Previously asked on: 2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
Rewind 5 years…
I was so frustrated I couldn’t easily design and print barcode labels on my Mac using a spreadsheet. I opened up vscode and wrote a crude MVP in react and got it working in electron.
I put it on the Mac App Store and the next morning had my first sale in the Caribbean of all places. It’s now making 5-figures per week.
Last year I decided to start another side hustle, importing and selling high quality label printers bundled with my app, now making 4-figures per week with a growing reseller network.
Design App at https://label.live
Label Printers at https://mydpi.com
Edit: I’m still consulting so I still consider these two projects my side hustles.
Fixed one time cost for personal or business. Or a cancel-any-time subscription model. Really, there is a spot for everyone in this pricing model.
It's refreshing and builds trust. I have no need for your software, but it's like the trust is so attractive, I would consider buying it just because it's there to buy.
Anyway, congrats on the side gig income. I need to get me some of that.
Before I buy a (digital) movie, I end up renting it first. The rental costs me $2.99 and if I like the movie, I purchase it for $15.99. Yes, Amazon (or whomever) makes more money off of me, but I would rather pay the "wasted" $3 in order to decide if the movie is worth watching again. In a lot of cases, I don't want to repeat the movie again.
Like I said, your approach is transparent and builds trust. People dislike the new "rental/subscription" model that is being forced. Anyway, kudos and thanks for the reply.
This. So much this.
IF you want to make money from a project [1] then you need to sell it. Selling takes time send effort. For most of us here the -developing- is the easy part so we just do that - seemingly forever.
Stop programming; start marketing. That will be a lot more profitable, or show that what you have is nothing people want. Marketing doesn't have to cost money, but it does take time send effort.
[1] sometimes the developing is its own reward, and that's cool too. You don't -have- yo turn every project into money.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Even though the website uses the same tech stack as the electron app I decided to hire a sub contractor to build it, that way, my dev energy could stay concentrated on building features. I think we found each other on LinkedIn by chance. They reached out to me because I sounded human. Ha!
At the time, the design was inspired by the gradients on the stripe website.
I do most of my own illustrations using Sketch. The logo design is mine. My last name is Larson and my mother (Linda) used to sign her name with two big capital cursive L. The alliteration of Label LIVE and Linda Larson were fun… and as I tried to sketch the flow of a label through the printer I just stumbled on a cursive L that had invoked my own warm fuzzies. So here we are!
The name choice was mostly looking at TLD name availability for the word “label” and .live appeared. That was pure luck.
I should do marketing, but instead I'm building another product - an AI (ChatGPT wrapper) to help automate marketing.
"If I force myself to do something I hate while having a full-time job, I'll just burn out" is what I say to myself. We'll see if procrastinating essential business tasks works out for me in the long run, lol.
Question: on your design app, is the bulk of your revenue reoccurring or onetime?
My high level business plan is that my app is probably useful to 1% of businesses worldwide. This equates to $500,000,000 or $50M/year over 10 years. Big goals!
I still work on it two hours per workday, before my day job starts, but it now supports uptime monitoring for websites, APIs and JavaScript apps, as well as cron job/scheduled task monitoring, and has built-in status pages (https://hackernews.onlineornot.com for example).
It's been funny working in a "red ocean" (as MBA-types call it), competitors will enter the market with such enthusiasm, and close up shop a few months later when they haven't made nearly enough money to justify the effort.
Anyway, I'm a big fan of the "outlast" strategy as described by Justin Duke (of Buttondown): https://www.applied-cartography.com/goon-squad - my aim is to ship high quality code over a very long time, and the business seems to be growing faster and faster each year, so it seems to be working.
- Building a better product than the incumbents
- Showing up, doing the work, every single day
- Refusing to compete on price
- Marketing until it feels like it's too much, then marketing even more
Easier said than done, of course.
Would you mind giving an overview of the marketing activities you perform?
I wouldn't say their comments were that helpful or insightful - mainly just advertising. Now they've raised ~$10m. It's spam, but it works ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Instead I started to buy solar farms from my yearly xmas bonus. Invest 40K (10K bonus + 30K loan) -> 6000K/year. Net -- post costs & taxes. On average the loan was paid off in 6 years (thanks to low interest rates). From there on it's pure revenue.
