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

Which conversion step do you think it would be easiest to improve upon? I'm curious, because increasing the rate of free trial signups by 30%, from 2% to 2.6% (which seems like a modest increase), would result in the same number of subscribers as if you were to manage to increase trail-to-paid conversions by the same 30%, from 70% to 91% (which seems like a much more difficult feat).

Anyway, I'm sure you know the various scenarios, so my question is: how do you determine where to focus (or how to distribute) your efforts? Of course, the free trial signup rate becomes a limiting factor as your trail-to-paid rate approaches 1, but at this point, where do you see the best opportunity for improvement?

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/), conceived as a 4-Hour Workweek–style product business, makes low five figures per month, requiring just about the proverbial four hours of work per week (mostly minor book updates and customer service emails). New editions are a lot of work (e.g., ~2 months full-time to redo the screencasts), but the new sales cycle typically yields a mid-five-figure income spike the month of the launch.

I'm currently working on a project designed to help make Rails Tutorial–type stories more common among hackers. Stay tuned...

That sounds really cool you should provide me (us) link.

For niche blogs that do well like yours;

What year did you start? How was growth? Posting frequency?

Thanks for any insights. I'm really curious because I'm slowly starting to realize I can maybe earn some beer money by being an active part of the community for a hobby of mine. Your case is a perfect example, as you do adsense, have a similar niche (newish tech) and seem like you started our of fun/love of your hobby. Cheers

So, for anyone following this saga...

In researching this issue, I found recommendations that 2.5mbps is probably the most you should plan for in North America. I'm not sure how accurate or current that recommendation is, but since I was seeing problems at 2.8mbps, it seems reasonable. (It also might explain why I have such a large proportion of international subscribers.) That said, I'd really love to get my bitrate below 2.0mbps, because that's what my actual videos come in at.

I went into my video export settings and fiddled (and fiddled, and fiddled) and ended up finding a compromise that gave me 1.94mbps at the cost of slightly-visible artifacting during transitions. [1] Bingo! Uploaded, deployed, done.

Well, not entirely done. I'm still using my old settings for most videos, because it doesn't have any visible compression artifacts at all, at least not until you get out the magnifying glass. (I can get away with such high quality because, although my screencasts have more transitions and motion than average, they're still mostly unchanging text.) But I don't want to run into this problem again. It's embarrassing. And I like killing problems dead. DEAD!

So I modified my deploy script to run `ffprobe` and pull out the bitrate for each new video. If it exceeds 1750kbps, I get a warning. And if it exceeds 2000kbps, the script fails. [2] That'll do it.

Of course, the real root cause here is that I don't have visibility into client-side performance issues. Eventually, I'd like to modify the client-side code to report back playback experience. That would have detected this problem much sooner, and it will protect me against CDN/network issues as well, which are particularly hard for me to get visibility into.

Thanks again to tankbot and alecthomas for helping me find this problem.

[1] The settings I ended up with, in case you're curious:

Video encoding: H.264; 24 frames per second; 2250kbps max bit rate; "High" quality; Single-pass

Audio encoding: AAC; 44.1KHz audio (mono); "Normal" quality; 64kbps audio bit rate

[2] These thresholds are pretty conservative, and I'll increase them if necessary. I like starting with low thresholds because it gives me more visibility into what's going on, at the cost of requiring me to be a bit more hands-on until I get things dialed in.

Thanks! There's an account page now. It still has room to improve—I handle most things manually—but as pg says, do things that don't scale. :-)