

Ask HN: How much of your personal capital $$ have you invested in your startup? - youngdev

1. How long have you been bootstrapping your startup?<p>2. Roughly how much of personal money have you invested in your startup?<p>3. Are you profitable, if not then at what point do you make the decision of pulling the plug and not invest your personal money anymore?
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zackmorris
1\. 20 years 2\. I was $50k in debt in 2007, now just $35k, so somewhere
between 100% and infinity.. 3\. Depends on the definition of profitable. I
probably get about $5,000 in app royalties during a good year. By the time I
get the money though, it's already gone to other things.

I'm being facetious but only slightly - it seems to me that a lot of hackers
have been doing this their entire lives and it's going to be a while before
they are profitable.

I've been bootstrapping since Nov 2010 (repairing old Macs and contracting)
and there has been a tidal wave of change washing over the industry with new
freelancing matchup services and funding opportunities like kickstarter. I
feel like I've been ramen profitable for about a year and really feel close to
a breakthrough in the next 3-6 months. If I could just find a nontechnical
benefactor, it would sure be a lot easier.

What's kept me going is the thought of working at a day job for years, only to
break even (been there, done that). There are more important things in life
than money. I garden now and ride my bike instead of drive. I think perhaps
society is starting up as well.

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soho33
not sure if our website would be considered a "startup" since all 3 partners
are doing it part time but we all invested around $5000 over a span of a year
and by the end of first year we were profitable and didn't need to invest
anymore.

being a technical cofounder i did all the coding so the only expense was the
server costs and also the design company to put together a nice layout for us.
so overall, not much overheard.

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kkt262
1\. How long have you been bootstrapping your startup? 5 months

2\. Roughly how much of personal money have you invested in your startup?
Exactly $250

3\. Are you profitable, if not then at what point do you make the decision of
pulling the plug and not invest your personal money anymore? Yes, we are
profitable.

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ntmartin
1\. How long have you been bootstrapping your startup? 2 months

2\. Roughly how much of personal money have you invested in your startup?
£50-100

3\. Are you profitable, if not then at what point do you make the decision of
pulling the plug and not invest your personal money anymore? Yes, profitable.

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leslyn
1\. We incorporated 11 mos ago 2\. Went live in Nov and have spent a total
about $3300 so far (over half on SU impressions) 3\. Not profitable - still
playing around with trying to figure out a revenue model that will actually
work! Not sure about a cutoff... Originally committed $10K in my head

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zeynalov
I started with 19 euros. 1 month of working on it. First month (after 65 days
after starting building) 2.000 euros profit. This was 8 month before. Now it
makes 50k-70k monthly profit. But my startup isn't a simple product, every
month I work on it, I make it more perfect and revenue grows.

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youngdev
Wow, those are some impressive numbers. What do you do if you don't mind me
asking.

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zeynalov
I made a traditional offline business online. For now it's local, for now it's
like "beta" version but in 6 month we will go global. Then I'll open a SHOW HN
topic and send you a message ;).

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bonsai
Send me a message with site url too :)

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tstegart
We've been going for about four months now. We have put in about $2250 and
expect to put that same amount in again before we start collecting revenue.
The plan is to be self sustaining immediately after we collect revenue, but
we'll see how that goes eh? :)

~~~
makatiguy
1\. How long have you been bootstrapping your startup? - We're on our 4th
month but I started working on this project in the middle of 2011.

2\. Roughly how much of personal money have you invested in your startup? -
About $30K, in addition to salaries I've given up to do my start-up.

3\. Are you profitable, if not then at what point do you make the decision of
pulling the plug and not invest your personal money anymore? - No. Not even
thinking about that.

