Ask HN: End projects with revenue b/c it wasn't enough to quit your day job?

#1

Post by hojoff79 » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

How many people out there have abandoned projects that were generating revenue / cash because they were never going to be big enough?

How much revenue / cash were they generating? (I say revenue / cash because I'm not counting businesses that had revenue but tons of expenses and never gave anything back)

Did you get anything for them, or just let them wind down?

Re: Ask HN: End projects with revenue b/c it wasn't enough to quit your day job?

#2

Post by byoung2 » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 7:59 PM UTC

I had a few ad and affiliate sites that made a fair amount of money at their peak, and then died after Google algorithm changes. TechSpyer.com was just a WordPress site that took an XML feed from Commission Junction and Linkshare and created posts with affiliate links for consumer electronics products. It took about an hour to make (it used a free WordPress theme and a custom XML to post plugin that I wrote). It made about $150 per month back in 2007 before I sold it for $1500 on Flippa. I later made a similar site for general products called DealSpyer.com that made about $100/month before traffic dried up. I had a travel site called RewardFreak.com that had pages for all the travel loyalty programs, and affiliate links to travel portals to book flights, hotels, cars, sign up for a rewards credit card, etc. There were thousands of pages of content, but 99% of the traffic came from 5 pages (for lesser known frequent flyer programs, I ranked higher than the actual websites). Just 1 or 2 affiliate sale per month was enough for $200+ revenue.

In total, I averaged about $500 a month during 2007-2010 with costs under $20/month, but 2011 the traffic on these sites disappeared overnight with the Panda update, so I just let the domains expire.

Re: Ask HN: End projects with revenue b/c it wasn't enough to quit your day job?

#3

Post by alok-g » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 11:02 PM UTC

While I am not in this boat, you should end the project if the returns from it (projected into the future if needed) are not more than whatever else you could gain with the time and money you are putting into this project, plus the stress you are dealing with, if any. Comparison to day job is not valid at least directly.

For example, if you are putting in T hours of time per day and M amount of money, think about what is the realistic value you could reap from that time and money, taking everything into account. Whatever is expected to give higher returns for your efforts, resources and stress, should be what you do.

Apologies if I stated something that you find obvious.

Re: Ask HN: End projects with revenue b/c it wasn't enough to quit your day job?

#4

Post by hojoff79 » Sat, Jul 26, 2014, 2:09 PM UTC

alok-g wrote: post #3

While I am not in this boat, you should end the project if the returns from it (projected into the future if needed) are not more than whatever else you could gain with the time and money you are putting into this project, plus the stress you are dealing with, if any. Comparison to day job is not valid at least directly. For example, if you are putting in T hours of time per day and M amount of money, think about wha…

No I understand and certainly agree with what you were saying. My question was more when you've come to this realization that the site making you $500 / month is not going to go much further and not worth your time, what are people doing with these side projects? Try to sell them, leave them alone and reap whatever cash happens to come in, or other solutions?