
Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month? - ljdk
http://www.quora.com/Is-it-hard-to-build-market-and-maintain-a-web-app-that-makes-at-least-1000-a-month?
======
patio11
Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which
makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl"
goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure
continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused
application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.

It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of
yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to
success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads
to successfully running a bed and breakfast.

~~~
chopsueyar
_since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the
ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and
breakfast._

Well put.

~~~
joshklein
Yes, a very important point. This is the central idea of The E-Myth (i.e.
doing a thing and running a business that does that thing require very
different skill sets).

ref: [http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-
About/...](http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-
About/dp/0887307280)

------
dotBen
Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly
help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.

Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites,
repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that
are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live
streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come
to mind.

Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a
healthy profit if set up correctly.

 _Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate
space_

~~~
getsat
I've been wanting to build a niche video/picture site for a while (to deal
with all the CDN/scaling issues involved myself), and I've also been looking
for a project I can use this _Programming Collective Intelligence_ book on.

Adult seems to be a good next project for me. The only initial unknown I can
think of would be where content would come from unless it's user-supplied. Any
other links/info/thoughts?

~~~
yeahsure
Several years ago I thought about building something in the adult market
(never got to it). Your best bet is to go to the adult webmaster's board:
<http://gfy.com> If you're looking for affiliate programs, if I recall
correctly, they gave you tons of content for free.

Anyway... hope this helps - good luck!

~~~
getsat
Thanks for the link and suggestions!

------
3dFlatLander
Questions like this, "what should I build", and "which language should I use",
and etc make me cringe when I read them. Asking questions is awesome, but
these just don't seem to be productive. His question isn't related to building
a web app at all, he just wants to know _if_ he built that app, _could_ it
make $1k+ per month. Plus, any answer(s) given will likely just fuel his
planning, and not execution.

~~~
tseabrooks
In his defense I know lots of developers doing small webapps they intend to
keep on life support and not actively work at growing in an attempt to hit
their magic mark for what their monthly budget / expenses are. This may not be
the attitude of the majority of HNers but lots of people would be happy with a
way to make 2500$ a month for themselves... Just enough to maintain a modest
quality of life in the midwest.

------
SeoxyS
Both the question and the answer are all kinds of silly. You can't start a
project with the end goal of making $1000 a month, or you will surely fail.
Instead, you've gotta motivated to solve a problem you've identified and then
you need to execute on it.

Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're
forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when
your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't…

Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when
$1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the
experience. And try again. Iterate.

------
nicpottier
I have an eBook for sale for $39.00 that will show you how in ten easy steps,
it includes: 1) how to market yourself and use the power of social networking
to do the marketing for you 2) how to unlock the power of referrals 3) how you
can grow from making $1000 a month, to over $10,000 a month in three more
months of work.

"I never thought I could own my own business, but it is just so easy" - happy
customer

</satire>

~~~
gersh
How much do those ebooks make? How hard is it to make $1000/month selling
ebooks?

------
maxklein
I have many products that make more than $1000 a month. Tip - use the app
stores to cut away the pain of having to market to users through vague means.
App stores are a godsend if you are a good developer but bad marketer.

~~~
yeahsure
But that wouldn't be a web app. How about a web app? Anything else other than
AppSumo?

~~~
maxklein
Why must it be a web app? To me web apps are only useful for a specific sort
of software, not for all types of software. People who want everything to be
web apps are just mentally inflexible.

The app store for web apps is twitter and facebook.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Why must it be a web app?

Because that was the original question asked, as well as the topic here. Stay
on topic, stay on topic.

~~~
FrojoS
I might be wrong but you might be splitting hair here. What I read was:

"Is it hard to write a small piece of software and sell it over the web so I
can make 1k per month to pay my bills"

~~~
jasonlotito
I don't know where you read that. Here is the question:

"Is it hard to build, market and maintain a web app that makes at least $1000
a month? For a single, skilled web developer."

You might consider that splitting hairs, but I think the question was quite
clear, and very precise. Basically, he's interested in capitalizing on an
existing skill set and wondering about the business side of things.

------
thetrumanshow
"Its hard, but not THAT hard!"

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY>

6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks
rolling in (still <$1000 month).

I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models
(free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately
burning out because things weren't working.

But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-
initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build
something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation
(because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy
employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes
here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think
they are connected better with the product.

You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as
meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get
past this way of thinking.

------
tjogin
I would not take business advice from anyone attributing all of Apple's
success to their image and none to their products.

