
Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I - mootothemax
http://tbbuck.com/building-a-web-application-that-makes-500-a-month-part-i/
======
mootothemax
Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an
incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's
about time I started giving something back.

None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a
difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on
the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;)

Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part
written and live by early next week.

~~~
rsoto
please don't split your articles.

however, it was a good read. thanks.

~~~
jimktrains2
Splitting isn't a huge deal to me. It's hard to write sometimes, and getting a
bit out there helps you get the rest out there.

Now, paginating articles (you know, it's not like there isn't infinite
vertical space). That is a different story.

------
shazow
I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine),
it's modest yet confident.

Some feedback:

* [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into.

* Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Great work, I look forward to the second part!

~~~
icedpulleys
> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API
> policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting
notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy
explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following,
but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone
unfollowing another user.

~~~
shazow
They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't
"organically display" unfollows, you should not as well.

> Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter
> Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept,
> disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter
> service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed
> on Twitter.

~~~
icedpulleys
Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing
it, I appreciate it.

It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they
wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a
bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective
enforcement. Sigh.

~~~
shazow
You're welcome.

The way I read it is "don't do things we don't already do" which is a really
bad constraint, effectively forbidding any kind of innovation. I can
understand the spirit of their selective desire to address this specific
violation, but I'm not convinced it's as much of a problem as they're making
it to be.

Oh well.

------
revorad
Hey I remember when you launched! I even gave you some "business" advice -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641>.

Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).

~~~
mootothemax
Me? _Drama_? Never! ;)

Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D

~~~
goatforce5
Make sure you buy the guy who recommended themeforest a beer. He sounds very
wise and probably is totally awesome.

~~~
mootothemax
Yeah, he has his moments ;-p It'd be ideal if suddenly it earned enough to buy
a couple of tickets from Canada to Warsaw so that this guy and his +1 can
collect a pint in person :)

------
zacharyz
I absolutely love reading articles like this that are grounded in reality
where the point of the app is to actually make money. The fact that you are
making any money at all brings value to what you have to say that all of us
can learn from. I think most entrepreneurs will agree that it is that first
sale that is the hardest part. I look forward to your next article!

------
djb_hackernews
It looks like what you are getting at is that the design is important. I don't
think your original design is a bad starting point, much better than any
designs I've come up with for my projects.

It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme
with an existing code base. A reason I've avoided buying a theme, don't know
what I'd do with it once I had it.

~~~
mootothemax
_It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme
with an existing code base._

Honestly, it's pretty simple: you have the HTML for each page that is
demonstrated. Chop out the relevant bits for headers, footers, and then any
tables etc. that you might need, copy across the various css, js and images
directories and you're done! It really doesn't take long. Sometimes the themes
come with PHP versions as well, but not always.

If you want to test yourself, why not try downloading an open source theme
(e.g. <http://www.oswd.org/>) and take a look at what's in the HTML? I can't
guarantee it'll be an identical process, but it should be fairly similar :)

------
davidmat
Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in
the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing
freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?

~~~
mootothemax
I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By
Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it
might not be that great in, say, London or New York.

~~~
yeahsure
I would certainly _love_ an article about how to do that. In my limited
experience, it's actually pretty hard to make decent money through these
sites.

------
MicahWedemeyer
Wow, it's like reading my own history, especially the beginning, the _knowing_
that gazillions of people will be clamoring for what you build. It's tough
when you find that 99% of reactions are "meh..."

------
jamespacileo
Hey guys,

not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of
the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin
panel...

I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)

~~~
pepsi_can
Can anyone elaborate on this? From the regular license description:

 _The main thing you cannot do is offer the item up for resale either on its
own or as part of a project. So you can use the item in a free game, but not
in a game that is on sale. You can use the item in a website, but not in a web
template that you sell._

Here are the full legal terms: [http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-
terms/licensing-te...](http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-
terms/licensing-terms/)

Specifically, I wonder if you are referring to this line:

 _(d) Unless you have our prior written consent, you must not directly or
indirectly license, sub-license, sell or resell or provide for free the Work
or offer to do any of these things. All of these things are referred to as
Resale._

 _(g) You must not incorporate the Work in a work which is created for Resale
by you or your client._

I wonder what they mean by "indirectly selling" the Work. Does this apply to
SaaS? What about Freemium products?

