Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

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- Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive.

- I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster tools" type projects, with one-page websites like http://www.daterangepicker.com that get ~10K visits/day, and run one AdSense ad on each page, which brings in a couple hundred dollars most months.

- I run a web store where I resell another company's products (with permission) targeted at a different customer group than their own website. I advertise it on Google AdWords and Bing Ads on just a handful of keywords. Fulfillment is automated through the other company, so I haven't touched the store except to update the design every few years, and it brings in $500-$1000/month in profit. Sorry, don't want to link to this one, too easy to copy.

- Dividends from stocks and high-dividend-yield index funds are totally passive. But first you have to earn and save the money to invest in them. I also have some money in REITs, investing in real estate without having to buy and manage the real estate.

- I used to run some referral ads on my sites for a merchant account provider I used 5-10 years ago. A couple businesses signed up through those links and still use that company for their credit card processing. The commission agreement was a lifetime residual based on their monthly processing volume... I'm still getting $100-200 transferred into my bank every month from that company even though I haven't been referring anyone to them for years.

Extremely impressive list, do you mind me asking how you initially get the projects off the ground in terms of users / traffic?

Also as a side note, thank you for daterangepicker! I've integrated it into a couple little things I've built like chrome extensions and absolutely love it.

* W3Counter: I started "Website Goodies" as a content and tools site for webmasters in the 1990s. It had articles about learning HTML, learning JavaScript, and basically whatever else I myself was learning at the time back then. It also had a tools page, with things like guestbooks and surveys and a website hit counter I hosted. They were initially Perl CGI scripts, then later rewritten in PHP when I learned that. The traffic all came from search engines and organic links. The counter was pretty popular, and I wanted better web stats for my own sites without paying for them -- this was before Google bought Urchin and made Google Analytics out of it, when good web stats still cost money. So I made W3Counter, and linked to it heavily from Website Goodies, which got it off the ground. 100% word of mouth since then, I've never advertised it.

* Improvely got its first customers from Google ads. Because Improvely has a high CLV (customer lifetime value), I could spend a lot on advertising to acquire a customer and still make money from it. So that's what I did. Once I had a couple dozen customers, who were all delighted with the product and the support, word of mouth started taking over. These days 90% of new signups are referrals from an existing/past customer, or referrals from some website that's written an article or review mentioning Improvely. I still run some Google ads but with a limited budget.

* The open source projects get their traffic from Stack Overflow, forums, people searching NPM and other repositories, etc. The Date Range Picker widget got its initial traffic from a "Show HN" post I did here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408070

I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out. The thing that made them different from Improvely and W3Counter is that nobody was super excited about them. Nobody loved those products; they were maybe useful but not the best at anything and not particularly unique. So the word of mouth referrals never came, churn was high, and eventually I shut them down and tried something else.

I'm jelly. Congrats on your achievement. How many saas have you started that did not fizzle out? Also, for the 600K what is your profit on that? Was that just in the last couple of years (getting 600K/year) or already a long time?

> I've started other SaaS apps that never worked out.

We need more stories and details about such endeavors, but unfortunately most don't write about it.

Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

> Btw, how do you monetize the Date Range Picker?

The AdSense ad on the documentation website

It gets quite a bit of traffic -- https://www.w3counter.com/stats/90840/dashboard

Interesting. I was thinking most people from the target audience (tech) would have ad blockers installed. I can't imagine being a more or less tech-savvy and not using an ad blocker.

The most popular ad blockers also block W3Counter's tracking script, so those 110K monthly views it counted are just the people not running a blocker. Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

> Who knows how many more people visited but weren't counted.

Yes, although this is irrelevant regarding monetization (with adsense).

Really informative, thank you!

I'm very envious of what you've achieved, I actually wanted to start a SaaS doing almost the same as what w3counter does, but I figured because products like yours that the market wasn't worth attempting.

I am unemployed, I won't mind doing your low tech shores . I have an online shop but I made less than 90USD.

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