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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?

#431

Post by eggsyntax »

sixdimensional wrote: post #387
emhart wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am like you. Recently, I was given the advice (by someone who the advice was working for well) to hire a business manager. You do what you are good at (producing content, conducting research, giving workshops & lectures) and they manage the business. You need to be able to trust them, but assuming you can find somebody like that and afford to pay them, it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps there should be an app for tha…

Relevant new Wondermark comic: http://wondermark.com/969/

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

#432

Post by justadude »

tokenizer wrote: post #306
JeremyMorgan wrote: post #257

I pull in anywhere from $400-$600 in adsense off my blog, it's not exactly passive because I have to contribute content to it. But I originally only put AS on there to cover hosting costs (and other servers for dev, etc) but now it's starting to get closer to "income". I'm still putting it into things like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, Parallellas etc for stuff to write about on the blog. I use that money to try out other…

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…

Might be this one?

http://www.jeremymorgan.com/

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

#433

Post by jakobe »

zura wrote: post #402
jakobe wrote: post #241

I make around $2000/month from two Mac apps (database tools). Revenue is falling as multiple competitors cloned my profitable app, so I have to do more client work again :(

How the selling compares on Mac App Store vs outside?

It varies month to month, but around 70-80% of my revenue is from MAS. Additionally, selling on MAS is so much easier. I don't really have a good reason why I'm even selling it outside MAS.

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

#434

Post by jakobe »

konradb wrote: post #414
jakobe wrote: post #241

I make around $2000/month from two Mac apps (database tools). Revenue is falling as multiple competitors cloned my profitable app, so I have to do more client work again :(

Is there any way you find to guard against competitors cloning your app? Do you have any recourse?

There's pretty much nothing I can do. One competitor even made an icon almost identical to mine. I contacted Apple, but all they did was forward my complaint to the competitor. The competitor first sent me a threatening email, but then they changed their icon.

I think the best way to guard against competitors is to improve your product. The first one and a half years I was always far ahead of my competition. Since about a year I haven't had time for any significant new features, so my competitors have catched up. Some competing apps now have more features, some are a lot cheaper... Unfortunately the next logical steps for improving my app are so much work that I don't know if they would pay off.

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

#435

Post by britcanpakus »

There are some interesting lessons with my pay-what-you-want approach, although I haven't quite nailed it down.

I run a DC-based service called Linktank [http://dc.linktank.com] that offers limited access to registered users and full access to PWYW subscribers: http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe

After launching my subscription service this past August, I have about a 6% conversion from freemium registrants, although that has been picking up steadily this month and will continue to rise in October.

Users have an option to pay $3, $5, $7, $9. Most users choose $3 but slightly less than that choose $7. On average, I am getting about $5.25 per user.

I'm generating about $1,400 from subscriptions alone but that number is increasing by a hundred or so every week.

I started this service as an email roundup. That list has now grown to about 23K subscribers and I'm now monetizing with subscriptions, advertising, and job postings.

What do you think of my approach? Where am I leaving money on the table? What are some missing opportunities?

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

#436

Post by llogiq »

Whenever I hear an evangelist (and I label everyone dealing in absolutes like 'is X worth it?' without at least asking 'what?' and 'for whom?' evangelist), my gut reaction is to dismiss everything without even reading it.

I work in an unconventional setting, where my code runs for a potetially long time and where failure means trying again. This has led me to use a lot of assert statements, both in a pre-/postcondition/invariant checking and in a more general assumption checking style. I still use unit tests, but only to exercise portions of the code quickly - the tests are often devoid of assertions.

I find that this style gives me the best test coverage + internal code documentation for the time invested.

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

#437

Post by TechpinesMary »

jtreminio wrote: post #248
jdlshore wrote: post #188

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'm a PHP developer that's been looking to become better at JS. Right now I'm at the level where I basically can write some simple JS to do what I want, most of the time, but the code is a mess of spaghetti. I am also a huge testing fanatic, and absolutely love that you're teaching using TDD from the first episode! Consider me signed up and a paying customer!

My answer to the main question here is related to yours, since your a testing fanatic ;)

My company does web dev and consulting, but we struggled with how to manage long-term support. So we developed an automated html5 testing platform and started writing custom UX tests for our clients' applications. This way, if they continue to develop new features or whatever, they have a way of quickly checking for breakages. It works so well that we've now opened it up as a service we offer outside of our development projects.

We get a little bit of cash for writing the tests, and a little bit of cash for hosting/maintenance/updates.

Here's a link: http://html5testing.co/

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

#438

Post by jtreminio »

TechpinesMary wrote: post #437
jtreminio wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a PHP developer that's been looking to become better at JS. Right now I'm at the level where I basically can write some simple JS to do what I want, most of the time, but the code is a mess of spaghetti. I am also a huge testing fanatic, and absolutely love that you're teaching using TDD from the first episode! Consider me signed up and a paying customer!

My answer to the main question here is related to yours, since your a testing fanatic ;) My company does web dev and consulting, but we struggled with how to manage long-term support. So we developed an automated html5 testing platform and started writing custom UX tests for our clients' applications. This way, if they continue to develop new features or whatever, they have a way of quickly checking for breakages. It…

That's pretty cool. Are you looking for developers, or ?

What do you use to drive the tests? I'm most familiar with Behat.

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

#439

Post by jonstjohn »

hanley wrote: post #313
jonstjohn wrote: post #284

About $100/month on http://www.climbingweather.com It was ad-free for years, finally put some ads up last year and now it's covering my expenses. Haven't done much development in a couple years, but working on an updated Android app. A bit skeptical that I'll make much money from it, debating pay-app vs ads vs free-free. Now trying to pick up some real advertisers (currently adsense).

Why would someone use this instead of Weather Underground, Weather.com, WeatherSpark, Forecast.io, etc.? It doesn't seem very specific to climbing and there doesn't seem to be much room for growth since Mountain Project is already the go-to site for route and community information.

I think the main benefit of ClimbingWeather.com is ability to quickly find climbing areas. Looking for the forecast for Indian Creek, Joshua Tree, the Gunks, Cathedral Spires? You don't need to find the nearest town or hope the forecast is right (maybe you'll find it is 10 degrees difference due to elevation). Agreed that the growth potential might be somewhat limited, but there is still a small and solid audience that likes the format.

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

#440

Post by TechpinesMary »

jtreminio wrote: post #438
TechpinesMary wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My answer to the main question here is related to yours, since your a testing fanatic ;) My company does web dev and consulting, but we struggled with how to manage long-term support. So we developed an automated html5 testing platform and started writing custom UX tests for our clients' applications. This way, if they continue to develop new features or whatever, they have a way of quickly checking for breakages. It…

That's pretty cool. Are you looking for developers, or ? What do you use to drive the tests? I'm most familiar with Behat.

We're actively looking for test writers at the moment, but we also throw consideration to every dev resume that comes our way for our consulting projects.

I'm not familiar with Behat. We're using Node.js.

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