

Ask HN: How would you spend $3000 a month for a year to create income? - petervandijck

I you had 3000 US$ a month to spend, for a year, how would you plan that money if you wanted to create a few (2, 3) online apps or something to generate a reliable income stream, generating, say, 5000$/m? Assume I can do some programming myself, but not all. Same with other tasks.<p>Another way to ask this: which parts of creating apps is it most efficient to spend money on. For example: a great visual design can be expensive, but you only have to (mostly) pay for it once. A few hours of a great (expensive) programmer can be better than a full time mediocre one. Marketing expenses should be x% of the budget. What types of apps would you focus on? And so on. All advice welcome!
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TomOfTTB
As someone who controls the resources for a non-profit I'm often finding ways
to stretch money. As such I'd offer this advice...

1\. College contests are a gold mine. Rather than pay a designer $1,000 to
design your app post up flyers in the design department of your local college
and offer a $300 prize for the best design. It's a great way to save money and
you can often tap into $5,000 worth of talent from the students.

2\. Don't use sites like scriptlance unless you're prepared to spec the
project out very specifically. NEVER, EVER use them to do something you can't
do yourself. In my experience sites for cheap labor will blow up in your face
about 90% of the time so buyer beware (and if you do happen to find a quality
person keep in contact with them outside the site)

3\. Advertising really doesn't work that well when you're trying to get off
the ground. There's just too much out there at this point. It's better to
spend your time and effort contacting influential people. In my experience
most people won't pay attention to advertising unless they've at least heard
the name of the product through other means.

4\. I can't say enough good things about Amazon's Web Services. If you have a
lot of money there might be better options but for someone starting out with
very little EC2 and S3 are great.

As for the programming itself the only advice I can offer is to do as much as
you can by yourself. $3,000 a month really isn't all that much in the long
term so time is the only resource you have in abundance. Most apps are
relatively simple programming tasks that only get complicated when they have
to scale. So even with rudimentary skills you should be able to do 80% of the
work yourself.

Don't assume you have the skills now but the few hundred you spend on
javascript and usability books could save you thousands if you put the effort
into it.

~~~
petercooper
_If you have a lot of money there might be better options but for someone
starting out with very little EC2 and S3 are great._

I'm a fan of AWS but I'd argue it's only viable if you have _more_ money or
very specific requirements. You can get a reliable VPS or even dedicated
server for less than Amazon would charge and get significantly more
performance and included bandwidth. Even a 1GB VPS at $40 or so a month (from,
say, a Linode or Webbynode) can reliably cope with a significant amount of
traffic to a non-crazy webapp.

AWS has serious pros for certain use cases but with the learning curve, the
necessity to tie together so many pieces to get something reliable, and the
lackluster performance on the cheaper instances, I couldn't recommend EC2 to
anyone starting out or on a budget (assuming they want to run something 24/7 -
EC2 is great on a budget just for short term testing).

------
grandalf
1) create the concept in your mind first. This costs $0. Try to think through
it deeply enough that you really understand what challenges the designer will
be up against.

2) Figure out what the simplest thing you can launch that is still cool is. $0

3) Have a designer do the design and iterate a few times if necessary. This
will cost a bit.

4) Build it.

5) Advertise it. I like stumbleupon a lot for this b/c you can get a lot of
people to at least see the first page of the app and maybe use it a bit. If
you get a lot of "thumbs up" ratings, your cost per display goes way down b/c
they serve it free some of the time.

Focus on apps that solve a specific problem that you or someone you know has.

~~~
petercooper
That's one common approach (and a good step-by-step for it) but I'd argue in
favor of the _opposite_ : Find a need or something that a market is ready to
pay for and build _that_. This approach gives you a more certain market to
sell to as well as people (potential customers) ready to give you feature and
design ideas.

~~~
grandalf
I don't disagree. I think that people generally pay to have a problem solved
for them.

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dangrossman
These "What would you do with $x to make $y" questions come up all the time --
I'm sure you could find them if you search. You'll find lots of ways to spend
money getting a design at some site or hiring a freelancer at some other site,
throwing some at AdWords to test ideas, etc.

More important than any of that is whether you can self-motivate yourself to
identify and test good ideas, build them into products, and follow through on
them long enough to see if they'll gain any traction.

It's extremely unlikely you'll create 2-3 web applications that generate
$5000/month in the span of a single year if you're leading them yourself. You
might be able to hire people to build out 2-3 things, but you won't be devoted
enough to any of them to aggressively find your initial customers and develop
the application until it's something they love enough to start spreading the
word.

