

Ask HN: How much time did you invest in your startup until ramen profitable? - clyfe

Time.at(ramen_profitable) - Time.at(first_code_line) = ?
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dangrossman
About a week. Back in January 2004 I bought a domain, a design template and
set up a copy of the free osCommerce shopping cart. I created packages of
advertising services, put them in the store, then started posting on webmaster
forums with advertising sections, and participating in the forums with the
site in my signature. Total time from idea to working website was two days.

I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then
I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the
end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales!

I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from
various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual
site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A
few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as
well.

I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial
endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that
success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were
income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live.

I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay
for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while
my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I
need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.

~~~
sivers
Almost exactly the same experience here.

First month = $495 in expenses. $20 for my first month webhosting. $99 for
Dreamweaver (I was still hand-coding HTML). $375 for that damn Verisign SSL
certificate.

First month I made $300, so was a little in the red. Second month I made $700
and was profitable ever since.

First 10 musicians were just people I knew. After that were friends-of-friends
since the first 10 were so happy with my service. Then some people started
mentioning it in their newsletters, and more strangers kept signing up.

That whole first year, the site did almost nothing. I didn't even know
PHP+MySQL at the time, so it was just a hand-coded HTML site that let you put
a CD in a shopping cart, and enter your payment info. Whatever you entered was
emailed to me, and I'd copy it by hand into my merchant account to charge
their card, then copy it by hand into a label printer to mail their order,
then copy it by hand into Eudora to email them a thank-you email.

Though this was 1998, yes I think the same approach applies today.

~~~
buss
So CD Baby initially sent users' CC information via email...

~~~
dangrossman
Keep in mind none of the 'secure vault' type services of today existed in
1998, and PCIDSS didn't exist until 2004.

~~~
buss
Fair enough. I was only 11 in 1998 so I don't have any idea what the
fraud/security situation was like (and should have thought about that before
posting criticism). I'm sure CD Baby made the transition to more secure
methods as soon as it was more apparent that sending CC information via email
was a bad idea.

I was just surprised to see that, since it's such a well known Bad Thing now.

------
jasonkester
Depends on what level of ramenability you're setting your bar at. Here are
some of my milestones for S3stat:

6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at
that point).

18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.

30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a
major city.

40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first job out of college.

That's for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of
having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into.
Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get
the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires
maybe six hours of my attention each month.

So I guess the answer to your question is: longer than you think. But once
you're there, it's pretty nice.

~~~
omnipath
So if this is your secondary stream, what do you do for a primary income
stream?

~~~
jasonkester
Consulting. In the short term, it blows the doors off of any entrepreneurial
thing you could do.

The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to
keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and
use the runway to bootstrap product stuff.

Seems to be working thus far.

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spencerfry
All bootstrapped:

1 year for ramen profitable for 3 founders;

3 years for full-time job for 3 founders;

4 1/2 years for hiring 1st and 2nd employee;

5 years for hiring 3rd employee;

5 1/2 years for hiring 4th, 5th, and 6th employee (present day).

Re: <http://carbonmade.com>

~~~
Smirnoff
Just wanted to say that's a nice website. very simplistic. i assume you will
let us change the url for a price.

~~~
spencerfry
Thanks.

Yup. With the paid plan you can use a custom domain.

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joelg87
Short answer: 5 months with my new startup (to reach about $1500/mo revenue).

Longer answer: I've completely immersed myself in startups for around 3 years
and spent a full 1.5 years on a startup which never reached ramen
profitability nor got funding. I don't think I'd have been able to reach ramen
profitability in 5 months without the learning I did in the previous one.

~~~
mark_h
I'll be the first to ask... do you have a blog post with the lessons learned
that enabled your current success? (congratulations, by the way!)

~~~
joelg87
Thanks Mark!

I wrote this post about how I went from the idea to the first paying customer
in 7 weeks: [http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-
in-7-week...](http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-
how-we-did-it)

I also write weekly on my personal blog and almost every post has some form of
reflection comparing the previous startup with what I'm doing for my current
startup: <http://joel.is>

~~~
mark_h
Great read, thanks. Incidentally, the link at the end 404s:
<http://blog.bufferapp.com/tagged/building_buffer> (looks like it should be
<http://blog.bufferapp.com/category/building-buffer>)

~~~
joelg87
Aha, thanks for that Mark, it's because we moved from Tumblr to Wordpress.
Much appreciated.

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patio11
I suppose I theoretically could have bought all my ramen with bingo profits
after about 2.5 ~ 3 years, although a) I kept working at the job for another
year, b) actually doing that would have resulted in an "interesting"
discussion with Immigration, and c) you probably shouldn't use this as a
comparable since I was very, very part-time on things.

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dangravell
1.5 yrs part time for my work on bliss, of which a little over one year was
with a commercially available product. Once RP, I went full time.

This was aided by both shrinking my outgoings as well as growing revenue. I
cut out as many monthly outgoings as possible, went PAYG with my mobile phone,
stopped spending daft amounts of money on wine... You've got to work out
what's more important - cable television or your startup?

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preinheimer
Probably around 8 months - 1 year for us (<https://wonderproxy.com>). My co-
founder and I were both employed full time elsewhere so we used revenue to
expand constantly, becoming profitable wasn't on our short to-do list.

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powertower
This greatly depends on your experience level, how much work you put in every
day, the type of business you are in, you're personal situation, and quite a
few other factors.

If you're at the top of your game (you know what you are doing - have
experience of 5-10+ years), I would say if the income does not come in after
3-6 months, you're wasting time and effort.

Otherwise it could take years to get things right before you find out that the
market for your idea is not there.

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beeeph
My startups first iOS game, Quotiac, was making ~$7/day within two days of
making it on to the App Store. It took me about three months of full time
development (programming + asset creation) to get there. My monthly expenses
at the time were nil, so every penny earned was considered profit.

<http://itunes.com/apps/quotiac>

~~~
amerine
It's only profit if your time spent on it was worthless.

~~~
beeeph
Time spent building anything is worthless until that thing is profitable.

------
steventruong
First startup, within 30 days (or less) we had revenue and profit to sustain
cost. Currently working on finding next idea so nothing yet.

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jeffrieger
Breakdown for freshtemp (firmware/hardware/software)

10 months full time (80 hrs/week) - first customer ($200/mth)

This time includes learning YUI to build the frontend (2 months)

Hiring consultant to build the backend (3 months)

Testing and building hardware (7 months)

This was done with less than 40K of cash, financed through myself and family.

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erikstarck
Related question: how much faster can you do it if you quit your dayjob and do
the startup full time? Is it worth the added risk?

~~~
autalpha
I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full
time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part
time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if
you could afford it.

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erikpukinskis
2.5 years and counting, for better or worse!

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westiseast
Interesting question, thanks for posting. I'm selling Chinese tea (a physical
product sold online), so it's different from these SaaS guys, but it's about 3
months from launch and covered 1/3rd costs, but about 6 months since first
line of code.

~~~
wallflower
Check out this site.

<http://www.inpursuitoftea.com/>

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damoncali
<http://trackjumper.com> took almost a year to break even. Had I been working
on it full time, it would have happened much sooner.

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DenisM
5 months for my iPhone app. I broke ground in May 2009, released in Sept, and
the money became ramenable around Nov, after I fixed the glaring bugs.

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Maro
18 months for Scalien.

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azsromej
nearly a year of writing iOS apps

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hrasm
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