It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years.

2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k

Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that!

This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io.

It's now a cost of living and city database with 1,000+ cities, and monetized with a 10,000+ people membership community of digital nomads, remote workers and general travelers. They pay $75/year to be a member (not everyone is recurring, I just started with that)

I haven't had a lot of costs as most of it I do myself. Although it's been very hard work, especially in the beginning before I automated everything. I do have to charge 21% sales tax, and Dutch tax is relatively high but I've just opened a Ltd. so it'll be less now.

The hardest part? I think early on capturing a new market quickly, keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better. And then hopefully don't get traction, haha. Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin.

It's mostly been an extremely fun experience though and I'm really happy and proud of what I made ^_^

P.S. I've been lurking on HN since 2010, that made me learn to code seriously and build stuff. I'd read patio11's posts and was super inspired. So I'm really thankful that HN existed and helped me get here.

Out of curiosity, was the fallout over the lack of security very bad? I was in Chiang Mai last fall and nomads at coworking spaces and meetups were all talking about it. Several downloaded the entire chat logs from Nomad List. I was horrified to be honest but hadn't really chatted about much of anything yet so I never complained.

I will say though that it was a bit grating to see you bragging on twitter about not bothering with frameworks or testing right after having seen discussions I'd thought were at least somewhat private downloaded and passed around online.

Lots of people asked for the chat logs (of public channels only) to be public and searchable. Like the forum. So I made them. Then lots of people didn't like that and wanted them to be private. It was never a security leak, I uploaded the logs myself. That was the whole point. I've never had any security breaches.

It was never a private chat, it's always been publicly accessible by anyone who paid the entrance fee and then scraped it. And they could (and probably) have already done that since the beginning.

(I guess misunderstandings are also difficult to catch as a solo team, too)

Found this the other day: nomads: people who have larger collections of coffee shop wifi passwords than clothes - @jongold

You've mentioned something about automating. Can you tell me more about it and which you've decided to not use?

As for competition, how do you specifically handle this?

I mostly try to ignore competition and stubbornly make what I would like to use myself. It helps that I am a "nomad" myself, so I know kinda what they need.

> keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better

My current project https://remotebase.io borrowed a lot from NomadList. While it's not successful yet, I can see what you mean.

Thank you.

So I added a MailChimp email box, then a chat group, a forum and kept making more for them. That's how people kept coming back and finally paying money.

Great work !

It's a myth you can just open a corp anywhere and benefit from low tax, a lot depends on where you live personally (as CEO), where your staff is, where your customers are and where you spend the "fruits of your labor". Why is it a myth? Because otherwise EVERY freelancer would offshore to a low-tax country. They can't. It's a loophole that doesn't exist.

https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/

About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly.

Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret.

Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, persistence, persistence. In a very crowded niche. Desktop software is definitely not dead - you can charge a whole lot more for it, and ongoing costs (other than people) is comparable to trendy web apps.

Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment.

It took me over five years in this business to fully internalize this. Programmers (me included) often complain about clueless entrepreneurs in this business, but even more rare than a good programmer is a good entrepreneur, who can sell/market and turn code into money.

Modern day marketing is a complex orchestration of many parts that are often highly technical. Further, the discipline as a whole has some incredibly hard unsolved problems when it comes to measurement and analytics (attribution and viewability I'm looking at you).

If anyone has a product with initial traction but is unsure of where to go next, feel free to ask, happy to answer questions.

I am always torn because while I can appreciate good marketing, a lot of the marketing and advertising Industry (which too me seem like different things) seems to be bullshit.

I really like it when there are marketing campaigns that try to understand me and help me. Well designed product descriptions for example. Or research to understand customer needs, actually useful newsletters not only about the company itself(there is a really good startup tracker whose newsletters i read for a while)that stuff I get. I also get advertising as a separate or subfield of marketing, when it is in the case of "hey, we exist, we do this, you might be interested". Helping me find stuff which is useful basically. And usually, the good products don't need to do more(at least it seems like this?). Like rsync.net had an advertisement on resist once, that they now supported ZFS and that of you did not know why that was cool, you should not click the link. That spoke to me, conveyed information clearly and made me aware of rsync.net

What I don't like is stuff like YouTube ads trying to sell me beauty products. That will get them nowhere. Or the bullshit newsletters to build "engagement" by automatically subscribing you when yiu make an account, then listing "10 freaky ways people use $product. Number 5 will surprise you!". That stuff will turn me off products, even if it is good.