~~~
thenduks
Indeed. How does the poster figure Apple _got_ their image? It was pretty bad,
their image I mean, in the 90s. It surely couldn't be something crazy like
_they make great products_ :)

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MichaelApproved
It can't be _that_ easy otherwise everyone would build 10 or 20 of them and
retire.

~~~
csomar
If it takes you one year to get that product to $1K/month, then you'll need 20
years... But you have to consider that in 20 years, some of your apps will die
and also managing 20 apps and customers is a headache.

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jmitcheson
Yes, yes; it's very easy! Now, just step this way and let me show you my
excellent range of pick axes and mining equipment ;)

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mootothemax
I think saying, however sarcastically, that if it was that easy, everyone
would be doing it is kinda pointless. The most important step is to _get
started in the first place_.

Even if you don't make huge amounts of money (disclaimer: that's my blog post
linked at the bottom of the answer), there's a huge gulf between those that
spend their days thinking about possibilities, and those that get up and start
their projects. If you're in the latter group, you stand a much greater chance
:)

------
SandB0x
Confirmation bias overload: this is Quora.

------
braindead_in
"The first 3 years of any startup is very hard. After 3 years you just get
used to it".

------
antirez
I think it is harder to go from zero to $1000/month than from $1000/month to
100,000$/month.

What is sad is that instead to create a spam engine, adsense powered, doing
$1000/month is pretty straightforward.

~~~
VB6_Foreverr
OK I've done the first part, but I've been a bit stuck on the easier second
part for a long time. :)

------
Keyframe
Is it hard to write a story or make a film that people will watch? Same thing,
just a bit different. "Everyone" seems to know the answer, but the truth is
nobody knows. Because everyone would do it then.

~~~
riffraff
I agree in part with your cimment but even if everybody knew how to do it, not
everybody would. Compare: basic healthy habits.

------
swah
What does a "recurring billing system" do? I'm new to this, but all I did for
now was to store PayPal's (actually the clone that exists in my country)
transactions in my database, and bump the "good_until" timestamp when a new
payment is received (via POST in my case).

------
DrJ
it's so simpo' why not everyone does it?

and I mean it in the most sarcastic way.

~~~
aristidb
Because $1000 a month is less than a developer's salary?

~~~
jodrellblank
Need I point out that (your salary + $1000/month) > your salary?

------
pknerd
A mobile web app mashup having a social layer+LBS on top could be quite good
to earn revenue which you are looking for.

------
ahoyhere
It's not hard at all. Here's what you need to do:

1\. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.

2\. Build it for people who will pay.

3\. Market to them.

4\. Build it.

5\. Ship it.

6\. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)

I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you
reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest,
once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of
mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)

~~~
rhizome
Easy to describe is not the same as easy to do.

You should hack off 2-6 and describe step 1 in 7 steps.

~~~
ahoyhere
This is Hacker News, not "Write A Business Book For Me For Free Then Hold My
Hand" News. There's a lot out there on how to do each one of those steps, in
books mostly and some of the better software-biz blogs. The fact that I didn't
write a 30,000-word essay doesn't make what I'm saying any less true.

So few people even say that the first step exists, or that it should come
first, that alone is worth stating. Then go look for resources for how-to.

~~~
chc
I'm not asking you to do it, but honestly, I really haven't ever found any of
these places that contain much more info about step 1 than was contained in
your rough outline (but I have found lots of places that contain roughly the
same amount of actionable info in longer form).

If a piece of writing does go further, it typically just advises the reader to
do something like "Talk to people and find out," which is frustratingly
circular. Talking to people is something most of us do every day without any
profit, and "find out" just restates the problem.

It may be that this has been written about well somewhere, but I have never
seen it. I figure it must be one of those things where you just have to figure
it out for yourself, and for those who have figured it out, these vague
platitudes look like actionable advice because they're able to mentally fill
in the blanks.

~~~
ahoyhere
There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and
internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper
into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?

Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading
blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably
picking the wrong teachers to learn from.

As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12
years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end
adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources,
including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing
with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and
looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.

That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific
crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product
and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems.
I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place,
but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out
there.

It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a
willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only
one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be
hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the
strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a
LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course,
doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the
workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.

You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business
book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a
workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more
profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a
book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops.
There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of
information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more
expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.

That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about
step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the
"figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins,
and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.

Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really
good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source
of workable knowledge.

~~~
SonicSoul
Can you list some of your favorite books?

------
leon_
the building not so. the marketing and pr needed to reach that goal on the
other hand is a little more work :)

------
seanp2k
>"Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?"

Yes.

------
Vmabuza
A person asking such a question shouldnt be building stuff for profit in the
first place.

~~~
Mz
What are better questions to be asking?

(Serious question. I suck at asking questions that get me useful answers. I
have some websites that have been around a while and make next to nothing in
spite of having something of value to offer. I want to make $2000-$3000/mo.
How on earth do I get there from here?)

