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Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

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Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#182
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any generic advice on selling ebooks? I'm preparing one and it will be the main offering of the site besides an established forum.

I do most of my volume through e-book reader sales like kindle. A lot of people do this whole "launch formula" thing with e-books, but I've never tried that, I just pick topics that gets decent google juice and let organic search bring in people to the sales site. I also pick topics that aren't covered, or at least not well cover, on amazon and the like.

I looked you up on the Kindle and didn't find anything. I'm guessing you use pseudonyms? Any reason why?

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#184
post #95

Until about 2 weeks ago I was the largest creator of stores on CafePress. I was earning decent residual income on existing stores that I had put up, but due to some external forces (some in my control, some out of it) I got my accounts shut down by CafePress. I still expect to earn some residual income for the next couple months on things I had already sold. I had just started to seriously follow this path but I was…

Your software sounds clever. Are you confident CafePress will let you use it? How automated is the process? You're planning to use it yourself, correct, not sell the software? A blog post on your lessons learned sounds interesting, definitely.

I have been using it myself. I'm also looking into using it for other people as a service. I'm not sure how clever the software itself is but increasing the throughput was fun across as many as 8 slicehost slices. I did discover all of the pitfalls of this type of approach, which I'll cover in my series of blog posts.

My internal process is extremely automated, as in I wasn't involved directly unless something broke.

There is some politics involved also, including Osama Bin Laden stealing my retirement.

I'm working on a new site to sell my designs directly and these blog posts will mysteriously coincide with the launch of that site.

As to CafePress reinstating me: They were letting me use it at lower upload levels and when I got things really going I was a big piece of their API traffic (like half). I'm confident that they will see the value proposition to them, particularly after the projected numbers I worked out yesterday (which I will share in the posts).

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#185
I make close to $1k/month on a few iOS apps and games, as well as an OS X app that I released a few months ago. One is a meditation timer, and the game is an elf bowling clone.

We're working to improve both products and fix bugs. It's not easy to stay on top of it as an indie shop, especially in between consulting gigs and new product development.

I also make another 300-500/month from ebooks and other digital products. Working on some software that I hope will make this number triple.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#186
Around $1000 a month from Android app sales: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.dozingcatsoftware..... (After Google's cut, before taxes). A few weeks ago I applied the common HN advice and raised the price from $0.99 to $1.99, which so far has increased revenue by about 50%.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#187
About $300/month from a GPL script. A PHP class, quite popular, about 7 years old and still going strong. I am surprised nobody in this thread gets recurring income for sharing open source code. I mostly receive donations. I also sell licenses, from a few dollars to hundreds. I publish about three releases a year, and don't spend that much time working on it or supporting it. I shall not forget to mention that publishing this code got me a lot of freelance gigs. Bonus fact: it is rather enjoyable to go to a contract interview where the interviewer has actually used my code.

Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

#190

I make ~$2,000 a month with an iPad game for cats. My co-founder and I were working on a "more serious" game and it was taking a long time. We needed a quick win, so I agreed to do it if we spent less than 4 weeks on it. We completed the game from idea to app store in 3.5 weeks and it is now, by far, our most popular game. * face palm * EDIT: We split the revenue 50/50, so the revenue (after apple's cut) on this game…

FYI my dog likes to play this game too.
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