~~~
jasoon
Taken from [http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-
re...](http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-regular-and-
extended-license-usage-examples/)

 _Regular License Examples - The Regular License could be used for any of the
following: Single website (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single
website for a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single intranet
site project.

Extended License Examples - The Extended License could be used for any of the
following: Template for a web service such as WPMU. Part of a software package
for sale._

To me that reads like in this case, the Regular license would be fine. The
extended license seems more about situations where your customers will be
creating their own unique and publicly accessible content using the template
(You start up a blogging service www.omgblogs.com and someone could create
their blog at mahblog.omgblogs.com then pick from a template you got from
ThemeForest)

------
nikcub
Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger
to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account
page.

Make the rules so that a blog post referral only requires a single click -
that way you can verify that the blog post is from who they say they are

Once you have that infrastructure, you can use it as a more generalized
referral system for people that want to tweet out a link to your product, etc.
For eg. every tweet referral signup gets you a free month

There are hordes of freelancers out there who do nothing but affiliate
marketing. For those types, you want to send them 30-50% of revenue. There are
entire products to do this for you - cj.com et al. Their referrals made up
over 50% of new users on a product I worked on previously.

~~~
lsc
>Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each
blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their
account page.

this would solve the problem of people who don't produce clickthroughs getting
paid, but it wouldn't solve the problem of looking scummy, and if you have a
bunch of duplicated content all over the place, you look scummy, and the
person who actually wrote the content is going to be cheesed.

Reputation management (which is to say, wanting to not look scummy) is the
primary reason why I don't have a referral system. Well, that and I'm not
willing to put that much cash in to customer acquisition. But it's primarily
about reputation; It's hard enough presenting a consistent message when you
have two or three employees.

Even if you only care about money, reputation is worth quite a lot.

I'm sure there are ways to do affiliate marketing without looking scummy, but
it's not obvious or easy.

------
taylorbuley
I'm happily surprised that the word "lifestyle" hasn't been dropped yet in
this thread.

~~~
mckoss
At $500/mo, this is more like a "weekend-style" business, providing some nice
walking around money even if not enough to pay the bills.

------
bane
Thanks for writing this up! We're currently going through a similar
experience. The good news is that we went from 1 signup a month to quite a few
per day (with a few days at over 100 new signups) -- mostly by following
things that we've learned here on HN.

A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting
to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few
places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various
popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do
with.

Exciting stuff!

~~~
guynamedloren
Sounds like your hard work paid off indeed! Care to elaborate on how you
gained users? Did you only email editors, or did you have other strategies as
well? What were your pitches like? I'd love to hear!

~~~
bane
I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different
details) but here's our story:

Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little
scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server
bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it
effectively.

Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that
seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any
interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.

We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening.
But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional
features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users
kept trickling in.

We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our
friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the
idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of
service quality...etc.

One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that
offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them
and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how
that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody
to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we
decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on
its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.

On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker
being one of them. Still nothing.

About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened:
[http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-
messages-f...](http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-
from-gmail-or-yahoo-accounts-in-the-future)

I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a
few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive
spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous
spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on
LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.

So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe
how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google,
you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to
LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's
called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing
up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.

Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We
haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of
our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is
pretty exciting.

It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new
traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a
few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested
features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we
contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial
Lifehacker story.