~~~
petervandijck
Fair enough :) But my question is more about: if you have some money to spend,
and assuming that is at least somewhat helpful, which areas should you spend
it on?

For example, you could just spend everything on Google ads to get traffic to
your site. Or you could spend it on a great copywriter. Or you could spend it
on quitting your day job.

~~~
dangrossman
I am having a hard time seeing how that type of generic advice would be
helpful. You spend it on the things that would help you most on your specific
project at a specific point in time.

If you're a great copy writer, having me tell you to hire a copy writer isn't
useful.

~~~
petervandijck
You're most likely right and it's a useless question. I was struggling with
that question today though, that's why I posted it here, the HN community
often does come up with good answers to useless questions.

Edit: saw you added some advice to your original comment. Actually good advice
:)

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joeld42
I would try to generate many small, focused apps, try to make them better than
average but not obsess about perfection. I would aim for one app every 2
months. You can't predict which ideas are going to take off, so if you
generate a lot you have better chances, but be honest and self-critical and
don't make shovelware.

You really can "feel it" when the market responds to a good idea, if/when that
happens then shift gears and put most of your energy behind that one (for a
while).

That's my iOS game/app strategy anyways. I'm a little new to this myself, and
it hasn't "taken off" yet, and I've got a lot of work ahead of me, but that
seems like what has worked best from watching successful peers.

~~~
petervandijck
That's roughly what I'm thinking as well..

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ryanteo
Hey Peter,

You could take a look at FreeTheApps.com. <http://mixergy.com/free-apps-
interview/> There's an in-depth mixergy interview on how 2 guys outsourced
iPhone app development on Elance, often under $3k and they're doing about $80k
in monthly revenue. Pretty interesting for your budget =) Maybe you could
email them direct, they seem pretty friendly. They also have an e-book called
"How to Make Profitable iPhone apps with No programming experience".

------
gallerytungsten
As others have kind of hinted, you seem to have the cart before the horse.
What are you passionate about? What problem is constantly bothering you?

Once you find the "better mousetrap" (at least, conceptually) then the
question is, how can you build it for $3k/month and make $5k/month.

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invalidOrTaken
<http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html>

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JustinD
Guess it depends what your skill set is.

I mean, any major city and given your average bloke, the answer is dead
simple.

Drugs.

First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women. And
income.

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alain94040
Think outside the box: invest $5K in 7 startups. How you pick the 7 is of
course the tricky part, but much less work than actually being the one coding,
designing and selling stuff.

~~~
dstein
I've kind of been wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of mini-
stock exchange for startup companies. Like the Toronto Venture Exchange, but
specifically for startup tech companies.

Just completely eliminate the VC/angel seed system, and replace it with a
democratized, electronic, exchange.

~~~
alain94040
That was one of our goals when we started fairsoftware (now foundrs.com), but
US regulations prevented us from going all the way. I think we were pretty
good at bypassing a lot of SEC regulations (we invented a concept of "virtual
shares"), but cash for shares was off-limits. And we had some pretty good
lawyers to help us out.

------
petervandijck
Thanks everyone for the feedback!

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Someone
Let's assume your 'some time' costs $5,000 a month. That would make that one
year cost around $100,000.

Interest on that sum would be say $5000 a year. So, your 'reliable input
stream, say $5000/m' would recover that $100,000 in two years.

From that, I conclude that you do not really need that $3000 a month to do
this. The 'only' thing you need is this bright idea.

If I had that idea, I wouldn't tell you about it; I would try and implement it
myself.

~~~
ojbyrne
That's some interesting math you have there.

