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Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

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Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#3

Our latest side project was specifically built to have as little operating costs as possible (while still delivering a kick-ass service). We were lucky enough to break even about 14 days after launch.

Nice. Would you mind sharing a link of your project?

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#4
I've had a start up for about 1.5 years now and we are covering our bills plus salary for a contractor. We are still growing and since this is bootstrapped, it will be a long road. But we just released a hacker news equivalent to our niche market just yesterday and are already receiving rave reviews. So we are doing great things for our market, so hopefully things will keep looking up.

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#6
My personal side project, a MUD client for iPhone and iPad, is not even remotely profitable. That's right: online multiplayer text-based games. There are still thousands of them online today, set in fantasy, sci-fi, absurdist, and many other worlds!

I knew before I started that it wouldn't make much money. That's not why I wrote it; I wrote it because I wanted this app for myself.

It expands to fill much of my free time, driving my ROI even further negative, but I sure do enjoy it. :)

By Great Odin's Beard, a free copy! http://tokn.co/msvuyzp8

I have also open-sourced many of its iOS bits: https://github.com/splinesoft

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#7
I created my first Ruby on Rails SAAS few years ago. My goal was to earn $5 and call it done. But within 2 hours I made $12 and I was ecstatic. That year I made $2000 from the site. My overall expense was just hosting on Linode and time I took to learn Rails and develop it. I no longer run the business actively as it was very hard to reach the ideal market.

its still there! http://www.residencymail.com

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#8
I'm a solo founder on www.rocketlease.com, which gives landlords an online rental application for screening prospective tenants.

It's profitable but my total investment still probably hasn't been recovered. I'm probably just over ramen profitable at this point.

It's been about 2 years since I started focusing seriously on it around jan 2012), it got to around cash flow breakeven in q3 2013. I haven't received any outside investment.

I write quite publicly about it and am happy to answer questions for anyone curious.

http://blog.ezliu.com/rocket-lease-update-sep-2013/

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#9
It's too early to tell for me. My mvp proof-of-concept was front page on HN and has had a ton of signups, but the manual payment process I'm using really sucks and no one has actually paid yet.

I'm currently writing the automated backend to enforce payment (along with some improvements), and then we'll see how much revenue it brings in.

http://www.manualviableproduct.com

Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

#10
I'm building http://test.gmbl.io as a side project - it'll be a nice stats site, I mainly built it for my own use and then decided to make it accessible on the web, rather than just replacing my spreadsheets. Might monetise it eventually, but I just want to finish it off in the end. (Excuse the designed-with-a-potato look, the prototype designs are at http://test.gmbl.io/static/prototype/1/index.html though!)

Edit: worth pointing out, I learned to code building this the last 4/5 months in my spare time.

Double edit: Eh, it's pretty clearly Definitely Not Finished. Lots of placeholder text and stuff, but yeah.

http://test.gmbl.io/matches/Arsenal/Newcastle/

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