We launched https://coinkite.com in november, we are now profitable.
Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#22I'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 out…
Really like that, cool idea. Come launch it in London? We paid £135 (EACH) for that service the last time I rented a flat here.
Thanks iamwithnail! :)
There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.
I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#23Nope, probably not ever going to be profitable, but I barely have any operating costs either. My project is called Simple Blocker, and it's an extension for Chrome that lets you block websites to help you concentrate. It was designed to be as simple as can be (hence the name), while still having all the essential features. I don't really have any plans to monetize it, and I think asking for donations is a bit tacky.…
@bigmario
I used your extension and liked it. (I'm currently trying a different one). I don't think it's tacky to put up a donate button. I'm happy to throw a cup of coffee amount to free apps. There's even a few that I use often where I donate yearly during the holidays.
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#24Since building stuff is both a career and a hobby, I've always had 3 types of "projects": * One or more services that are intended to make money. Some of them never make it; I've more failed ideas under my belt than winners. But the winners really win and pay for all the time spent on the rest; Improvely and W3Counter are doing really well and provide a comfortable lifestyle financially. * Projects that are never int…
[deleted]
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#25We bootstrapped our SaaS company (www.cbinsights.com) and while profitability is not a goal as we reinvest any excess back into hiring, technology, etc, we're doing 7-figures of annual recurring revenue.
We launched 4 years ago with 3 folks and should be 20 by this summer assuming we find the right folks (we're 15 now). Just hired our first biz dev guy a couple of months ago. I'd sold the first couple of million in subscriptions. While I'm not sure if we should have hired a BD guy sooner, my co-founder and I did feel like we needed to understand the sales process first.
The good news is that I'm pretty far from a natural salesperson so if we get this product into the hands of someone who really knows how to sell, we'll be on an even better path. That said, I brought a really solid understanding of the product to sales calls which def helped us.
It's been a great and rocky road. We're about to reach escape velocity I think, and I'm really looking forward to that.
As an aside, I try to convene a group of bootstrapped SaaS entrepreneurs for lunch/dinner periodically to exchange ideas/tips/help one another so if you fit the bill and are based in or near NYC or going to be in NYC, please reach out. (details in profile)
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#26Our 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.
Subscription based or ad based?
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#27I'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: w…
As a soccer fan, this makes me happy! When do you expect to finish? I would love to use this as a back-end API for a couple of app ideas I have. By the way the data side of the business is pretty tough to break into. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, absolutely tough to get into. I'm using some free resources right now (football-data.co.uk in particular), but would like to pull more information - the Betfair API in particular is a mess, and Opta are ludicrously expensive - c£8-10k a season. Actually might have public beta in a couple of weeks, I'm just going to put the prototype layouts into Django templates, and then troubleshoot. Want me to ping you an email when we're doing a soft launch?
(PS: If you know anywhere that has a free, REST/JSON livescore API, that would be grand...)
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#28I'm the founder of http://oregonlaws.org which is Ramen profitable. And now I'm revving up v2 to do the rest of the U.S. Since Oregon is just 1% of the U.S. population, I'm optimistic. But I'm tired of the slow bootstrapping pace and starting to look for funding.
Meanwhile I'm spinning off an internal tool for black-box testing web apps. It should launch today: http://think200.com/beta But I really don't know what to expect.
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#29I launched a paid upgrade for Postman (http://getpostman.com) last month and it's been doing pretty well. :)
Re: Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?
#30I'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 out…
Wow, good for you, I'm impressed. A quick Google search indicates that's a very competitive space (probably an understatement). What is your approach to marketing? As a landlord you're trying to reach, I'm curious how you're getting the word out. As a developer, I'm curious what you've found most effective.
Getting the word out: honest and probably in satisfying answer is that it's a huge slog. As an engineer, I kept looking for automated solutions that would be scalable and elegant.
All the "growth hacking" talk out there makes you want to search for the "one secret trick" or the better placed share button, but for Rocket Lease I did/am doing just tons of unscalable, schleppy, inelegant stuff.
I personally have made thousands of cold calls, found property management companies with errors on their websites and offered to fix them for free to get a conversation started, tried tons of online ad channels (Adwords converts for me now, but I can't buy that many clicks profitably and the viable keyword space is smaller than expected). Flyers, postcards, calling brokers and taking them out to lunch....
Basically all the elegant automated stuff I wanted to happen didn't.
Dogged persistence has been the biggest winner to date. It's gotten easier and with domain age and more back links I'm starting to do better in organic search but it's still not that much (~70 hits a day). With more customers now I have some social proof and I'm starting to get more recommendations in but I think the tipping point for when that becomes a meaningful growth driver is still a ways away.
Oh, and customer service. Unreasonably good customer service. Not because I have to but because I obsess about my business, I personally get to support tickets really fast, try to personally connect with the customer and understand their needs and figure out how to help them.
If I think rocket lease isn't the best fit for their needs, I'll tell them and recommend them to a better suited competitor (this happens if, for example, the landlord wants online rent payments built in to the same system).
Landlords really appreciate the quality service and personal attention. This is typically only necessary early on, and after the customer has used it a few times, it's pretty much auto pilot and they're a customer for life because of the great on boarding experience.