If yes, then that's it, you're done. Take the money, give 'em the thing, and do it again. :)

For books, for getting a start in marketing, I like "Guerrilla marketing in 30 days".

Biggest shift, though, is just mindset; going out and talking to people again and again until you learn what matters to them. It takes a lot of time, and when you're not used to it, it feels like it takes way more time than you're actually putting into it. Eventually you do learn, this is what these people have in common (they're members of some industry, field, hobby, affinity group), this is where they go (online, offline, in-town, conferences), this is how they like to be marketed to (online ads, postcards, in-person events, etc). Just takes time and effort, more than anything. Pretend you're learning a language, and assume it'll take that long to get conversational. :)

Go to marketing industry tradeshows and see what people are focusing on. Read Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report and other research to understand macro trends. Pick up a recent college textbook on the matter to brush up on the basics. Talk to people in the space and learn what works and what doesn't. Find blogs and read enough where you can separate the truth from the bullshit.

Oh yes, there's a lot of bullshit. Any marketer worth their salt will be the first to tell you there is a lot of snake oil out there and there is unfortunate overlap with the "get rich quick" community in many cases when researching this stuff online.

Like any industry, there is a spectrum of good and bad actors, and quality/crap products and services. Sometimes that is difficult to determine because your own situation may be the barrier to success.

More to your point, my personal motto is "the right message to the right person at the right time." This seems to align with your view. It all comes down to understanding your audience and earning trust--not tricking them into your message with a clickbait headline.

Beyond that, if you are able to harness the goodwill of the hive mind, you can reach that critical front page trajectory pretty quickly. If you are one of the few brands that lucks out in dominating in a given subreddit for a period of time (not through advertising), that's a huge validator. Further, pleasing that audience can result in lots of earned social activity which is great for a nascent brand.

For FB specifically, Lookalike targeting is very powerful, and banner blindness is a very real thing that requires constantly refreshed creative depending on your reach (excluded audiences can be important here to avoid wasting impressions). Unless you are using a FB PMD (basically a tool to manage FB that offers loads more than the basic Power Editor), splitting stuff out for granular targeting can be a PITA. Break out your audiences in meaningful chunks where you can gain insight and better improve your creative. More importantly, make sure the rest of your analytics are in order so you can understand what people exposed to you through FB are doing on your site. For a brand that may not be well-known yet, you might avoid a lot of bigger attribution issues with conversion tracking, but make sure you think carefully about whether you want view-through attribution settings enabled for conversion tracking. They are by default, and that can skew things and they may not be worth as much as you think they are based on the stats.

In terms of hiring for marketing, most strong marketers know there's a lot outside their control. There's definitely a difference between marketing a sales. As such, I would actually avoid focusing too heavily on commission as that can be a turnoff that says you aren't putting your money where your product is so to speak. That said, if the person has significant control over the full funnel and relevant touch-points (a requirement to be successful when it comes to online marketing), they might be willing.

The other side of that is the affiliate world. These are essentially 100% commission marketers. You can get mixed results, but it manages your direct financial risk a bit better than hiring someone internally in some cases. There are real benefits to having an internal hire though that you simply won't get with affiliates as they are by definition mercenaries.

Like many professions, comp can be relatively simple. A competitive base plus a well-detailed bonus structure, solid benefits, potentially equity if appropriate, and a great culture coupled with a product with lots growth potential are all things that can land a solid marketing hire.

Another question - looking to pick your marketing brain. We built a bit of a swiss army knife into our products. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible:

- a user can use one Puck as a remote sensor for their Nest

- a user can use one Puck + Multiple Vents for an Ecobee (like Nest but with remote sensors)

- a user can use Multiple Pucks and Multiple Vents with a Nest

- a user can use a Puck with a Window AC or Minisplit (standard AC outside of North America where they don't have central heating/cooling)

Without having you get too deep into our specific products my main question is more around how to market in a scenario like this. I am toying with the idea of effectively building different landing pages for different people (one person controlling a minisplit likely doesn't care about smart vents for instance and might even be confused). Was thinking specific adds that target different use cases that then direct to those landing pages. A bit of a PITA in terms of lots of different flows/content etc but need to make sure we effectively communicate without confusing.

Multiple landing pages may be the way to go, and can have value from an SEO standpoint as long as they are not too repetitive.

