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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?

#191

Post by patio11 »

suprasanna wrote: post #110
patio11 wrote: post #20

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work. I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't…

With such a vast shift away from desktop downloadable applications, I'm curious to see what you've done from a marketing standpoint to get those numbers. How did you promote your application and drive sales?

The overwhelming majority of my customers are on the online version now, since I've exiled the downloadable version to electronic Siberia. If no customer ever found it again I would be happy.

With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.

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

#192

Post by JonLim »

callmeed wrote: post #158
JonLim wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this your site? http://2tablespoons.com/ If so, Cilantro sounds interesting. One of the things I keep reading is that the restaurant industry is super resistant to change and adopting new technology. Or it seems that way. How are you going about circumventing that issue? Or minimizing it, at least?

Yes, it is. Cilantro was originally going to be a "DIY Groupon" that you can embed into your own site and Facebook page and take payment via PayPal. But, after doing some research, I've come to the conclusion that white-label daily deal stuff is the wrong way to go. So, I've decided to go after the website market and solve the Flash/PDF menu/no mobile/crappy website problem. Plus, I've succeeded in the niche website…

Very cool, thanks for the update.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that restaurant owners think that the website should not have flash/pdf menus/no mobile etc, why? Well, look at all the crappy websites that exist out there, right?

However, I completely support your endeavour because I hate all those restaurants.

Could I get your email? I'd love to discuss this further and see if my product can help out.

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

#193

Post by mleonhard »

dpcan wrote: post #99
Periodic wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on the "hosting websites" bit? What scale and size of sites are you talking about and what sorts of clients are you hosting? Are they all just your consulting clients? I work with another developer to do web development projects, and I always felt like hosting would be an easy way to get some additional income from our clients. He maintains that it's just too much of a systems administration heada…

I host a couple hundred sites on dedicated servers. Mostly local business sites. Hosting was hands down the dumbest move I ever made. I pay tons for servers, I'm fielding "I get too much spam" support requests several times weekly. Managing backups is a nightmare, then there's the endless responsibility of keeping the sites up and running. It's like jail I pay to live in. That being said, I'm SLOWLY moving everyone t…

What are your problems with backups? Does Rackspace Sites solve them?

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

#194

Post by acangiano »

Two9A wrote: post #109
acangiano wrote: post #89

About $2K-$6K a month from my blogs. (Plug: I'm writing a book that will help people do the same: http://technicalblogging.com )

A question for you. I have a technical articles site, but I write something fresh around once a month, and my articles are massively long; would you recommend breaking them up and releasing parts more often?

Generally speaking, it's entirely possible to be successful with longer, more infrequent posting, however increasing the number of posts gives you more chances to get noticed (as well as more opportunities to promote your content). Do keep in mind though that while post frequency and length are important factors, consistency and having a solid strategy that justifies your schedule matters even more.

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

#195

Post by ujeezy »

flyosity wrote: post #39

I generate about $1000/mo from an iPad app I wrote (that I haven't updated in a long, long time) and then between $5-10k from iPhone user interface design/development tutorials that I sell.

Dude, I learned so much from this one blog post of yours: http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-...

I will definitely be grabbing some of those tutorials this Summer :)

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

#197

Post by dpcan »

mleonhard wrote: post #193
dpcan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I host a couple hundred sites on dedicated servers. Mostly local business sites. Hosting was hands down the dumbest move I ever made. I pay tons for servers, I'm fielding "I get too much spam" support requests several times weekly. Managing backups is a nightmare, then there's the endless responsibility of keeping the sites up and running. It's like jail I pay to live in. That being said, I'm SLOWLY moving everyone t…

What are your problems with backups? Does Rackspace Sites solve them?

For 1 - it's expensive how I have it setup. I have dedicated servers and am running full-server backups nightly with 5-day archives. It takes more dedicated machines to do this. I need to find another solution.

With Rackspace Cloud Sites, they say they backup regularly for me, yes. They recommend MySQL backups on our own etc, but it's got me covered for the catastrophic situations I believe.

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

#198

Post by sixtofour »

cheez wrote: post #48
frommers wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat, it's a comfortable way of life but I always struggle with how to bring it to the next level.

Make a product.

This seems like one of the best "right answers" to the "doesn't scale" problem. You can sell a product over and over. If it's critical to someone's business or well being (according to some definition of well being) then you can sell it OVER and over.

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

#199

Post by dpcan »

detst wrote: post #136
dpcan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I host a couple hundred sites on dedicated servers. Mostly local business sites. Hosting was hands down the dumbest move I ever made. I pay tons for servers, I'm fielding "I get too much spam" support requests several times weekly. Managing backups is a nightmare, then there's the endless responsibility of keeping the sites up and running. It's like jail I pay to live in. That being said, I'm SLOWLY moving everyone t…

So your issue is mostly with email-related support issues? I'm working on something and considering if hosting will be a bigger headache than it's worth and if I can get away without offering it. I'm thinking I can't and that it won't be bad anyway. I expect to keep things limited in scope so don't anticipate the issues you're having but I'm concerned that I might be overly optimistic.

Yes. I would say email is the #1 headache by far. Going with Rackspace Cloud and their email solution is helping A LOT. I'm moving my biggest accounts over, and they seem much happier, and I get virtually no support requests from them anymore regarding email. Amazing relief.

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

#200

Post by jpk »

cheez wrote: post #154
doyoulikeworms wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you need?

Just do something.

This thread may sound silly, but there's some truth here. Time you spend waiting for the idea is time you waste actually implementing an idea. PMF doesn't happen in your head, it happens when interacting with the market. Get something together, pitch it, refine it, repeat. You'll get there.
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