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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?

#71

Post by simonswords82 »

blparker wrote: post #45
simonswords82 wrote: post #26

TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious attention. I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com . We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month. We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwor…

How do you market StaffSquared? You mentioned SEO and ads; is this your main source of customer acquisition?

We're currently number 1/2 for "HR software" (at least on google.co.uk) and so we get a lot of traffic from that. I'm working on getting us to rank for HR Systems which gets just under half the amount of traffic as HR Software.

We have a limit of £30 per day on PPC. It drives traffic to the site but I'm still getting under the hood of whether it delivers real ROI.

We get a lot of interest in our app from the Chrome web store. I think a lot of people overlook that as a (free!) place to market their software. They have a whole section dedicated to HR software and the majority of the time we're featured at the top. We're going to get listed on the Google enterprise marketplace soon too.,

A bunch of other stuff we do includes:

* Advertising on various HR blogs

* Partner marketing - I could write a whole post on just this topic, it's a big undertaking

* Writing guest posts

* We're trialing influads.com at the moment, which is an ad platform. Again I'm not sure if we're getting value from that just yet...

The one thing we've not done to date is press releases. We've performed exactly zero PR for the app, but that will change once we complete a few super cool features we're working on that I feel will set us apart.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Formatting

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

#72

Post by cjstewart88 »

jamesgagan wrote: post #64
cjstewart88 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much traffic do you receive a day?

About 400 - 500 visitors a day. CPM is ok compared to other sites I've run adsense on. People seem to like the site.

How are you attracting those visits, ads, word of mouth, etc? I run tubalr.com and have considered ads but am worried it will scare off the users I have. My traffic is a little more than what you're running... but its going down day by day.

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

#73

Post by simonswords82 »

jey wrote: post #63
simonswords82 wrote: post #26

TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious attention. I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com . We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month. We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwor…

Apparently "SME" means "Small & Medium Enterprises".

Ah yes, you guys refer to it as SMB I believe?

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

#74

Post by kbelbina »

asciimo wrote: post #12
kbelbina wrote: post #5

I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No-one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a lot of $ in poker: http://hhsmithy.com/

This is fascinating. It took me a while to discover the purpose of subscribing to this data, and I finally found it at https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour "Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast." How do you harvest this data? Do you u…

The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager (http://www.holdemmanager.com/). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

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

#75

Post by n1c »

I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss?

http://dressed.so

I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over.

For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page http://drsd.so/15YxDWv the 'shop this look' links earn me affiliate revenue.

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

#76

Post by peacemaker »

23andwalnut wrote: post #7

I've made about $3k a month in semi-passive income from my codecanyon portfolio in 2013. I call it semi-passive income because I have to spend some time on support each day, but it usually doesn't take more than 30 minutes. EDIT: My portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio

I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the visibility. Do you have any tips you can share?

Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.

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

#78

Post by andyakb »

drpancake wrote: post #70

I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together relatively quickly. My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon. I'm freelancing for ~45 hou…

Please do blog about it. Freelancing while traveling is a concept that a lot of us are really drawn to, but most of the current blogs focus on the travel and only briefly mention the freelancing aspect. Maybe if you focused a bit more on the business side of things you could find a niche within the blogosphere.

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

#79

Post by peacemaker »

clarky07 wrote: post #51

I make between 5-10k a month on my apps and book. (It depends on the season. Summer and Christmas are best.) http://buildanappbusiness.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760

Your book site uses the same theme as an old book of mine no longer selling! Nice landing page though isn't it? :)

Also, my latest book sells nowhere near that amount. How are you marketing if you don't mind me asking?

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

#80

Post by TallboyOne »

trevorcreech wrote: post #38

$2500/mo from AdSense on http://coverphotofinder.com/ Zero-maintenance, which is nice.

You know, what I would love to know is how you attracted the initial audience. This stuff is always so easy to make, but my past attempts never really got enough traffic boost. I'm wondering how you got over the 'plateau' (which in my experience seems to be ~1000 visitors a day.
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