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Poll: Is your startup or side project profitable?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#41

Post by asanwal »

ericthegoodking wrote: post #38
asanwal wrote: post #25

We 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 s…

Congrats on your success! Its ironic that your product is a database of "vc's" yet you are bootstrapped. :).

Thanks and yes, we get that a lot.

We're not religious about bootstrapping. We may raise funding at some point but want to do it when we find the perfect partner(s) whose interests are aligned with ours. Ultimately, we think bootstrapping and building the company up to be real gives us leverage down the road, i.e., we're not raising money to survive or test a hypothesis but to put more fuel in the tank so we can accelerate growth.

Because of what we do, our 1 requirement is that they have o have been a customer of the product. We need believers :)

We'll see. Right now, the focus remains squarely on the product, customers and the team. Thanks for the kind words.

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

#42

Post by chromatic »

I built a stock screener to calculate the present value based on the past five to ten years of owner earnings for myself and family members. On a whim I put ads on the articles explaining how to use it. It's modestly profitable:

http://trendshare.org/how-to-invest/

It amuses me that most of the revenue comes from warning people about the risks of penny stocks.

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

#43

Post by jdprgm »

I launched fbmusicgate.com a facebook musician fan page app about a month ago and have a handful of paid subscribers and a lot of free users. Haven't reached enough to cover all the expenses yet but hoping to reach that milestone this week. Averaging about 17% weekly growth rate. Just have to figure out how to turn the free users into paying users.

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

#45

Post by yesimahuman »

We bootstrapped our products Codiqa and Jetstrap (http://drifty.com/) to profitability in 2013 with a team of 7 (though we just closed a funding round a few days ago).

In hindsight we could have gotten there a lot faster if we actually charged earlier and had a better signup/payment model. Oh well, lessons learned!

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

#46

Post by jpd750 »

xSwag wrote: post #15

I built a security scanner that scans WordPress installations for threats (plugin vulns, outdated installs, theme vulns, xss, sqli etc) without any installation or code knowledge required. I posted it on Reddit and got a few sign ups, after that I just got bored and I'm not sure what to do next. I'm thinking about partnering with WordPress tutorial websites and give them a recurring revenue cut or something. I really…

Let's talk, working on similiar thing except for platform, language-agnostic . email me (remove dots) j.p.d.75.0@gmail.com

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

#47

Post by zeman »

SpeedCurve is proving to be very profitable for a side project. Paid back initial $3k investment in server costs and now growing at 32% month on month. Can't live on it yet, but it will cover a couple of conferences and a two week holiday in New York this year. Also just won $10k in a startup competition, does that count as profit? ;)

http://speedcurve.com/

For bootstrapped SaaS projects it's worth remembering how long it can take to grow the flywheel and see growth. It took Rob from HitTail a year after launch to connect with the right audience and Freckle took 5 years to get to $57k/month. It's a multiyear investment to grow something substantial.

http://unicornfree.com/2013/5-years-of-saas-growth-every-mon...

SpeedCurve has been in development for a year and available commercially for only 5 months. Haven't even started doing any marketing yet with all current growth via word of mouth.

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

#48

Post by gane5h »

I have a couple of side-projects as well as a startup.

The last few years, I’ve switched my side-projects to helping people with their backend infrastructure or architecture. This is definitely not profitable and most times I don’t even charge money. I like helping people and this is very satisfying work. Cold-email me (details in profile) if you like to discuss infrastructure.

My startup silota.com will be profitable as of April. I started hitting the road actively looking for customers in Jan of this year. The product isn’t self-serve yet and requires me to actively hand-hold people during the on boarding process. It’s been great and looking forward to the next few months!

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

#49

Post by dogweather »

rosspanda wrote: post #37

My first start-up http://moodpanda.com gets donations that covers the hosting and runnings costs and helps hundreds of thousands of people, which is fine with me. My brand new start-up http://crowdscore.io is targeted at mid to large business's so is going to need quite a bit of cash to get traction, I've had some early interest but I think its going to be a much harder sell than my first.

Mood Panda looks perfect for tracking how my dog is doing as I vary her meds.

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

#50

Post by novum »

loceng wrote: post #35
novum wrote: post #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 t…

I first learned to program when I was 11 or 12 years old because I was playing MUDs and wanted one of my own so I could implement features and ideas I had. Best of luck. :)

I think I can also attribute my initial interest in programming to MUDs. Funny how, all these years later, they still give me satisfaction albeit through a much different tech stack. :)

     > recite ritual of reminiscing
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