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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?

#22

Post by anon_builder »

In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions.

Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.

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

#25

Post by CWIZO »

anon_builder wrote: post #22

In august I made about $122,000 from display ads, mostly Adsense. 5-10% of that is spent on stuff like server space and freelance employees. I can imagine that this will not be taken seriously due to lack of details, but for anyone interested, I'm open to answering non-specific questions. Edit: I see 'from what' is also the question; I have a bunch of entertainment related sites.

I would love to hear some more on this if you don't mind. If you are making that kind of money, then our company is clearly doing something horribly wrong :)

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

#27

Post by codex »

I generate about $1K-$2K a month in passive income. I spend approximately zero hours on maintenance every week, and I bootstrapped it while holding down a full-time job. It took an extra 5-10 hours per week for about a year. Here's what I did:

a) Got a job at a major software company for very high comp. b) Spent an extra 5-10 hours a week working intelligently at my full time job; got promoted. c) Invested the salary, bonus, and stock from my high comp. corporate job in real-estate and tech-heavy index funds, and reap the (literal) dividends passively.

b) is optional; even without the promotion, I would still make enough money to generate almost all of my passive income via investments. Not bad for zero hours per week.

A stable income has allowed me to buy a house at the bottom of the housing market, which will appreciate at about 1% over inflation; my other investments typically do 2-8% over inflation (especially retirement funds, which grow tax-deferred). All in all, at least $1K per month, spiking to much more. At the rate I'm continuing to invest, I'll likely double that monthly return within 18 months.

Sure, this is all pretty volatile, but no more volatile than entrepreneurship, and with much better worse and average case scenarios.

Best of all, these investments will, in the long term, outpace inflation, which is more than can be said for selling software or tech stuff, which tends to depreciate in price over time (after all, the marginal cost of software is zero, which depresses prices due to competitive dynamics).

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

#28

Post by mittermayr »

I created FRUJI.com (Twitter Analytics service) and it keeps generating a minimum of about $50 a day, sometimes (often) more. It's fully self-maintained (unless the server or database crashes), which is just purely amazing. The machines sell, process the orders, upgrade, and provide the customer experience. All I did was programming it. I go for a run, my phone rings a couple of times, I look, PRO account purchased, PRO account purchased, THIS IS F* AWESOME.

I tried creating/selling other things to businesses. This time, it's mostly you and me's, paying it out of their own wallets. Never expected this to work so well.

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

#29

Post by bdunn »

A little over $2700/mo with Planscope (https://planscope.io), my SaaS product that's been out since February. I'm averaging about a 8% growth rate month to month, so very excited about how things are going.

* Bootstrapped

* Raised my consulting rates to free up more time for products (= same amount of consulting income)

* Most new customers come via referrals from existing users and organic traffic (via targeted blog posts)

* Wrote a complementary book targeting people who aren't necessarily looking for PM software (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com), and upselling Planscope through that. Extremely successful so far.

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