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Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

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Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#21

Post by matt1 »

I'm currently working on two web apps:

Preceden [1], a tool for making timelines, was profitable almost immediately. Heroku costs about $50/month and a premium account costs folks $29, so with 2+ upgrades/month it is profitable. Currently making ~$700/mo.

jMockups [2], an HTML5-based web-design tool, was publicly launched about 4 months ago and is still not profitable. Costs total $200/month and with one paying customer, I've got a ways to go before profitability (but it's progressing very well).

Recent blog post has more details:

http://www.mattmazur.com/2011/03/february-in-review-life-tra...

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

[2] http://www.jmockups.com

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#22

Post by ian_h »

4 years in as a bootstrapped one-person product before sufficient profitability to reinvest and take a salary/dividend (my definition of profitability).

Bootstrapping and being just one person made it feel so much longer than I had hoped when starting out.

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#23

Post by eekfuh »

bane wrote: post #20
jonknee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May want to add a DNS record so it works without the www: http://kymalabs.com/

Thanks, we're on GAE, and they claim they'll only route to subdomains. Any ideas?

been using this for one of the sites i run on aws.

http://www.wwwizer.com/

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#24

Post by giardini »

bane wrote: post #7

I've worked at a few startups in the past and can give you this history: 1) First one was an ISP, boot-strapped. 4 years. Mildly profitable, sold to a larger ISP. 2) The next one was a short stint with a e-retailer. They were almost immediately profitable, but needed some serious cash to grow. So it sold within a couple of years and the founders all still work there. It's wildly profitable now, but alas none of the f…

"NLP middle-ware company"

"Neuro-Linguistic Programming middleware? Eh?

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#26

Post by thedjinn »

giardini wrote: post #24
bane wrote: post #7

I've worked at a few startups in the past and can give you this history: 1) First one was an ISP, boot-strapped. 4 years. Mildly profitable, sold to a larger ISP. 2) The next one was a short stint with a e-retailer. They were almost immediately profitable, but needed some serious cash to grow. So it sold within a couple of years and the founders all still work there. It's wildly profitable now, but alas none of the f…

"NLP middle-ware company" "Neuro-Linguistic Programming middleware? Eh?

It's probably Natural Language Processing.

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#27

Post by rudiger »

patio11 wrote: post #15

BCC was profitable within about a month of conception and has been since then. AR will, knock on wood, probably hit cash-flow positive in May (about six months after launch) and pay back development costs in a month or two after that. I was originally targeting 12 months for surpassing BCC & consulting but, knock on wood, I have since learned something about my market which may make that pessimistic.

Care to elaborate on what you've learned about Appointment Reminder's market that would make you pessimistic about it?

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#28

Post by paraschopra »

dralison wrote: post #13

Last hit for me: launched solo in 1998, self-sustaining though I didn't make any money personally (kept folding it back in, worked programming contracts to live), got angel funding in 2000 and popped staff to 14, first profitable month in March 2001. Became consistently profitable in October 2001 and never again went into the red. Sold to a venture firm in 2006. Current biz: launched in 2009. Still working on profita…

I am curious. Do venture firms buy whole businesses? I thought they invest in firms, not buy them altogether.

Re: Ask HN: How long did you stuck with your startup before it is profitable?

#29

Post by patio11 »

rudiger wrote: post #27
patio11 wrote: post #15

BCC was profitable within about a month of conception and has been since then. AR will, knock on wood, probably hit cash-flow positive in May (about six months after launch) and pay back development costs in a month or two after that. I was originally targeting 12 months for surpassing BCC & consulting but, knock on wood, I have since learned something about my market which may make that pessimistic.

Care to elaborate on what you've learned about Appointment Reminder's market that would make you pessimistic about it?

My apologies, I think that phrasing was difficult to parse: the 12 month estimate was excessively pessimistic (i.e. it probably won't take that long, because the market is better than I expected it to be).

I had been basing my projections off of running a medium-volume low-touch business with average yearly account values in the $500 range. It turns out there is an addressable market for which average yearly account values are in the five figure range. More detail on that in a blog post Friday-ish.

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