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How much money are you earning from your software products?

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Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death" I've always liked that term (which I presume you used ironically). It's the most pessimistic way one could possibly describe the state of "If I don't ever touch anything from here on out, I'm still pretty much set for life." I assume it was a Venture Capitalist who coined it, since VCs don't like profitable companies that get slightly more profitable month after month. People , however…

The first time I heard it was Gail Goodman's eponymous talk at BoS 2012. It refers to the unlikelihood that you'll have a hockey stick revenue curve. Most SaaS businesses add recurring revenue fairly slowly and steadily, over time, and take a long while until they get to the "totally milk it!" part of the model.

Indeed, but to a one man shop, being stuck in the flat part of the curve at, say, $2k/month in profit and growing by $100/month/month is a completely different thing to a 10 man shop at the same place.

One venture is about to fold. The other can safely quit its day job and start entrepreneuring full time without having to worry about starving in the immediate future.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#162
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The product looks pretty good imo. You should start charging soon. Btw, which one of DigitalOcean's cloud servers are you using? Did you find it reliable for a startup? Also, do you mind telling how many users you have?

Thanks! The current server setup is: 2x2GB servers (web+workers), 2x1GB servers (DB & replicated backup), 2x512MB servers (one HAProxy loadbalancer, one running redis & memcached). All running a fairly recent version of Ubuntu, based in the Netherlands datacentre. I could run it on fewer servers but I like to separate out the roles so a failure in one place doesn't take everything down. For the first month reliabilit…

Thanks for the detailed answer. ;) That's a good number of users. You shouldn't have any trouble at all getting your first paying customers. All the best. :)

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#163
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I basically started it to get away from Hostgator which along with other providers started to oversell anything under the sun and presented gradually degraded speed and quality of service. So I got dedicated server to myself and fully configured it for hosting needs including automated iptables-based firewall protection and malware protection. Then i sent emails to my past web. dev clients out of which a few signed u…

Did you build your own control panel or are you using something like Cpanel?

I had WHM which comes with an ability to fully manage (create/edit/suspend/delete) CPanels for clients.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#164
post #151

have a few side projects. here's a fun one: http://ShouldIDrinkThisFuckingBeer.com it is making absolutely zero money (yet), but the engagement on the site is INSANE. also, the site itself, and the people who come to it (and email/tweet/blog/instagram/vine/smoke signals/carrier pigeon/etc about it) are passionate and willing to support craft beer. besides the benefit of interacting with super cool, kick-ass people wh…

So, after it got mad about me putting in Bud Light or whatever, it suggested "HOFBRAUHAUS BERCHTESGADEN JUBILÄUMSBIER", which I then copied and pasted back into it. Instead of telling me to fuck off, it just blue screened and hung there forever. If you replace the fancy "Ä" in there with an "A", then it will not get stuck but still tell you to to fuck off.

thanks for the heads up, thought i pushed that fix! will update it shortly.

you have broken the system and you should be rewarded for such a thing… go drink a good craft beer and celebrate!

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It told me to go fuck myself when I entered Sixpoint Crisp, what's wrong with Sixpoint?

abso-fucking-lutely nothing! got nothin but love for brooklyn beers, i am a huge fan of six point and brooklyn brews. the real question is: why don't you know the beer's actual fucking name?! THE Crisp (by Sixpoint) http://sixpoint.com/beers/core/thecrisp it's even IN the url slug! ;)

But dude your app still swears at me when I tell it I drink Sixpoint beers, Sweet Action too.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#167

About $15 a month from a military reading list site ( http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com ). That's $14 affiliate, $1 from ads. It's on a $40/month Rackspace VPS, so it's halfway to covering its costs.

Fascinating site! I'll have a good look through the book lists :-)

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#168

Sorry about the throwaway account. Would rather not link the numbers to the site at this point. Revenue about $60k/month; fairly even mix of affiliate programs (mostly a couple big ones) and advertising (mostly adsense/ad exchange). Earnings before taxes and my draw ~ $500k/year. Have tried out many alternate ad networks and exchanges, and the only other one I've found worth taking space from google so far is AOL's n…

Very inspirational! I have got few questions (1) From your own experience what marketing strategy would you recommend that has worked for your software products? (2) How did you come up with the idea? (3) Are you working alone?

Thanks.

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