In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our
quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even
showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week
of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's
free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost
effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to
"good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).

~~~
guynamedloren
Wow, great! Thanks for all of the details. Really helps to put things into
perspective. Sounds like you're doing all the right things and hustling away.

The reason I'm curious is because I "launched" my first web app a few months
ago. In actuality it was just a feeler to see how the product faired in the
wild - core functionality was there, but greatly lacking features. The only
place I shared was HN and it was received tremendously well. It hung out on
the front page for the majority of the day, resulted in thousands of hits and
hundreds of signups, with more trickling in during the weeks following. At the
time, I was reluctant to promote anywhere else before incorporating a few new
features. Unfortunately, I was pulled away by more demanding projects, so I
haven't had time to make all of the changes and features I had planned on (or
marketing), resulting in significantly decreased traffic.

Now that my other projects are winding down, I can focus more time on building
and promoting this app. Stories like yours help a bunch, so I appreciate the
details.

Could I get your e-mail address? I'd love to stay in touch, but I don't see it
anywhere in your profile.

~~~
bane
yeah!

I updated my profile.

It's banehn and I'm on gmail.

------
karterk
Thanks for posting this. What do you use for handling the recurring billing?

~~~
mootothemax
Right now I use the most basic of PayPal business accounts. With IPN
notifications, it's pretty simple to get up and running quickly.

------
dr_
This is great, look forward to reading the second part.

At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really
not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling
tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot
of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your
concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs).

I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the
price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer.

~~~
mootothemax
_I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the
price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer._

Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda
hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make
that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long
do you think would be fair?

~~~
rhizome
You want it to be long enough for your customers to integrate it into their
habits. If they tend to be slow to decide (low conversion for a given trial
period length), then they might just need more time to depend on it.

------
delvan07
This is interesting. In the next piece can I request you go into a bit more
detail about how you increase in traffic flow to your site...basically what
marketing did you do?

------
liamgooding
Thanks, an interesting read that puts a lot of the other "I'm so amazing
because my rails app makes me and my uni buddies £50k a month" into
perspective.

But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up
soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it
increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice
to turn that $500 into $5k :)

------
dpcan
I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace
Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.

~~~
mootothemax
Because prgmr is _cheap_ and I wanted to keep costs under control from day
one. :)

For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can
set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I
know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to
Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I
see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)

~~~
patio11
Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive
crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files
is not exactly backup best practice.

~~~
sp4rki
I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a
system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically.
You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning
projects and it'll be worth having.

~~~
stakent
Don't forget to check logs to make sure your automation actually works.

Periodically make full restore from bare metal or fresh VPS image using your
backups and following written procedure.

Make corrections if something does not work as expected.

------
josefresco
Love how he cited the crappy design as the main reason why the app sucks ...
Then proceeds to put the minimum effort into design to adress the problem.
Give a designer a chance to work for you, you will end up with a result that
is better but more importantly unique.

------
eggbrain
Greatly written article, but I wish it hadn't been pulled apart into three
separate posts.

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks! The reason why I've separated is time - I thought it would be better
to release them as I write them, rather than make everyone wait several weeks
:)

~~~
eggbrain
I can definitely see it from your perspective: not only does it take less time
to write one article rather than three [and probably less pressure as well!],
it gives you content for your website (not to mention a steady stream of
visitors wanting to see your content, rather than just one big group of
visitors then nothing).

From my perspective though, it is unfortunate: I'm interested in the story,
but I don't know if I will be interested enough to check back a few weeks from
now to see the updates, perhaps because I forget the URL, perhaps because I
don't see a post on HN about it, or perhaps because I just forget. I also
think I'm spoiled by the internet: I want things now! :)

~~~
jpk
Solution: RSS! I'm a google reader user, and when I find things like this, I
toss them in there. If it's not interesting enough going forward, I can always
unsubscribe. Of course, if the author is using twitter/facebook/whateverelse
to hype posts, you can use those to similar effect, too.

