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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?

#112
post #88
post #86

I have had a few interesting experiments here in the past year. Experiment 0: I bought a hotel affiliate site off of flippa. It did pretty well initially, but I didn't do enough investigation into how the previous owner had been generating traffic. In short, there was a lot of untoward stuff going on. As I was getting all of that straightened out, the site got (deservedly) banned from Google's index for a few key ter…

One note here: Experiment 2 isn't exactly passive income, not until I get a lot more comfortable with the code. That's the goal, though, and I think it's the likely choice for the greatest amount of income (and least amount of work) in the long run.

Are you willing to tell more about Experiment 2? What kind of strategy are you using? What development platform (e.g. what language and libraries and what OS)? What trading platform (e.g. what brokerage / API)? Where did you get your test market data from / how much did you pay? What other strategies did you try first that didn't work? What blogs or sites do you read on the subject? What is your background in? Finance/Econ? Or programming? What other details would you like to offer? Some of us are very interested in this field. :)

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

#113
post #29

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 bl…

This is a great success story. Would you mind sharing what your conversion rate is on the 14-day free trial? Have you experimented with asking for a credit card upfront? Also, was there ever a time you thought about giving up?

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

#114
post #14
post #6

A couple of years ago I started a food blog with my mom (www.theyummylife.com). She does all the writing, and I do programming, design, and monetization. I spent a lot of time setting it up originally, but now it only takes a few hours each week of my time. Right now we're making $5000-6000/month after expenses, and I get 40% of that. My main business (a bootstrapped SaaS startup) generates more than that, but the pr…

The food blog is awesome! http://www.theyummylife.com/Refrigerator_Oatmeal

Awesome! also: w/steel cut oats cook 1 min+chill =>AM bingo

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

#115

I have a free website/webapp in the education space that does about $90k/m right now (2012-2013 school year) while school is in session, and grows about 2.5x each year. Revenue is 100% Adsense. I'm happy to answer any questions that don't give away what the site actually is.

I'll be entering in the "worksheets" space, both free ones made by us and worksheets generators. I have a kind of a niche in a non-English website and I think it's a nice move.

Do you happen to work on anything related to that? Thanks!

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

#116
post #17

I make between $200 - $400 per month off my HTTP testing tool: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ Not very impressive (who knew selling a niche tool in an environment where $5 is considered "expensive" wasn't the road to instant riches?), but it has been fun to make and it is always cool to hear about how useful the tool has been to fellow developers.

Don't sell it to developers. Sell it to their bosses.

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

#117
Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

Sales are up by about 40% year-to-date over last year, owing to a combination of increased AdWords spend, organic growth in the business, and a successful redesign (and related conversion optimization) right before summer.

Appointment Reminder is doing fairly decently -- monthly recurring revenues (on the publicly available plans) are up about 4x versus the last thread. I've recently gotten some time to actually work on it (my wedding kept me busy for much of the earlier part of this year). My run rate is currently up about 50% since, oh, two months ago? (Why? Interesting question -- re-did pricing, tweaked my marketing knob to "slightly more than zero work", and started getting a wee bit serious about e.g. my use of email to people in their trial period.)

The enterprise pipeline, which is not tracked in those figures, is... well, like all enterprise sales operations ever, I cry a lot and dry my tears on stacks of money. Not terribly relevant to folks who like recurring revenue because it feels like avoiding work, since Enterprise Sales is pretty much exactly what work always felt like, but it is work you get to bank in the past and then get a fairly motivational check from monthly for the present and extending into the future.

I guess consulting doesn't count as recurring revenue, at least not on my model, so I'll skip it. I'm productizing one of my consulting offerings and should be releasing it later this month -- we'll see if that works out.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had $200 of adsense free credit. Ended up getting users (like 100). Then I had $50 of Facebook credit and that turned into like 20-30 users. Just don't know what to do at this point. Don't want to spend more time adding features if it is not going to lead to anything. Was thinking of making it like $10 a year or something and trying to get paid users instead of ad users. Just not sure if anyone would even pay $10.

The beauty of golf is people spend a lot of money on it. I'd charge people a premium to use it. Couple recommendations: Lose the pop-up for Facebook sign-in. Optimize it for mobile (you're probably going to use this while you're in the cart). For marketing, try going directly to some clubs and getting in front of some of their members. Some exclusive clubs probably won't let you, but start small. Can't hurt.

Thanks... I introduced the popup for facebook sign-in and it didn't change my conversion for new (adwords) visitors but like 10% more signed up with facebook so I kept it.

My site posts a timeline post when a user creates a new round (unless you have turned that off). So it is kind of a free impression so I prefer facebook sign-ups. Maybe that is a project for the winter make it mobile (jquery mobile?) and implement some sort of payment system. $10/year seems fair to me. Just have to figure out an amount that will cover my hosting + adwords spend on a typical month.

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

#120
post #17

I make between $200 - $400 per month off my HTTP testing tool: http://www.uresk.net/httpclient/ Not very impressive (who knew selling a niche tool in an environment where $5 is considered "expensive" wasn't the road to instant riches?), but it has been fun to make and it is always cool to hear about how useful the tool has been to fellow developers.

Don't sell it to developers. Sell it to their bosses.

Generally speaking, I agree with you. In this case, however, this was just a weekend project and easy distribution was a goal of mine - hence the app store.

If I were trying to make a full-time living off something like this, then there are a bunch of things I'd do differently - such as what you suggest.

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