

Ask HN: How much did you spend on your startup before you got ramen profitable? - vaksel

How much did you spend on your startup of your own money before you got ramen profitable or got funded?
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patio11
Disclaimer: I had full-time employment to put a roof over my head and food on
the table for the entire duration I've had a business.

$58.17 of my own money, spent in the one month before I had enough sales to
fund all business expenses out of incoming revenue.

If I had to do it over again, I'd tell my younger self that the "bring it in
for under the price of a video game" discipline was worthwhile, but $500 or so
on icons, visual design, domains, and directory submissions in the first few
months would have made my life much easier.

If you (somewhat arbitrarily) say having a day job is cheating and that my
basic living expenses were de-facto invested into the business, then I'd
estimate I probably spent something on the order of $15,000 of implied
investment prior to ramen profitability. I think that is a pretty useless
statistic but, hey, full disclosure.

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pxlpshr
This is an interesting question because I spent the better half a year
ignoring consulting work and focusing solely on our mobile software company.
So if you include opportunity costs, you could say about $60k was "spent" over
the course of about a year (about $5-7k or so was hard cash, the rest was
6-months of not doing service-related work).

The company became ramen profitable pretty quickly but I went back to doing
part-time consulting work to maintain a lifestyle. As the AppStore grew
exponentially, our apps pretty much remained ramen profitable. We missed our
opportunity to make a bigger return when we launched our first app in Nov/Dec
08. Part of that was my fault based on how I setup the company, and being way
to tolerant of lack of effort from developer-partners. Fortunately I learned
my lesson with my own money.

We received angel funding about a month ago to start a new company, we'll have
1 (maybe 2) apps on iTunes but we won't be solely dependent on it for our
success. This will let us stay focused on making a really fantastic mobile
app, not only for Apple but also for Android and other platforms.

Right now I'm trying to decide if I should sell my former small business on
SitePoint or something. I'm not sure we'd get much for it but it would be nice
to put a nail in the coffin since I don't have time to really maintain the
company. Anyone have any experience with small sales like this?

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atkuebler
To those who have said and are going to say that the time they have spent
isn't worth anything, it is. The time you spend on your start-up is time you
could be spending working a paying job, be it a "real" job, a freelance job, a
consulting job, etc. You time is not free!

Now there is nothing wrong with this. You are investing your time into
something you believe will be worth it in the end, but don't think you time
has no value.

Evaluating how much your time is worth is another question though.

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fookyong
I stopped doing consulting and lived off my savings whilst building my first
SaaS app. It took a few months to get ramen profitable and I had zero income
the whole time during development. Looking back, that was actually kinda
stupid of me...

But we're not talking about time or opportunity cost, we're talking about hard
expenditure right?

In that case, probably about $3000. Got spent on a bunch of things - hosting,
buying software licenses, SSL certs, icon sets etc etc.

My biggest expenditure was on hosting. I went with a dedicated Rackspace
server and I signed up way too early. 2 months into my contract I still hadn't
launched and was, of course, paying a flat fee per month (not cheap!). This is
precisely the situation I could avoid by using cloud solutions, but at the
time there wasn't a cloud service out there I was comfortable with using.
Tried out Rackspace Cloud Servers recently and would like to use that for
future projects.

You live and learn.

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jacquesm
Camarades.com was funded from a software licensing scheme that brought in
about 700,000 annually. In one year all the licensing income was spent on
salaries for employees we hired and bandwidth (which was very expensive back
then), the second year the business became profitable when we added 24x7 media
advertising.

The licensing deal was abolished and the licensed software became completely
free as long as people would host their video streams with us.

After that the whole thing was spun out as a different company underneath the
parent, and extra shareholders came on board.

All told I figure about a million went in to it before it was really
profitable, because it was launched off an existing stream of income we had in
that sense a relatively easy time of it. It definitely is a lot of money to
spend on something you are not sure is going to take off though, fortunately
it did.

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sosuke
Well, I spend enough for a nice new BMW or Mercedes Benz and I'm no where near
ramen profitable after 6 months.

~~~
iworkforthem
Did you work alone?

~~~
sosuke
I work alone. Why do you ask?

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wlievens
Working on a new game project; spent $590 for art, $20 on domains, using a
server I'm already renting on another budget. Spent about 200 manhours on it
(worth €10k or something).

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Concours
I'm still spending, altought it's more of time and energy, so far probaly
>1000 $, I won't count my time I hope to break-even in January 2010.I will
post it here.

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pplante
Mostly just time invested so far, thats the biggest chunk by far. Funds spent
so far: $500 for legal, domains, hosting, etc.

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yosho
i wonder if there is a correlation between initial spending vs later success.

In some cases, i would be willing to bet that high initial spending lead to a
greater turnout because you're able to leverage the money and convert it into
increased traffic and sales.

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tamas
That approach didn't really work out in the dotcom era. Of course, in some
cases it would make greater turnout, but it is an expensive experiment.

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apowell
$70, because domains names were expensive in 1998. Best $70 I ever spent,
that's for sure.

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ag
Around 10K€ or $15K in USD.

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jv2222
<http://tweetminer.net/stats> \-- I spent $zero! :)

(check out <http://techzinglive.com> for weekly updates on how the business
has been built)

Oops I guess the domain was an original cost $9

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Raphael
Mr. Simpson, I didn't get rich writing a lot of checks.