~~~
mootothemax
My solution is looking at integrating MailChimp's offering once the traffic's
died down a bit. I should have done it before really, but am reluctant to
further stress a server that's already getting a bit upset ;)

------
moe
I like how you build the tension towards the cliffhanger. ;-)

------
ramynassar
Will you continue this story?

~~~
mootothemax
Absolutely! I'm hoping to have the next part up by next week :)

------
csomar
Great read. However, I wanted to mention that this is actually a story and not
a guide.

------
phlux
Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think
this is a great article and I think this is information that _should
certainly_ be shared out...

I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly.

Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the
biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a
clear and real issue for the market and industry overall:

The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who
says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X.

he then turns and build the application to do X himself.

This in and of itself _is fine_ \-- but it _will certainly_ wind up pissing
people off/alienating people entirely.

The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution
matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around
waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal
profit.

I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point
out that the way _this_ article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of
the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a
developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ
Comes to mind)

This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if
you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-
of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing
themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND
great execution to matter.

~~~
jeromec
phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369>

To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have
value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its
value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is
misleading IMO when phrased that way.

> why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with
> utterly amazing work

That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the
population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the
percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those
that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of
developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech
innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best.

Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do
amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and
post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a
device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games,
download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great
developers are _busy_ building things. Many amazing things. Some developers
build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and
innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and
many which don't. But there certainly are _many_ amazing pieces of technology
that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't
all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building,
trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing,
and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off.

Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is
"idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by
not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their
house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?

~~~
phlux
Ok, I think I need to clarify what I believe an "idea" to be. So, this is both
to you and Random42...

To Random42's point, simply having an _idea_ like: "Wouldn't it be cool if
cars could fly" is obviously worthless.

I think that I was not clear enough:

I think of an idea as a vetted plan. An idea, based on an understanding of a
problem and a market, a vision on how it will make money. A design a spec and
even mock-ups.

Far more than a simple statement of wishful thinking.

For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans
having it developed.

For example, I have a current "idea" in the medical space (which is where my
current full time focus is) that is a patient entertainment system.

This idea is based on several years of full time health care systems design
experience designing two hospitals each with a budget of more than $500
million. It is an iterative evolution of a previous idea which we implemented
and built and released open source, and a solid understanding of the market,
the challenges and the sales cycle. Further, it is arrived at with the
inclusion of hospital IT and Clinical staff that I have worked with on two
projects -- and input from the founder of one of the existing market leading
companies in this space.

I have a product spec, financial model, business plan and mock-ups.

This is my "idea" -- it is not worthless because it is a proven, fully
informed documented product plan.

I still need development and a host of other things to accomplish this.

I have millions of simple wishful thinking ideas as well, but for anything
that has value - real potential I go through the above.

I apparently was not clear with what I thought an _idea_ was... I hope this
makes my perspective a little more clear.

~~~
jeromec
> For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans
> having it developed.

But that's the problem. You know why? Because _anybody_ can do this. You can
have one million people do this, for one million years, and you know what
you'd end up with? Nothing.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that you also attach careful research to your
idea, but that only serves to lessen the risk you've overlooked obvious
reasons for it to fail. It doesn't mean it won't fail. If your idea was
guaranteed to succeed then crossing over into development wouldn't be a
problem. You'd be able to get the money somehow. I know many ordinary people
who have set aside as much as $50-100K just by being focused. Or you could get
investment, or a SBA backed bank loan. But idea people won't actually work to
do these things, because they know the truth: their idea may end up failing
(being worthless when actually tried). Either that or the other truth: even
once an idea is developed _it takes time and effort to grow it into a
success_.

~~~
phlux
Um, no. I am building this. I am not just sitting around thinking up some idea
and wishing it were true.

I am very early in my own development abilities, but I have a technical co-
founder, a hospital that has agreed to pilot this and experience in my field
which informed the design of the idea.

I think I see way to much arrogance on HN. It appears that you guys are so
eager to try to find why things shouldn't be built, when maybe its better to
figure out why things should.

I love how you all assume that one comes up with an idea, then just sits
around and attempts to wish it into existence.

Lets take a poll. How many of you here think of yourself as a mediocre
developer?

I'm willing to bet that many are under the impression they are some Ninja Star
developer and that NOTHING in this world can possibly work unless you
personally come up with it.

