Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by scottschulthess » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

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. ;)

Causation vs correlation

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

#152

Post by drpancake » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

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.

Thanks for your encouragement, I put up an email form if you're interested in reading more about this: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com

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

#153

Post by acketon » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances I have in my workflow and tools.

The first ( http://www.mockuprocket.com ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.

I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it.

My wife is a self-published fiction author (http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI & http://www.stephanievoid.com ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something.

She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.

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

#154

Post by emhart » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it.

Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking for money, or even advertising on my content (only about 50% of the videos I put out have ads at all, and many of the most popular do not), but at the same time I'd love to have the time & resources to produce more & better content in the future.

Not looking for advice, as my disposition away from revenue is much stronger than my wish to get money, and I've learned that lesson many times, just adding another voice to the thread.

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

#155

Post by drpancake » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

jaredandrews wrote: post #123

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.

Take a look at my edit above - I'd be happy to share more about this stuff.

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

#156

Post by Altaer » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

cjstewart88 wrote: post #72

jamesgagan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of ads, I decided to try affiliated "buy this song on x site" buttons on my site (www.tunecrawl.com) under each song. It generates so low income, however, that I would have removed it a while ago if users didn't find it useful. Might be worth a try to see if you have the same result. If nothing else, it adds some additional functionality to the site and is easy to set up. I honestly think you could get away with some well placed ads on tubalr, though.

Great redesign, btw!

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

#157

Post by sitkack » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

drpancake wrote: post #136

sitkack wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 require…

Pretty accurate. But you can mitigate this by 1) sticking to the kinds of locations where you know you'll find a decent connection, e.g. Thailand, and 2) pausing when you find a good setup and working for extended periods to make up for poor conditions later on.

Totally agree. The locations that are most conducive to "the flow" also have internet that is worse than non-existent. I have learned to just shut it off completely rather than sink time trying to get blood from the turnip. Local copies of documentation and projects that take little outside research also help.

When going on another extended adventure, we will definitely stay in one well scouted location for awhile (6 weeks to 6 months). Nothing ever gets dialed in if you're moving all the time.

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

#158

Post by jeffwilder » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:51 PM UTC

Every year around Halloween I make $400-600 via adsense with http://trickortreattimes.com/ which lists trick or treat times for cities/towns. It felt like a good service to provide as you really have to hunt for the data. First year I did the aggregating myself, last year I added user submission which made it much more passive.

It's time for me to update it for another year!

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

#159

Post by xpose2000 » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:51 PM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #65

Improvely reached $10,000/mo RR recently, less than a year from launch ( https://www.improvely.com ). I also run W3Counter (freemium) and a couple smaller services and paid plugins for Shopify stores.

Well done... those numbers are impressive to reach. How many other people do you work with or are you solo?

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

#160

Post by Omnipresent » Mon, Sep 23, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

coherentpony wrote: post #85

Run a consulting firm. Make about $250,000 per month.

I'm really interested in this. I work full time right now but am thinking about opening a consulting firm. Could you please share details of how you started and took the first few steps? I don't plan to quit day time work to concentrate fully on consulting work (at least not initially)