I feel a little bit ashamed to post this but whatever. I used to write bots for a popular online game that would harvest materials and sell stuff in the games auction house. At first I only wanted to automate some tedious, boring tasks in the game, but over time I got really good at it to the point where I wouldnt have to touch my guy for days. Anyway, there where lots of bots on my servers and we would all undercut each other to a point where our materials where worth almost nothing. Around this time the company released an API where you could pull auction house data for your server. I wrote some scripts that would pull the data, store them in redis and crunch some numbers that I would later feed to my bots, to gain some advantage. Basically, I was able to withhold my stock when the price reached a certain threshold and buyout all of my competitions stock at super low prices. By that time I had already "scaled up" and ran several instances on various servers, all full automated by some python scripts. I wrote a web socket based web interface that allowed me to see my bots log messages in real time from work. I set up alerts when game masters messaged so I was able to answer them to prove that I was not a bot, all remotely. It was so much fun. At the end of each month I would sell the in-game currency to some chinese companies, the last few months I made between 300-500 € / month, double that amount around christmas. One day, the bann hammer (rightfully so!) hit me hard and I lost all my accounts. It still was a fun experience that introduced me to several new technologies.
Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
371–380 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#372Nothing, 0 ;( But after seeing so many success stories here, I hope one day to overcome that internal brake inside me that prevents from trying.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a lot like you temperamentally and currently homeless, though the two things are not really directly related. I have thought a lot about it over the years. For me, part of it is that I was one of the smart kids in high school and got a lot of not subtle messages about how I owed the world benefit for my gifts and would be evil incarnate to try to, gasp, get rewarded for them. For me, I think gender also plays a…
I would recommend not being so open and candid, emotionally and concerning life events, on the internet. This is doubly true when your handle is linked to your photo, location, and real name. I wouldn't hire you for freelance work due to your seemingly incredibly unstable situation.
Thank you for your concern. As is typical, off the cuff advice about something you know almost nothing about isn't going to be useful to me. Your remarks smack of jumping to conclusions, probably very erroneous conclusions. Arguing about the particulars is not likely to do either of us any good but I am also not comfortable letting your characterization of me stand. Suffice it to say, your opinion has been noted and I plan to continue to be emotionally open as well as open about my life. My financial mess is getting cleaned up. I am clear I am on the right track.
I hope you have a great day. The world would be a better place if more communication came from a place of concern for another person's welfare. I hope you do not stop caring about other people. Although the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, I believe it is usually due to good intentions combined with poor execution. I think execution is easier to fix than a cold heart.
Take care.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that's interesting. Please do share more about your disposition away from revenue. What does that mean to you?
I'm trying to think how to explain it without using anecdotes, as I want to understand it myself without punting to simile. I know that I undervalue the importance of money in my own life (I have been poor to the point of homelessness once, poor the point of selling possessions to get rent/food money a few times). I also undervalue my worth, almost never charging an appropriate amount for my time. I've cultivated a n…
The person asking you politely for free work is probably someone good at sales and manipulating people. In other words, you aren't doing them a favor. They see you as a sucker. You sound like a nice guy, and everyone assumes most people are like themselves. But in business there are tons of wolves in sheeps clothing. The line of people who will take advantage of you will last longer than your life on earth. So you have to learn communication, and learn that you bring value and they should pay what they agreed to pay. Invoice them for the full amount, and don't give them any freebies unless either they complain (even then they need a good reason), or at the very least they have to know that you are trying to do them a favor. If you do free work and they don't even know about it, you have just shot yourself in both feet. You remind me of me. I speak from experience. It's not easy, but it is worth it.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that's interesting. Please do share more about your disposition away from revenue. What does that mean to you?
I'm trying to think how to explain it without using anecdotes, as I want to understand it myself without punting to simile. I know that I undervalue the importance of money in my own life (I have been poor to the point of homelessness once, poor the point of selling possessions to get rent/food money a few times). I also undervalue my worth, almost never charging an appropriate amount for my time. I've cultivated a n…
Also maybe read some of Ramit Sethi's stuff. He has a book and tons of stuff on his website and YouTube.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#376I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on http://pizzacodes.com . About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.
How do you make money? Some sort of affiliate deal?
Mostly AdSense. I get a small amount of money from affiliate links to Groupon also.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
These ideas were not original to start with; 4 pics 1 word (which is, imho, incredibly boring) somehow got a lot of attention, downloads and money but was never original. Then 100s of devs copied it in some way or another. All these 'games' look / work the same. I made one for a client and the 24 hours sounds plausible including artwork but excluding the actual levels. That would take around another day. Making a few…
Seems to me someone with this much skill/ability could easily make $100k/year ($100 x 1000 successful app months) plus pension/benefits just working for the government. 10x easier work with 10x the pay and more stability. And "mobile apps" is supposedly the promising, high-tech growth segment of the economy everyone is harping on. What's wrong with this picture?
Well it depends on what apps; these are not brilliant examples of app and app economy. There are people making that kind of money you are talking about with games like this (4 pics 1 song is top free in the Appstore for instance at the moment and that is known to make quite a bit of cash), but the things you don't see 'in the Appstore' are apps which save companies money, for instance, by optimizing their internal HR or support workflow. Or for instance an app helping chronically ill elderly managing their meds so the on call nurses and doctors have a significant % less workload thus saving money and lives.
These apps will not be in the store, but they are making or saving companies millions. These kind of apps are already critical to a lot of enterprises and are a real opportunity for developers to make your $100k/year and much more.
The promising factor can be in games, but then rather games people stay engaged with (Minecraft, Plague, Plants vs Zombies; not saying if they are good or bad; saying they are liked for years in a row because they are better gameplay and polish wise). Next to that the aforementioned apps either to save or make money; mobile, unlike laptops/desktops, brings apps to everyone, all the time and there is a lot of money to be made in all market segments because of that difference. Both for devs as well as companies hiring these devs.
Oh and, this is definitely a matter of taste, but I rather make $2k/month from home than $10k/month in some gov job in an office. Where I live, you are allowed to work from home in some of those jobs, but they do expect you to be in the office at least 2 days/week and that is definitely something I wouldn't do very unless there is really no other way out.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#378$1k-$3k/m (depending on season) mostly passive income from my design online niche sign related websites. I've done a lot in design online software so I made my own and farm out the production side. I've automated most of it and it provides a nice steady income when I'm between clients. I also license the same platform to clients when it fits their needs.
I'm curious what exactly you mean by "design online"? I wonder if it's similar to what I do. Shoot me an email; I'd love to chat.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#379About 400EUR monthly from running game servers on open-source game.
How do game servers make money? Advertisements in the game?
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#380TL;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…
Simon, Thanks for the great insight!
We are also targeting SMB sith a SaaS in a different area (sales): http://www.quotty.com.
We haven't still defined a strategy, but your comment caught my attention because we are facing the same issue. Your application is innovative, how do you announce it? I figure that hardly somebody will search for an application like yours that nobody figures exist?
In summary where you get most leads: keyword search, organic search, partnership, ads placed in industry blog? Did partnership generate results? With other software? With distributors?
Another issue we found is that many users are too lazy ans inexperienced for the trial disert. I am conducting the following experiment: instead of immediately sending a free subscription-trial password, we ask for a phone number that we will call to make an interactive (remote) demo of the product using real client data, This has improved results, but elevated cost.
Don't you have the same training problem with new users?