

Ask HN: Anyone on HN running a web startup with 50K+ a year net profit? - riskish


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dangrossman
I was 19 and in my first year of college when I finished my last contract
programming job and started working for myself. I launched my first product
with a $10 domain name and $17 web template for the site design. It made well
over 50K in net profit its first year. I paid my way through college without
debt, and run several profitable web apps now.

There are others on HN with similar stories. I recommend checking out the
profiles of commentors. A lot of people have their sites in their bios so you
can see what they've built.

~~~
tereno
I would love to have a chat with you about your experience, if you don't mind
that is?

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rubeng
Definitely more than 50k/year net and growing at a nice pace. I'm a single
founder, worked on my SaaS product nights and weekends, and been live almost a
year and a half. Also, just quit my day job a couple of weeks ago so I can do
what I love full time. My product: <http://www.bidsketch.com>

~~~
blacksmythe
That is a nice product that fits in the category of something I had no idea I
needed until I saw it.

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rubeng
Thanks; this is one of the challenges I run into with marketing and trying to
find traffic sources. I've had good success with word of mouth, integrations
and giving away free templates for users feeling the type of pain my product
solves.

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wyday
Yes, quite a bit more than 50K/year, but we're only a web startup in the sense
that we sell all our products via the web. Our 2 main products are an updater
suite for Windows apps (<http://wyday.com/wybuild/> ) and licensing & online
activation for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X apps (<http://wyday.com/limelm/>
).

In short, we make development tools.

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foobarbazetc
Woo, wyBuild! :)

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rt10k
Nope. I'm broke. Thanks for the reminder.

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tjic
My two startups, SmartFlix.com and HeavyInk.com, both clear this hurdle.

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chopsueyar
What kind of physical infrastructure to you have to handle all those physical
goods (comic books and DVDs)?

PS, I really like SmartFlix.com. What a great concept!

~~~
riskish
I would also like to know the answer to this question.

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cullenking
By sometime next month we will break $50k for this year alone. We have some
more work to do on two B2B license contracts to get our next couple of
installment payments. We should be launching our B2C pay product by next month
as well. So far, customers have donated $15k in the last year, so we expect to
clear minimum 4x that much this year in recurring subscriptions.

The site in question (<http://ridewithgps.com>) is a niche site for cyclists,
or anyone who wants a way to track their workouts using GPS. Garmin has a
large line of fitness related GPS computers with wireless heartrate, pedal
speed and instantaneous power output sensors, so the log files are fun to play
with :)

It took three years of work, but I now have a real (small!) regular salary...

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saucerful
How do you compete with MapMyRun? Everyone I know uses that...

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cullenking
We don't suck as much. Have you ever used their sites? It's like someone
loaded up every bad fad diet ad into a shotgun and pointed it at your face.

We get several messages a day from people along these lines - here is an
example from yesterday I just pulled from our suggestions/comment submission
system: "I love your site. After spending frustrating hours with Map My Ride,
your site is so easy. And, even better is the Cue Sheet. Thank you."

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jarin
Please post this thread again in a few months. Fingers crossed!

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cheald
Yup. Single man hobby project turned profitable product. Niche SaaS, took
about 10 months to clear the 50k hurdle, but I've done almost no marketing for
it either.

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cheae
Started two years ago 19K first year.

Still have few more months in the second year,already passed the 50K+ mark.

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code
Was previously but sold the last startup. Currently working on another startup
but haven't launched yet.

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justinchen
Yes, including after pay + benefits for 2 FT founders (+ ~4 contractors).
Started FT without profit or product 5 years ago. Bootstrapped. 1st hit
profitability ~2 years after starting. Advertising biz model. Biggest hurdle
was cold-starting growth with limited marketing budget.

I think that hits most of the questions I've seen in the thread.

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podman
For those of you who have reached this milestone:

1) What type of business model did you use? (SaaS, ecommerce, etc.)

2) How long did it take to get there after launching?

3) What was the biggest hurdle you faced in getting there?

4) How many people were working with you?

~~~
podman
Although I'm not quite at that point yet (very close)...

1) SaaS w/ monthly subscription

2) I'm about 8 months in and monthly revenue has finally ramped up to a point
where, if I were to make this much each month, profits would be well over $50k

3) The biggest hurdle has been customer acquisition. The first chunk of
customers I got through a deal when starting the company. The rest have been a
struggle. Managing marketing efforts while still hacking all day is a lot of
work. I also have no real internet marketing experience. One other hurdle has
been dealing with a deadbeat co-founder.

4) I started with one co-founder but he has since gotten a job and I have quit
mine. I'm working 100% full time on the startup and he hasn't contributed more
than an hour in the past 4 or 5 months, so it's pretty much just me.

~~~
tereno
How did you figure out your pricing scheme and did you suspect people might
need and pay for this before actually building it?

~~~
podman
I got kind of lucky here because my company grew out of the failure of my old
employer. They basically ran out of money and sold themselves to a very large
company. That company didn't want a subset of the users, so we offered to
purchase them. I just used the same pricing scheme as my old employer did to
make the transition for the old users as palatable as possible to increase the
amount of people that stayed on through the migration from my old company to
my new company. It worked fairly well as close to 80% stayed on.