~~~
jeromec
> Um, no. I am building this. I am not just sitting around thinking up some
> idea and wishing it were true.

Well, now we're talking! :)

You are under the wrong impression. It's not that hackers don't want to see
idea people succeed, it's that we don't have much respect for people who are
on the sidelines and all talk with no action. I'm a developer, but first and
foremost I'm an entrepreneur. If a person is willing to put their neck on the
line while facing risk and uncertainty, they have my respect. I don't care if
they can't even set up a Wordpress blog.

I wish you best of luck with your venture! It's not about arrogance; it's
about action. You're _in the club_ as far as I'm concerned.

------
eurohacker
it would be good if you also describe

what kind of architexture you are using for the app and why - what frameworks
, languages ( django, jquery )

also what other tools you are using for development/testing and why ( github,
eclipse, firebug etc.)

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sushumna
Thats an inspiring story and informative tips..Iam on my way to build one
small app. I am expect atleast half of your earnings. Thats also big for me...
as pocket money. Waiting for your next part.

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myearwood
The fact that this article is so popular is sort of sad.That shows that a lot
of people on HN are not making $500 a month from their web apps .We should
have higher goals than this.

~~~
ahoyhere
I agree, kinda.

I'm glad for the author's success so far (and, as another HNer said, that the
word "lifestyle" has not yet reared its head in discussion).

On the other hand,back in October, about how my products had brought in
$216,000 in revenue in 2010 to date (from $0 in 2008), and I got maybe 30
votes on HN, barely made it onto the front page:

<http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/>

Which leads to me to wonder: Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so
popular, but nobody was interested in mine?

For me, it's not just about getting the hits, but getting my message out there
(I am all about making & SELLING paid products, not "startups"), so it's a
question of effectiveness.

I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories,
and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between (which is where I fall --
now). But there's probably also something else going on, whether it's me, my
essay, or the audience.

If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.

~~~
mootothemax
_I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories,
and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between_

 _If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them._

Hi, original post author here! :) I think the main difference between our two
posts is that mine goes into more detail about _how_ I created the app and
bought in revenue, whereas your posts lists only that you're already making
serious dough (incidentally, congratulations! :)), and how your revenues have
grown - not a lot about how to get there in the first place.

 _Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular_

I'd like to take issue with this point, although please do correct me if I'm
seeing criticism where none was intended :) This is obviously not a full-on
startup - I don't work eight hours every evening on it; in fact I barely put
in that many hours on it per _month_. Maybe I need to clarify this in my next
blog post. Either way, I don't understand why you're knocking it for being 1.5
years old.

~~~
ahoyhere
Hey, mootothemax, I wasn't knocking you! Sorry if it came across that way. I
only added the time frame because our time frames were the same.

If we look at stories like ours PURELY as inspiration fodder (vs personal
sagas), wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who ended up with a hundred
thousand instead of a hundred? :) That's not to downplay your success at all,
because you've gotten what you've wanted in the way you wanted. That's what
success is about, IMO.

Thanks for the tip about the specificity, I bet you're right & will try that
approach next time.

~~~
follower
Leaving aside such issues as time of the day/week when articles were posted (I
have no idea if that has played a factor in this case) I agree that the
specificity issue is likely to be applicable.

> wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who > ended up with a hundred
> thousand instead of a hundred?

How about if it's presented as "$100,000 with full time hours" compared with
"a $100 with a few hours"?

From my perspective at least, I view an article about how to achieve "a $100
with a few hours (spread over a year)" as seeming more attainable and
accessible than one about "$100,000 with full time hours (spread over a
year)". I'd think "Hey, maybe I could do that" about the former and more
"That'd be cool to do that" about the latter.

I like that you've got a "mission" to show that what you've achieved is
attainable for others as well and I look forward to reading more about how.

~~~
ahoyhere
Thanks for the feedback! You actually told me something very important,
indirectly -- our SaaS app got to $1500/mo (start) to about $4,500 on a very
part-time basis, before we put much time into it. Clearly I should talk about
this part of the story more.