Beyond that though, consider entry into those pages. Odds are you want to give a different message to different people, so think about how you might incorporate some sort of self-selection mechanism when people arrive at your site. Maybe asking them in a little configurator widget what setup they have or what they are trying to do. You can use those signals to direct them to the appropriate page, but also to segment them into various audience buckets for purposes of advertising, remarketing, etc. It is amazing how valuable a couple clicks can be in terms of clarifying what audience someone falls under. For example, if you get a lot of searches on your brand term in AdWords, giving different site links to different sections lets you better understand the intent of your audience. Better intent signals give you better data for targeting and messaging which in turn should lead to better conversion rates from the more relevant experience.

Thanks Again!

I'm currently going through the pain of trying to figure out all the marketing stuff... it's hard. Really hard. I don't have traction right now, but I want to start building a small user base so I can begin collecting some feedback. I've put together a survey (http://survey.tutora.org), I'm handing out flyers and talking to people, I've also set up a small Google AdWords campaign. Am I on the right track? What do you guys think is the best strategy to acquire the first 100-1,000 users?

Thanks!

Low technical debt mostly revolves around:

(1) Keeping your code maintainable. Example: the framework you're using (like one for making a website, or JSON API, or accepting emails and triggering actions, etc.) gets a new version. You stop what you're doing and you go and upgrade. Why? Because the older version of a framework/library you use, the less chances you have to get a bugfix from the maintainers when you inevitably stubmle upon a blocker bug one day. Being able to [almost] always switch to the newest version means:

(1.1) Keep a good collection of unit / integration tests. They don't have to cover 100% of the project. If you have a good integration test suite covering most of the customer scenarios, you're already in a much better shape than most projects on the planet.

(1.2) Keep an eye out of the changelogs and version releases of all frameworks and important libraries your project depends on. You must have a good idea what's changing in there. It might help you remove WTF code pieces that were working around a defect in the framework/library which suddenly is fixed in the newer version as well.

(2) Keeping your code evolvable -- if at certain point of development you conclude Ruby on Rails isn't cutting it, you must be brave and decisively and quickly replace it with something else. There's a huge price to pay when you're hesitant. Don't be hesitant!

If your code has separation of concerns, the various pieces have single responsibilities, if it minimizes state sharing and is regularly tested -- that's a project you won't be scared to migrate to a much newer version of your framework, or switch the framework (or even the language) entirely.

(3) Keep a huge internal documentation of what you want improved. When you're in a hurry to deliver a working product customers can use easily, you inevitably make compromises. Document them. Be ruthless and never make exceptions. No "I am too tired to write this down right now". NO! Scribble it on a napkin if you have to. Dictate it to your smartphone. Do whatever it takes. Eventually you'll return to your computer and write it down. I use a private Trello board for that, works very well for me. It has ~60 points in there but you know what? 3 months ago it had 150. ;)

So keep your code tested and documented. Be real with yourself and document (internally, for your eyes only) all of its warts. Realize its limitations. Find the value it brings to the paying customers. Maintain that. Get ideas on how it can attract more paying customers. Implement them.

Bottom line: BE ON TOP OF YOUR CODE, always. Realize that the code itself doesn't change if you don't change it (not like GitHub will maliciously modify your source files) but if you don't change it, then the business value of your code rots over time. It's really not any different compared to any other revenue-bringing asset. It needs maintenance and support (and evolution/expansion when you want to grow).

Let me just point out that what I commented is a generalization and simply an excerpt of all the good practices I found during my [almost] 15 years of commercial experience.

Understanding your place in the world (namely what business value does your code bring) and worshipping communication -- even between your current self and your future self -- are what I found to be the gods I worship during my work, and it made me much more productive and valuable for my customers/employers.

The prototype was custom pages on a Wordpress site (pretty slow to load, especially on phones, not easily scalable, etc), the new one's a .NET-based site, loads instantly on any device, and when I watch the server load, I can see that this thing will live happily on even a low-end VPS for a long, long time to come (lot of traffic growth so far, no increase in load!).

Keeping technical debt low is good, money's a higher priority. It's a business. That never really hit me before. :)

Keeping people motivated is key. And an absolutely mandatory entry filter must be for them to be at least somewhat excited about your project.

If I am very tired and annoyed (like I am most of the time sadly), I can still deliver everything you ask for, to the letter, with good quality and on time. But you might need more than that -- you want a person who gives you ideas about your product, who criticizes and challenges your ideas, somebody with whom you can have midnight enthuastic discussions (or yelling competitions -- these help as well).