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bigohms
Niche SaaS & service hybrid product for a finance niche cleared that in 45
days. Have done slight pivots to retain a sustainable and healthy growth clip.

~~~
riskish
would you mind elaborating on the niche/product? URL?

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mdink
I would also like to add - how many of you started with 0 profit when you went
full time doing it?

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Retailslave
No, I wish someone would help me learn how to do all this stuff. I'm not sure
where I could begin with even doing a "web startup"

I'd need a lot of programming knowledge and I was not blessed with a computer
when I grew up like a lot of you.

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kariatx
Yes, since 2002 :-)

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callmeed
It depends on when a startup stops being a startup.

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iconfinder
I am.

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dtby
The answer is obviously and indisputely, "Yes."

So it would be better to frame your question in a way which got the results in
which you are actually interested.

Do you want to know which niches are being served by HN users? Ask. Do you
want to know how to use SEO to turn your 10k net profit business into a 50k
net profit business? Ask. Do you want to know if the majority of HN is
starving wanna-bes? Ask.

This question in an exceptionally poor proxy for your real question.

~~~
riskish
I'd like to edit my Q now, but I can't. :)

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buro9
Well how about you ask it again in a reply and we all upvote it so that
everyone sees it?

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riskish
The reason I asked is I asked a similar question a while ago, regarding "HN
founders taking the leap from full-time to startup" and a lot of great
responses about projects were posted, so I was hoping for a little inspiration
for the most part and to see what new projects people are working on /
succeeding with.

~~~
buro9
Well I'm currently full-time and I have had a hobby horse company slowly
building up for the past year. It currently makes about £36k GBP in profit per
annum, which means it's close to the point that with a tight belt I could
jump.

The hardest thing for me isn't spotting or monetising the opportunity, but in
balancing everything for a reasonable quality of life without burning myself
out. That and discovering and handling the minefield that is running your own
company and figuring our the finances, taxing, invoicing and asset management.

My company does community websites, forums and the like. I chose to start with
areas I'm most interested in, but have avoided areas where there isn't an
after-sales market. I aim making the lions-share of the revenue from affiliate
schemes such as the eBay Partner Network, Amazon, and then Affiliate Window
has a lot of companies running schemes specific to the communities I'm
running.

I don't push the affiliates... I just aim to build the communities up to the
point that enough conversation produces the links to used or new items that
then produces revenue.

Once a community is successful, I look for another.

What I've discovered is that revenue earnings relate to purchase price of
items, and that you can make significant money in high-value items sold
through eBay. I would now recommend people look at cars, motor-homes, boats,
etc sold through eBay, and then build affiliate based communities around
those. Which means building communities who love and use those things, and
affiliate earnings is a natural by-product of letting those people
communicate.

There is a lot of money in affiliates with a low entry barrier so long as you
can attract the people who will click on the links, and if you happen to have
also attracted people who would post the links (you can auto-rewrite server-
side to include the affiliate element) then you have a winner.

So that's what I do in my spare time (30 minutes per day), and it's wildly
successful given the effort invested (I'm using off-the-shelf forum software).

I could even make this my job full-time, except I personally need more
stimulus than just running a farm of community forums.

Also... beware the politics. If you can stick to a same-sex topic where people
are unlikely to sleep with each other, you'll get a lot less politics.

~~~
DennisP
How do you get it started? Do you have to learn something about the market and
start posting your own content?

~~~
buro9
It's a community forum, so you need to have something to say and to know that
the gap you're targeting exists.

In two parts this simply means:

1) You had better be interested in the topic

2) Check which other sites already exist and position yourself accordingly

My most successful forum is LFGSS <http://www.lfgss.com/> , which is London
Fixed-gear and Single-speed... a cycling forum which luckily caught a trend
before it got big. The positioning on that was that whilst other cycling
forums do exist, others failed to recognise that cycling is a local activity
and that cycling itself splits into various tribes and that even local
activities only have appeal to one tribe. I love cycling, and I was riding
fixed, so once I recognised that I could just start the London forum I was
pretty much done.

To launch it I just went on to sites like bikeforums.net and announced in the
most applicable place that I was starting something I hoped would appeal to
the niche I'd highlighted. About 15 people signed up on day 1, just enough to
have conversations between each other... and with about an hour a day invested
in chatting and going on the odd ride I get it to the point of getting 30 > 50
new users every day and am now somewhere over 25,000 members with over half of
them actively using the site each month and a unique visitor count (Google
Analytics) of 250,000 per month.

My other forums aren't doing as well, but all produce revenue and the platform
is already paid for by LFGSS.

It took me a while to work out the revenue model (get users first!), but once
worked out they're doing fine.

Seriously though... I would look at eBay and find high value items (above
$1,000 USD average) and ask myself which of those is something I'm interested
in and could invest in for the near future (as in... treat as a hobby). Then
create the site, and instead of thinking about the revenue and site, become a
user and just contribute as you would if you were a user. The money follows
that.

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madaxe
Yes, although we're now almost five, so not so much of a startup any more -
although we are entirely self-funded (not through a lack of investment offers,
just that we don't want/need it). Profits each year were $60k, 100, 30 (heavy
re-investment), 180, and this year's on track to be our first million dollar
year.

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haploid
Well, the answer is obviously "yes". I'm not sure what kind of elaboration
you're looking for, here.

To be fair, though, we're a few too many years in to really be called a
startup any longer.

