How I built a profitable bootstrapped side project | Hacker News Reader

How I built a profitable bootstrapped side project

getdeckchair.com

134 pointssquiggy2238 comments

I made my side project profitable quickly with a relentless focus on costs. The only fees I have are to Apple (dev license) and Delaware (for the LLC). Any service I wanted, I found an open source project and figured it out. I use the free tier at red hat open shift for hosting. If you let yourself get nickel and dimed by layering on SaaS products, you won't get anywhere.

Of course, I'm talking about building a profitable, low-touch side business, not a mega company.

But what about marketing? I assume you built an ios app - how did you market it among the herd of other apps?

This is where business sense comes in. If you want to make money, your number one goal isn't to have fun and learn something. If you want to work on something fun, then build what you want to build but don't expect to make any money. If you want to make money, you need to build what the market needs. If your enjoyment and the market intersects, that's amazing, congratulations. However, this is unlikely.

Once you accept that you are building a business, not a fun side project, you can start to think about how one lonely developer can make money. Preferably with spending as little money as possible to reduce risk. So to answer your question specifically - you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available. You will then immediately rank #1 or close to it, users will find you, and you will dominate without spending anything on marketing.

How do you find a niche like this? I could keep writing, but really this needs to be in a long blog post to summarize all of the different pieces of the "successful one-man side software business" puzzle. It isn't impossible but it's much harder than you wish it would be. No one pays money for something that is easy.

> you target a market that people organically search for in the app store, with zero (or totally inadequate) options currently available)

How did you go about finding such markets?

You want to build something that people find and continuously use. So even if you only get 5 new users a day, after a few years you have many thousands of users. What do people continuously use over years? Think tools, things that improve their productivity, things that help them. Monetization is pretty easy, as mobile ads pay well, and you can charge an SaaS subscription to remove ads, or consumables to get extra features. A free install is critical or no one will use it, charge on upsells within a free app.

This is an inexact science. This is inherently a risky endeavor, with a high probability of failure. You need to be mentally prepared to fail. Good luck

I believe that these are his apps:

    * Lending Club Order: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lendingclub-order/id1046114132?mt=8
    * Prosper Invest: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prosper-invest/id1093002241?mt=8

So let's say you built app A and spent 80 extra hours hunting for free SAAS products.

Similar app B saved 80 hours using more popular SAAS apps but has a SAAS bill of $100 a month. But he had a full 2 week headstart in development.

You don't think app B could end up getting more money?

That doesn't mean you should spend $600 hosting on Heroku. But swearing off all costs may be a bit much...

80 hours hunting for a tool is excessive.

I believe he was implying 80 hours hunting over the entire development process, not for a single tool.

Exactly. 2 hours to roll your own mail server here. 3 hours to roll your own cloud logging server. It can add up fast!

(And I don't think my point really changes if it is 20, 40, 80, or 160 total hours).

My interpretation of a business is a repeatable mechanism for generating profit. Starting a business takes lots of effort and time. Once you have it running, a good software side business should take very little time. You put the time in at the beginning. Once it's working, you should be able to make money without trying.

By using pay-for SaaS companies, you might save time, but as a one-man developer, I'm not in a race for success. I want to build something that lasts ideally for years if not decades that sends cash directly into my bank account. If you rely on an SaaS product, you will be paying them money for decades. And if they go out of business, you need to put more effort into finding a replacement.

By building everything myself, I pay nobody anything, and the only risk is that I go out of business. And if I build more side businesses, I can reuse my existing infrastructure and reduce their costs as well.

Why not use SAAS to launch faster, then replace SAAS with in-house after you've built market share?

For many things building it yourself doesn't take that much longer than doing an integration with a SaaS product. Usually I need 1 or 2 features that are a small piece of a much larger product.

Do you have concrete examples? Maybe this is getting too complex to use abstracts for.

server monitoring to ensure that it responds and is running. I solved it with a cron job. Lots of other server monitoring software with bells and whistles, didn't need it

New relic sever monitoring my friend. It's free (emphasis because I was shocked when I looked up pricing) and takes all of 5 minutes to setup (no exaggeration, it uses yum for 99% of setup).

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/servers/new-relic-servers-lin...

How is it free when it says it is 10 cents per hour per host? There is a LITE plan but it seems like no alerting?

Hmm, it looks like they have changed their pricing strategy. When I first signed up it was no strings attached free as a loss-leader to move you towards using their application monitoring products.

https://blog.newrelic.com/2011/11/08/server-monitoring-is-he...

So far I appear to still be grandfathered into the the free server plan?

Anyways, I guess you can disregard my original comment.

There are a fair amount of pingdom clones out there with free trials. Throw a few of them at a webpage that does select count(*) from users query, and you can get notified within a minute or two of a failure (for free).

Are you including your opportunity cost in that assessment of profitability though?

That's by far the bigger expense and dominates the nominal cost of any SaaS or licenses.

It's also what holds me back from developing any side projects: if it takes me 100 hours to build a project, it could take years to earn the $15k of my time I spent building it.

Wow! We built an open source app for holiday management [1] (with a very close UI to this one) and I always thought it would make sense to sell it as a SaaS. I'm glad to see someone actually did it!

[1] https://github.com/diacode/holidays

> If a soldier deployed in Iraq has the time to code...

LOL. True. I was running night raids in 2004 and coding during the day on an app for a commercial real estate company. If anything it was a way to cope, but hey I found the time.

I always wonder why it is so difficult to find good markets. Sometimes, it seems that coming up with a good product-idea is harder than building the actual product. Why does it work that way? Is this a flaw in how the free market works? Or is this just me - a developer - not knowing what other people need from me.

The market itself doesn't know what it actually wants.

Generally its a case of throwing ideas out there and watching what people nibble on, or stumbling across something that everyone has trouble with that you can easily solve.

Nice post. Can you clarify what you mean by proftiable, I'm assuming you're covering all costs and also paying yourself a decent salary?

If so, congrats!

I hope he hosted the blog on its own server.

Unfortunately: https://getdeckchair.com/

Congratulation on shipping. I'd love to hear about what you mean by 'profitable'. I don't want to be too nosey, but people mean all sorts of things from covering your hosting with a bit of beer money, to quitting your job and working an hour per week.

We hugged it to death

HN's smothering love.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say if you are relying on Product Hunt and Hacker News to send you all your traffic, you are still screwed.

Heh.

I'm trying to see how this particular service improves on having a shared outlook calendar where everyone reflects their vacation. Can someone point out the benefits? (This is not a criticism, I am trying to understand the service)

Congrats on the cool SaaS business! Quick suggestion. The logo at the top of the blog should link back to your homepage, instead of the blog index.

Site down, read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160530160943/https://www.getde...

I hit F5 to refresh and it came back.

I noticed that he put the following at the bottom of his landing page. There is on link to see the actual reviews.

"Rated 4.2/5 based on 144 reviews"

Anyone has any metric that something like this helps?

As of writing this, the main site is down, and the blog has missing image links.

Why do people host static sites on anything besides s3 (or similiar)? It's dirt cheap, (almost) always works, and can handle any traffic spike you can hope to receive.

Instead, simple static sites seem to crash and burn when receiving spikes in traffic. I do not understand it.

Because not everything needs to be on amazon. Also, the blog at least is wordpress, not "static".

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