~~~
syllogism
You can start by being specific. There's no generic answer here. You can't
really try to understand "succeeding at businesses" in the abstract. You have
to do things on a case-by-case basis. So if you ask about one of your
_specific_ sites, people can help you.

~~~
Mz
Okay. How would one get more quality traffic with this specific challenge:
It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim
it cannot be done. The rest of the world thinks it cannot be done either so
it's a hard sell.

So far, I have been working on building an audience painfully slowly. Since I
am also working on getting myself well, content does not go up as regularly as
I would like. My feeling has been this is probably a good thing for now
because the first thing I have to do is win over my audience and the world
just does not believe this can be done. Maybe I am completely wrong (about
needing to build the audience this way)? But without participating in email
lists and hearing what other people are asking, I also don't really know what
to talk about -- I don't just psychically know what is different about what I
am doing compared to other people. So for me that relationship to the audience
is important and there has been a huge barrier for a long time. It is
gradually coming down. Maybe I do know exactly what I am doing and it just
takes time. Or maybe I am an idiot and someone else would have no problem
slapping some content onto the site and generating an income.

Thoughts?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Some thoughts:

 _It's a health site where I talk about getting myself well when doctors claim
it cannot be done._

Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting _you_ well.

 _Since I am also working on getting myself well..._

Supposing I were sick, I'd care mainly about getting _myself_ well. It sounds
like you don't have the answers, so why am I bothering?

It sounds like you aren't selling solutions. So your best bet is to sell
sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it more of a forum, allow other
people to tell their stories as well. Focus on sharing emotions as much as
sharing solutions.

Monetization will probably come from ads selling snake oil. Near as I can
tell, that's the primary method of monetization in health related sites -
selling homeopathy and herbs to desperate people.

~~~
Mz
_Besides your Mom, no one cares about getting you well._

As noted elsewhere: The site exists because there are people who are
interested in what I did to get well, not because I had any plans to create
such a site. It gives them clues as to how to get themselves healthier when
all else has failed. I talk about what worked for me in large part because I
have zero interest in giving advice per se. I think that is part of what is
wrong with conventional medicine: Doctors routinely prescribe treatments with
short term benefits and long term costs, which is not so bad if you are
basically healthy and can take the hit for an acute problem. But it's deadly
if you have a chronic health issue. And the fact that they take this basic
approach is no secret. It's done quite openly: We all know about the huge
fold-outs detailing the negative side effects that come with most prescription
drugs and the waivers that have to be signed before they will perform surgery.
Since getting myself healthier relied heavily on trading short term costs for
long term gains, I have zero interest in replicating a system that I am
convinced is part of the problem.

 _So your best bet is to sell sympathy and motivation. My suggestion: make it
more of a forum, allow other people to tell their stories as well. Focus on
sharing emotions as much as sharing solutions._

I own several email lists. I cannot for the life of me get conversations going
on them. I also briefly had a forum for the site. It was overrun with spam and
had maybe three members (myself included). So I've tried that route and
failed, quite consistently and miserably. It works better for me to try to get
people sharing info when someone else owns/runs the discussion space. And that
is a piece I am working on elsewhere, for the purpose of helping people help
themselves. I'm also not interested in selling sympathy or motivation per se.
There is a saying that "an example is the best lecture" and I have found that
to be true. So I do offer myself as an example in hopes that it inspires
people to feel "If she can do it, I can do it". But I have zero interest in
being some cheerleader.

Again, I was not asking about monetizing the site. Only about getting traffic,
a question you have not addressed. As stated earlier: I have several websites.
I really don't expect this site to be where the money is. But it is the most
mature/developed of the sites I own and it basically serves as a proving
ground for me to learn stuff.

~~~
yummyfajitas
You didn't ask about getting traffic, you asked about getting " _quality_
traffic". Since you didn't define "quality", I assumed you were going with the
standard definition of quality - traffic that earns you money. Hence, a
discussion of monetization.

Anyway, I was going to list the ways your site is an SEO and navigation
disaster.

But then I saw that your content is a deceptive mix of good advice, snake oil,
and stuff I don't know enough to evaluate. It would be unethical of me to give
you any tips on directing more people to it. You should take your site down.
You are clearly unable to evaluate scientific evidence, and your anecdotes of
how the placebo effect helped you are not providing any benefit to others.

~~~
Mz
I am curious what you view as good advice, what you view as snake oil, and
what you don't know enough about to evaluate.

Thanks for the feedback.

