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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?

#121

Post by withoutfriction »

It's good to be back!

I guess it was around 864 days ago that I posted the original one of these threads!

My current stats:

$~500/mo from a few supplement related websites, and some fitness stuff. Last worked on these back in April. Total work/month is roughly 30 minutes.

My current project:

Doing the research so that I can boost this to around $5000/mo :)

I figure this is as good a time as any to announce that I'm actually putting together a little recurring project of my own - and it's pretty meta.

It's pure stats and useful information on who generates recurring income, how much work they had to do to get there, what they learned/should've done/shouldn't have done. I'm researching this purely for myself, because I want to get to more recurring income faster (because recurring income is so, so, so freeing) - but a few friends asked me to package it up so I'm doing so!

Check it out [1]. Also I figure I should post it to HN, so I'll update this comment when I do so :)

Thanks guys - and really glad to see this thread live on longer than when I first posted it almost three years ago!

[1]: http://recurringincome.meteor.com/

Edit 1:

On HN. [2]

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851

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

#122

Post by newppc »

I make about $30 a month running a small coupon code website focused on cell phones. Again it's almost nothing but the upshot is if the site takes off in any way, it can bring in some ok money on the site. A lot of it can be outsourced once you get the system down, but there is a good amount of manual labor. Site: http://www.newphonepromocodes.com

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

#123

Post by jaredandrews »

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…

It sounds like you are living my dream. Care to share any details about how you got into that? I work (and enjoy working) at a big company right now but I feel like down the road I will want to do something like this.

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

#124

Post by santa_boy »

nihaar wrote: post #60

I make about $300/mo with https://broker.mapthatpad.com . Not even close to what I originally was intending (and the amount of time I've spent building it) but to be honest, I have not been doing a whole lot in terms of marketing and selling it at the moment. I hope to do more selling/marketing in the future and get this monthly number higher.

What is your revenue model? How are you able to reach out to users and make them pay for it? What are the marketing tactics you have in mind?

That is decent revenue btw! Good luck!

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

#125

Post by kbelbina »

chisness wrote: post #92
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/

what are some of your main competitors? i know tableratings was big in the past but then got blocked out by pokerstars (and apparently now ftp as well).

hhdealer.com, hhmailer.com, handhq.com are the major competitors. After Black Friday there are lots of small localized (especially Eastern Europe) competitors. Poker Table Ratings also provide search, and we built something to do that too (PokerCloud) but ended up selling the tech and domain.

Its an interesting world though where only us, table ratings, and mailer actually do mining (as far as I know) and we sell at wholesale prices to some of the other resellers. And then of course there are lots of people who buy hands and without our consent resell them through forums, web sites etc and that is an ongoing battle. We all have interesting ways of marking our hands so we can track them back to users and ban them.

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

#126

Post by newppc »

tachibana wrote: post #57

I am a data point for the worst-case example. I don't have a hot application or a popular website, and most of my money is earned the old-fashioned way. My passive income from my investments in government bonds is enough to cover mortgage, basic living expenses for my family, and two family trips a year. Source of money for investments: - savings from many years of working and diligently saving - some real estate inv…

To be honest though, since we're all inundated with startup and marketing information all the time, it's refreshing to know the old fashioned investing still works :)

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

#127

Post by drpancake »

scrrr wrote: post #83
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…

Telling people that you should blog makes it actually less likely that you will actually do it. Read that on some psychology website once. ;)

In this case I have to disagree, as these positive replies are removing any concerns I had about nobody reading this hypothetical blog :)

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

#128

Post by sitkack »

andyakb wrote: post #78
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.

Having just traveled around the world over 7 months but NOT freelancing, I would have to say that:

  * net connections are very very spotty,
    prepare to work offline

  * supplies are rare (usb devices, upgrades, etc), 
    expect to pay more for less

  * desk conditions are poor, rarely did we 
    find a place where I could get into the flow. 
    Checking email and noodling on the net was 
    fine, but getting real quality work done 
    requires spending time to find the right location.
I think it could be possible, I have written some of the best code of my life in a corporate budget hotel holed up for a week with only a 1Mbps internet connection.

You can simulate work/travel by playing with IPFW settings on your mac and only working out of a macdonalds.

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

#129

Post by sleepyhead »

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…

Thanks for the info! Just a heads up: seems like your Twitter account is suspended.

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

#130

Post by peacemaker »

23andwalnut wrote: post #116
peacemaker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience quality sells. Quality code. Quality feature set. And most importantly, quality design. I think a lot of items on codecanyon neglect the design aspect and therefore don't sell as much as they could. Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is des…

You're probably right about the design side of things, mine is definitely lacking I just have zero ability in that area.

I've send you an emails, thanks!

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