Rinse repeat. Not even accounting for the free tax credits I get out of the investment.
Just doing my planning for the '23 investment. If I stop doing anything right now the last loan will be paid off in 2030 (interest rates are up a bit), and I will be making ~5K/month. Net. "Forever".
I use the time I gained for free work on important projects.
And yes, the post cost ROI is around 18%, currently -- not including the tax discounts.
May I ask what is it called?
6000/year, not 6000K, right? At first that sounded like you won a lottery.
My bad.
That is probably why you are investing your bonus, rather than selling everything to go all in. Because apart from the counterparty risk, 15% lifetime yield is pretty good. Obviously there is a threat from unlimited energy scenario like cold fusion, but that is probably 35 years away :-).
Launched just under a month ago, and recently passed $500 for November.
Plan to add analytics similar to Google Flights next to help people find the best monitor for their needs, and focus on the scope and quality of the data.
I never intended it to be a side project, I just liked the extension and started contributing heavily to it, to the point where I became the maintainer for the next several years.
I get about that amount per month in GitHub Sponsorships. Not nearly worth the amount of time I put into it, but it’s relatively effortless work. It makes my regular work on other GitHub projects more enjoyable (due to the features that Refined GitHub adds)
Thankfully not required to suffer github anymore. Specially now that their search is so bad. I dont' even want to imagine the work you had "refining" their new code viewer :)
I'll pitch some moonshot crazy idea that would be nearly impossible to pull off even with tremendous effort.
And he'll agree that it sounds neat, but comment, "I think you could make dozens of dollars with that."
It's then that I realize, I have no strategy for how to actually make money off my idea. I just wish the free product already existed.
Every now and then he thinks my ideas are worth following, and it's nice to have someone more objective than me help ground me in ideas that might actually pay off!
I curate and sell leads to agencies/marketers that want to sell to recently funded startups.
Each weekend the list is created for the previous 7 days and is sent out on Monday morning.
Marketing is purely cold email outreach right now (since that's my wheelhouse). However, I'm considering SEO and content, as it's less intrusive and can pay off long term.
Looking forward to ideas around marketing in this thread!
It's an app that takes screenshots of your screen continuously, and lets you explore it on a timeline, as well as search text on the screen.
It's a new-old idea for me. In 2015 [1] I wrote a script that did this, without a GUI. In recent times Rewind.ai started getting hype, which I guess reminded me of it. Earlier this year I saw an open source app, which seemed to vanish. Another app I tried, I just didn't like (can't remember the name). And finally, there existed a very barebones similar app (TimeSnapper) which has been around for ages, but doesn't have much feature wise, my MVP had the same base features, and I felt as if I was only getting started at that point.
I figured I could fill some void between all of this and so far people have given me good feedback.
[0] https://screenmemory.app/ [1] https://jontelang.com/blog/2015/08/15/automating-screenshots...
Same goes for the Klong book, which I bought and enjoyed thoroughly. Haven't mastered the language, though, but I'm hoping to; it definitely is really interesting, especially for a person like me who loves the build-your-own-tiny-tools-with-tiny-languages-for-your-own-use-and-prefer-low-end-computers philosophy. I'm definitely a fan of your work; your webpage and entire way of life has been an inspiration for me for years already.
If you don't mind me asking -- are you working on any upcoming books these days as well?
At the beginning writing somehow fascinated me, but right now it is probably just habit/momentum/karma that keeps me going.
It can be very frustrating, since I help my customers through the entire app creation and publishing process, so that includes dealing with Google and Apple.
I keep working on it because it's growing slowly but steadily and it provides me a lot of flexibility. I don't know which marketing channels to focus on to speed up growth though, at the moment it's pretty much all SEO.
https://chatgptwriter.ai
https://www.blackslate.io/articles
Currently I am not making $500 but over the period of time there is a potential to make.
The lowest RE rental income I have is $500/mo. I have 6 of them, between $500 to $2100 per month.
I don't actually do anything besides approving invoices. The PMs do everything.
If you are at 90% margin, might as well ignore the costs, especially for this informal chat.