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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?

#391

I net roughly $230/month from a rental property I own. I have a realtor I trust manage it for a "first month + 5% of rent" fee. The property is located in a market where rent is much higher than the mortgage (about 150%), so I end up making a profit while building equity into a house at a low interest rate. Not exciting, but it is a viable model and management fees seem very reasonable for the amount of work the real…

Make sure you're accounting for vacant months, and for maintenance.

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

#392

$2000/month from free Android apps. I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times. Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month. However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.

I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you?…

You totally got it man. As tluyben said, there is no support, no follow up work. But I wanted to spend the least amount possible on "making-money" so that I can be fully on my startup for 80h/week.

I've been just by myself for 2 years now and by "hacking" the play store this way, was the only way I could build my startup, so I seed-funded it myself. And all that finally brought it on the trajectory and it just started to work.

I'm not proud of building these apps, but there are 50 clones of these out there. I don't use that money to buy things, I'm going towards for $40k in debt now by taking another loan to invest everything back into my own startup to change the world.

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

#393
post #200

A small single-page info-site I made in a day or two some time ago started picking up traffic and now makes around $500/month from adsense ads. Quite nice for the work put into it, but of course if you take into account all my sites and apps that made nothing it's not much for the total effort. But now that it's getting traffic I have some ideas for building it out into a larger site, but I haven't found the time yet…

What is the site?

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

#394
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. What kind of plugins? Where do you sell them?

I loved your Duet app. I have a question regarding CodeCanyon. The most popular things selling on there seems to be Wordpress plugins and stuff. Do you see a pattern of some kind? I was thinking of making some templates for Android Apps but those don't seem to be popular for some reason.

Thanks! Yes, wordpress definitely sells better than other types of items, especially on Themeforest. This makes sense because Wordpress itself is extremely popular. I'm not sure why other categories like apps don't do well though. Perhaps envato doesn't invest as much in advertising for those categories....

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

#395

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

How do you decide what sort of thing to make in order to sell well in a marketplace like this?

I build things that scratch a personal itch. If there's a product that I need and I can't find a suitable existing product, I build it and sell it, because I assume other people also have that need. That's how Duet was born - I wanted a self hosted project management app that was functional and beautiful. I couldn't find one, so I built it myself...

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

#396
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This site forces you to login via facebook and then sell all your friends by forcing you to allow it to spam to all connections, thus promoting itself. Dirty "viral" tactic.

seems Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. have been using this practice for decades.

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

#398

I gross just under $10K per month from http://www.letscodejavascript.com , a subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I don't plan to hire any employees…

In [3] you wrote that you already had traction from the agile community. Was that just from the book?

I've been involved in the agile community since near the beginning, and I'm fairly well known there. It's partly the book, partly my blog [1], partly speaking at conferences, and partly longevity.

[1] http://www.jamesshore.com

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

#399

I gross just under $10K per month from http://www.letscodejavascript.com , a subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I don't plan to hire any employees…

I really like what you are doing, but after seeing what happened to RailsCasts I am a worried what will happen to this business model once it hits 400+ episodes. Hopefully your "other plans" have this part worked out?

I assume the screencast has a limited shelf life, so yes, my "other plans" are about that. Although at this point, I think the problem is more about organizing the content so it's not overwhelming. I'm not worried about running out of material or burning out, at least not for a while.

What happened to RailsCasts?

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

#400

Last year I made a decent DJ application for Android. I probably invested a few thousand hours into it & the framework I built it on that could compile to Android, Blackberry Playbook, and HP Touchpad. I grossed just under $10k between sales on the three platforms, and advertising on Android. That works out to a few dollars per hour, last year. This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertisin…

When you say a few thousand hours, do you really mean it?

Working 9-5 for a year is only 2000 hours...

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