Simply having a strong programmer isn't enough for a micro/small startup. Everybody has to be on the boat or it won't work. You can have the strong programmer as a lead once you have 2-3 others though -- in my experiences having an experienced dev is crucial once you're out of the phase of pure enthusiasm, and when you actually have something you can now work with.

I'm brimming with ideas - really good ideas, but I don't want to pursue them without dedicated partners. I want to build great products foremost, the money follows naturally.

We can talk privately if you think there's an opportunity here.

"Several 6-figure online businesses" / "$400k/year and 5h per week" --> this is the kind of posts that make it look so easy to build this kind of businesses. And honestly, it seems unrealistic and almost bullshit. Why commenting if you don't give out your URLs?

I seriously don't understand this trend of people blabbing their revenue numbers and showing their exact website... there is no better way to create a competitor than that. And for what, an ego boost?

Also, it's not like you email your competitors and exchange revenue numbers.

For what it's worth: I pal around with a group of entrepreneurs and the #1 factor to success is sustained marketing and advertising.

Most importantly I don't know if you can even compare the two fairly. At scale marketing is basically a subset of programming (or I suppose statistics). B2B it's quite a different beast and mostly about understanding processes and being good with people.

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in marketing (other than "people are complex"). In programming there are some problems that are extremely tough to solve.

I mean sure it's not that hard to hack together a webapp that scales to a reasonable number of daily users. Programming something more complex, keeping it secure and keeping it up and running...that's pretty tough overall.

Don't get me wrong, selling stuff and turning code into money is not trivial and also a very valuable skill, arguably a more valuable skill than raw programming power for a startup. I do however think programming is ultimately harder. If you start a company you need both. "Marketing" is more important I'd say (as you can live with acceptable programming for most web-based startups for example) but eventually the lack of programming power will haunt you.

Why do you say that there are no inherently hard problems in marketing? Winning market share against a competitor with a bigger ad spend than you sounds like a hard problem. Achieving minimum customer acquisition cost and optimum market segmentation sound like hard problems. Getting customers to self-select early in the sales funnel so that your salespeople don't waste their time on looky-loos without cutting into actual sales sounds like a hard problem. (I don't know, because I'm not in marketing. Educate me!)

Also, saying that there are no hard problems in marketing other than "people are complex" sounds a bit like saying that there are no hard problems in computer science other than "math is complex".

Once you've ramped up to a certain skill level in marketing you're pretty much set. I never get that feeling on programming related work. Maybe I'm just not that great a programmer it's somewhat likely (but I'm also not great at marketing, I've seen some true sales-beasts in action and it's pretty beautiful to watch).

I merely meant to say that getting to a level where your marketing/sales are at the 80% level that will get you really far is easier than getting to that 80% in programming (imo). I'm fairly confident that if you'd take someone with 0 experience in either field you could teach the 80% marketing a lot faster.

The initial post I replied to contained the line "coding is easy, marketing is hard". I basically wanted to provide the counter perspective. I very much disagree with the "coding is easy" part of that statement but I guess I focused too much on the "marketing is hard" part. I fully admit to being somewhat snarky with the "no hard problems in marketing" comment but I thought the "other than people are complex" made that clear. Guess not, should have stuck with "marketing is easy, coding is hard" ;)

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in AI (other than computability).

The reality is that for some people, programming is easy; marketing is hard. For some other people marketing is easy; programming is hard. That's really all it is. Delving into the details doesn't get us any closer to a more useful answer.

I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me.

Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two

Not sure about your customers, but if I was a customer of some product I'd be happy to know they're are doing well :)

And the couple of customers that know our size have indicated it's better to appear large. For example, you wouldn't switch a company from using Microsoft Exchange to something else if that something else was run by a couple of guys. Our company would be in very deep trouble if something happened to me. To balance that, customers get updates and fixes very fast because they work with such a small company.

I'm curious as to what you tell a potential customer if they just ask you directly how big your company is? "It's mostly just me..."? Do you just hope that they don't ask that question?

Personally in this market having a business run by a single person is probably these risky than a small team since the chance of bankruptcy is less.

It is wise to hide his small size from companies he sells to. I have seen countless stories that large companies act like bullies and take advantage of small companies on a routine basis.

That may not be what he was thinking. But it is in his own best interest.

