

And not this:

This [extended] license is more expensive than the regular license. An extended license lets you use an item in something that will be sold. For example, you could use an item purchased under an extended license in a DVD release for sale, in a game for sale, in a web template for sale, or on a t-shirt or poster for sale. An extended license is also appropriate for people looking to offer a web template to many users such as on multiple domains, subdomains or sub directories.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#75

Post by icedpulleys »

shazow wrote: post #69

I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident. Some feedback: * [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into. * Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be ve…

> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#76

Post by shazow »

icedpulleys wrote: post #75
shazow wrote: post #69

I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident. Some feedback: * [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into. * Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be ve…

> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them. Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifi…

They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't "organically display" unfollows, you should not as well.

> Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed on Twitter.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#78

Post by loire280 »

dholowiski wrote: post #58
blhack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked at prgmr (I hate that name), and it looks like you can get a really really tiny VPS for $48 for a year . That's silly cheap. I'm teaching a couple of the users on thingist python, and I've been wanting to give them accounts on a box so that they could have a real-world sandbox to play in...$48/yr lets me afford that pretty freaking easily. prgmr sounds freakishly awesome. What was that site the other da…

An Amazon EC2 Micro instance is pretty close to that price, plus you don't have to pay for it while it's not running, and you get to learn AWS too.

Amazon's pricing is complicated for this kind of price comparison - it actually costs ~$150/yr to run a micro instance full-time.

Here's the math: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049196

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#79

Post by pwim »

shazow wrote: post #69

I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident. Some feedback: * [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into. * Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be ve…

[Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)]

I couldn't find the pricing either, so I think it is hiding in plain sight.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

#80

Post by phlux »

Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that should certainly be shared out...

I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly.

Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall:

The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X.

he then turns and build the application to do X himself.

This in and of itself is fine -- but it will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely.

The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit.

I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way this article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind)

This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.

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