And since my replies were being rate limited, I'll respond to your long-tail question above. We have tried a lot of long tail keywords, but they have such low frequency that Adwords penalizes you (low quality score) for using them, which means you pay more per click account-wide. That is why I say get to know Adwords - there are a lot of gotchas.

Question - Why would you care if they did?

If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design).

The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago. People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are static graphics.

Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.

The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.

Re: traffic spikes, no. There are limited spots which can be purchased so adding more spots whenever I want wouldn't seem right to my current advertisers who bought based on the limit in place.

Edit: I also get contacted by ad networks from time to time saying I could boost my revenue, but I always ask which advertisers they have who are relevant to my audience. It is always none. So at this point, I'm relatively confident that I don't need an ad network to service my particular niche.

The site is on Wordpress so I just use plugins to handle that stuff. I'm basically a publisher so Wordpress is perfect for almost anything I could need to do.

OS has changed a lot in its look and features and the audience I target, but it is essentially the same concept.

I have some questions. Who puts content in your site? Who placed content in the site at the beginning, just yourself?

How did you learn how to host your own ads?

Btw, which office design do you like the most?

My favorite office is mine because it is well-suited to my needs :)

I think a year after I started the site was when my first major office design of Google's office in Stockholm was sent in by the architect. Before then the site was mostly candid tours from random people and random companies.

Edit: I think I have ~60 projects on the calendar to be published right now.

Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that.

Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then great!

1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)

2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).

3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.

Good luck!

Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.

I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.

Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!

SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits.

Thanks!

Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?

I've actually been using IFTTT for my PagerDuty replacement since I can't afford it hahaha, unless I'm missing something they don't seem to charge for phone calls etc

They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.

I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans

The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).

Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.

(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)

I'll have to keep an eye on the analytics for free plans. I'm not tracking conversions very well right now, most seem to choose a paid plan right away (if ever).

Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?

P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.

P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :

[1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,

As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things.

I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products.

I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.

- Incorporating the company

- Terms of Service

- Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company

That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.

Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.

I have never used it, but many friends have, and the owner is my buddy Aaron, who is an all-around great guy.

I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?

2) Hey you're TJ Holowaychuk. I know you've since (mostly) moved on from doing a ton of Node contributing, but as someone who uses projects you've started and maintained for a long time, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work in the open source community.

I'm also going to link your photography site (a) for those who haven't seen it. I know this it's slightly off topic, but everyone should see it.

(a) http://tjholowaychuk.com

[0] http://github.com/garnaat/kappa

Have you considered translating it to other languages?

If I could make a bet that adding, let's say, French, German and Chinese would cause... 700 more sales, I would probably bother, but I don't think this sort of feature 10 months after release would generate that.

I'm treating this more as a 'lesson learned', and approaching my next project with localisation in mind. Translating to a bunch of languages is one of my main goals.

A final thought; I love that in 2016 a lone developer can make a silly puzzle game about cats and sell it in 80+ countries. The internet!

I have another question: how much of a hassle was setting up a company in order to submit something to Steam?

Good luck with your next project!

EDIT: in the spirit of proper forum etiquette, I will add to the conversation.

Currently spent 4 months 'funemployed' and aggressively pursued my side project full time, a side-scrolling action platformer. I became rather quick to pick up the necessary art skillset and have demo-ed my alpha at local venues. It's received solid praise regarding fundamentals and playability - peoiple just want 'more polish' to give them a reason to buy it and play.

Subsequently networked and found an audio engineer who I've found to fit my needs. I cannot stress how hard it was to find one i liked, which kinda justified my decision to pay him a dec. amount.

Total nominal expenses thus far: 12k

considering I own vice renting, a good portion of that is tax deductible so really it's a net expense of 10K, plus the added benefit of flexibility and pursuing passion.

If I were to sell > 2k units, I would seriously consider a campaign of 1 game a year on the side, as I feel I have a grasp on the process. I still aim to be a moonlight dev vice full-time, for risk-mitigation and life reasons.

In this specific case, I used the Unity engine. I write in C#, and with Mono/OpenGL, Unity can build executables to various platforms, on (mostly) the same code.

http://electron.atom.io https://cordova.apache.org

This won't work for all apps, but (for example) a lot of simple mobile apps use Cordova with faux-native UI frameworks, and there are a lot of graphics-lite games out there using NW.js or Electron on desktop.

Market: Add-on tools/plugins/components for enterprise software platforms. Customers: ~30 Growth rate: Adding about 1 new customer per month Revenue: $550K ($300K product / $250K consulting) Gross profit margin: 80%

Costs are basically hosting, occasional marketing campaigns, some offshore development, and various SaaS subscriptions to operate the business.

The product often requires consulting services to customize, which can be lucrative. I bootstrapped the product development via consulting and am transitioning to a full-time focus on product dev/support... recruiting SI partners to do customizations.

Note: This is purely a lifestyle business. My true goals are digital nomad in nature.... traveling, writing code from a hammock in the Philippines, spending Winters in Mexico, work 6-9 months per year, etc...

The income is nice, but freedom and mobility are far more valuable.

My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)

It was nice to hear about this, as my wife also helps me out in running my business. Its ultra important to have the buy-in of your significant other for these kind of operations.

In my case I have other developers as well. That's why can't claim to be a single person company. Although, there have been phases in its journey, where it has been just a 1.5 person company.

I am not as mobile (got some dependents) but cheers to the digital-nomad/lifestyle-biz kind of company. Work hard, but at your own pace. See movies in week day afternoons. Or spend entire days on HN/Reddit/twitter. Then feel guilty about it, and spend some days coding, and making some progress, has been my modus operandi.

Edit: Just to add one random but key point in single-person companies, is that you end up doing automation, automation and then some more automation. Cron jobs, alerts, actions, automated test scripts, backup scripts, data refresh scripts and so on. So then even if you grow, its a positive to have in your culture.

Automation is certainly crucial for one-person shops. Leave nothing to chance or human error.

TDD for both front and back-end code, lint checks, version control, server-less DevOps.... embrace as much as possible.

Really any forecasting, CPQ, quote-to-order, or month end close app that saves users a few hours and clicks per month will demonstrate immediate value and sell itself.

There's always a risk that the platform vendor will fill the niche, so I keep iterating and addressing more edge cases to become the "premium" product with high touch support.

Also.... basically just be happy with 42 customers and let the whales have the other 98% of the market :-)

I want to know more.

Would you mind if we chat on a non-public channel (email/twitter DM/skype chat) where I can pick your brain ?

If you want, in return I could help you out with coding or marketing or even some mundane task that takes time. I'm a software developer.

You can reach out to me on my alias email that is in my profile or let me know the method of communication you prefer.

Launched on Product Hunt in January 2016 and we were #2 for the day. It’s generating revenue now, though not enough to give up my other gig yet. But I have customers that are giving me some great feedback.

Initially I did everything myself (including UI/UX) but last year I hired a designer to help with a redesign. Also even though I am a developer I hired another developer to help when I had some other things to look after in my consulting business.

LOOKING FOR COFOUNDER: Do you have the marketing and business development chops that will complement my technical and product experience? Drop me a PM or email to jordan @ my domain.

I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid, I keep expenses low so it doesn't take many paid users to be profitable. If I had more knowledge of how to market such a thing, I believe it could be a reliable revenue source. But I'm otherwise happy that its relative profitability motivates me to maintain it, as I find it supremely useful for my own personal use.

1. Identify leads (comapnies + the email of the person who would be in charge of server status)

2. Create alerts for their services

3. Your system sends an alert when their service goes down. They instantly recognize the value of your service.

I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.

Once you've talked to all your customers you should have a lot more info you can use to market to new customers.

It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups.

Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year.

User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rather than total new users. Active users increase around 15% year over year.

A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding.

We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clone. It'll be 10 years this Fall, and we've been profitable since 2013.

Price point is high enough where it's not likely a quick purchase but too low for an inside sales team. I'm working hard on content marketing to build trust in the market place to drive user growth while keeping my team small (just me so far)

My acquisition process right now is a "call me to sign up" after showing prospects a demo video. Not ideal. I'm working on making the app (filled with a model farm's data) live for users to test for a couple days (gated behind an email opt-in) and then allow them to sign up online. We'll see!

It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but well on the path to become one. I've learnt a lot about product development, handling customers and had many choices along the way I was completely confused about. I hope to put it all in text one day but for now I am too busy adding features, developing new products and optimizing the code :)

I just don't like doing marketing and I don't like convincing people what they should or shouldn't buy. I realize that maybe we are leaving some money on the table but on the other hand we get great reputation, a lot of word of mouth referrals and very small refund rate (below 1%) so that's good for mental health :)

As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were:

-everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive)

-people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations

As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could).

It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).

- 10k first two years.

- Growing somewhat steadily to 250k around 2010

- Revenue (this is period when I was working 3 others) grew to 350k) by 2013

- Crashed to 40k in 2014, 2015 after cutting bunch of apps and going back to being just me as only employee.

- With luck foundation is back in place (http://www.taskpaper.com), hope to reach around 100k in 2016.

Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses besides my 5 eur/month webserver.

https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/

Any tips?

Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?

Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however. Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.

Are you a streamer ? I would love to have a quick chat with you over slack or skype or whatever to know more about the tool & your experience as a streamer.

You can reply here or to the alias email listed on my profile.

I'd love to talk to you, but am unable to do that right now. Is it ok to contact you in ~2 weeks?

I love to interact with like minded HN users/developers/entrepreneurs... and these days have developed an interest in the Twitch eco-system and how it works.

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I use http://hnreplies.com to monitor for replies to my comments at HackerNews. How do you keep track ?

I'm running a booking system SaaS (https://zapla.co) which basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.

I must admit that marketing is my absolute weak side, but I've had the most success using organic SEO backed by some SEM campaigns. Since my product requires customers to have a website, I've created landing pages targeted at major WYSIWYG/DIY website builders. If they search for e.g. "booking system for <platform>" they'll have a chance to find a Zapla landing page for that platform :)

I have a bucketful of ideas, and I'm endlessly energetic in a team context, but trying to do solo projects wears me down quickly.

Maybe this is just a character difference, but if solo entrepreneurs have tricks or methods for keeping going and keeping focused, I'd love to hear them.

Internalize the idea that you don't have to be motivated to get stuff done. It's okay to admit, "I'm not motivated right now", and then get to work regardless!

Get into a routine for starting work, and try to never skip it, even when it feels unnecessary.

Find blog posts, videos, and articles that motivate you. Revisit them often, or work them into your routine. I like DHH's talk from Startup School '08 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY), for example.

It's a market data app with a custom technical indicator for a specific commodity. I've found an external commercial team specialised in this industry niche and they're going to start sales in the coming weeks (after the remaining regulatory hurdles are cleared). This is a top-notch sales team working for Fortune100 companies, so I'm doubling down on them for 15 to 50% of the revenue (depending on sales)....

We tested the tool internally for some customers and was an incredible success. People is literally waiting in line to get it... so I'm also arranging external accounting + support teams.

I hope (knocks on wood) it'll generate me x5 to x10 times the salary I was offered in management positions at 2 of the biggest spanish startups (tuenti and social point).

In the coming months I hope to automate everything for all the teams via Slack ChatOps so I can have more free time and start new projects before Christmas...

Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience.

My hopes are high for this product.

Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have a good build system.

I'm also with you on Backbone there. Good job and keep on going.

Have you done any testing with real users ?

What exactly are your hopes for it ?

My aim is to first provide a complete web based music notation app. And ultimately a library of licks and phrases which users can utilize to aid in their compositions. Basically I've loads of ideas with this product. Build practice routines, i.e practice scales, maintain a practice schedule, etc. So yeah, lots of stuff I can build into this.

Other ways on the top of my head would be writing guest posts on other music related blogs or paying them to send it to their newsletters ....

You could also cheaply? target specific YouTube videos with your ad ...

Further, if you are new to copy writing for ads, cashvertising is a great book.

And btw, when I enabled it (Noscript) the page loaded forever and again did not show anything - but I guess you may get some more visits now that you've linked it here.

The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke.

Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the first page statically so it does not need to talk to a backend when the visitor is most likely going to close the page after looking at the landing page.

If you really want to make it as an entrepreneur, dogma has to go out the window, and data based decisions have to be front and center, especially when weighted for cost/benefit.

If data shows that search engines don't link to your site and don't index your content, that would be action actionable data.

Ohhh I so hear you. Thanks for voicing reason in a sea of hipsterity.

Also I do agree with the sentiment, that data decisions should lead an entrepreneur. Non the less everyone should be able to at least grasp an idea of any site.

Further, 'Free' should be immediately visible above the fold on the landing page.

A common and, IMO not-unreasonable view is that all content on the web should be viewable on the web with just HTML and CSS (sometimes even without the latter) and thus JS should never be required save for specific tasks such as in-browser computation and the like. That's a bit extreme for me, so I just white-list scripts as needed.