$100k Revenues in One Month | Hacker News Reader

$100k Revenues in One Month

startupdesi.com

196 pointsmast35 comments

Most important bit of the post: "[Don't be] shy to charge more." If there are people getting $250 of value out of your services, give them an option to pay you $250.

Wouldn't that negate the value that they get from the services, such that their overall balance becomes $0?

I'd expect a charge (at least) slightly less than $250 in such a case so that there's a win-win situation for both.

They probably don't have a hard limit at $250, and even if they do, it is often useful to get extra money from folks who are getting incredible customer surplus from you (e.g. big companies, well-paid professionals, etc) and just ignore people who don't (students, startups, etc).

Very awesome! To say I'm jealous is an understatement. One small nitpick, I thought the title meant you made $100,000 your first month alone. Congratulations none the less.

I thought the same thing. I read that as $0-100k in first month. Still the feat is impressive nonetheless.

Well, that is just the post title on YC. My article still says $100,000 Revenues in <em>a</em> Month – Wow!!!

oh I know. congrats on that BTW. Interesting read as well.

Congratulations! You're more profitable than Groupon :-)

I was thinking about writing an ebook, with code examples, that taught how to build HTML5 WYSIWYG editor in HTML5/JS/jQuery.

It would include a full working website with database as a starter kit.

I wonder if something like this could be profitable...

If you do and you have a reasonable affiliate program on it, I run a 7000+ subscriber strong JavaScript newsletter and would be all over this ;-) (Same goes for any good JS related products, to be honest.)

Can you recommend an affiliate program?

I've never run one. But the best ones I'm an affiliate on so far seem to be http://zferral.com/ and http://clickbank.com/ - they're very different. Zferral is basically a webapp that lets you create an affiliate program for your "whatever" using your existing billing system. Clickbank, on the other hand, actually hosts your product and does payment processing and affiliate stuff all in one.

I know many people that would buy something like this. It sounds like it would be a great into to the basics of the main web technologies.

You mention a database - client side local storage or server side? If server side, what server side language were you planning on using, out of curiosity?

Server side. I'd probably pick one or more web frameworks with simple ORMs. Basically take RoR, ASP.NET MVC/EF, and PHP Hello World applications, and add one more models and a couple of pages.

I'd buy it.

I would too. This is one of the few known cases in which showing upvotes would be a good idea.

Congratulations, that's very impressive! VBA seems like it will be around for many years to come, and there is probably good opportunity in and around financial centres (London's Canary Wharf/City, New York's Wall Street) for a financial orientated VBA course.

As far as I know, many mid-office support staff spend their lives writing VBA code to soup up spreadsheets for demanding traders. Sure plenty of them would pay for a head start (or the firms would)

Congrats! Something has to be said of the demand for VBA in India however (or what percentages of classes were in US/India).

Edit, how about some more blog posts (or comments here, both?) on your current feedback loop that you used/developed the course material? (i.e End of class surveys, emails, in class choices, etc). I'm interested in hearing about it :-)

@jjm... Most of the registrations are from US, Europe and Australia. We have roughly 50 students from India.

Course content was developed after we did a survey. You can see the survey here: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/04/18/online-vba-classes-survey/

Whoa! So awesome! Congrats!

If i am not mistaken, you are the same Chandoo who started the "All I want to speak about CAT" (the profile pic is unforgettable :P) on pagalguy.com and what a great ritual you have started there.

I am very happy to hear again from you in this grand manner and i wish you the very best for your endeavor and congratulate you again for your success. :)

Yes, the same Chandoo.. :)

You know what, I miss programming Excel workbooks/spreadsheets. It's a hell of a lot nicer than dealing with the CSS/HTML/DOM/JS web-stack. You've got your data storage, visualization, maths functions, filtering algorithms, access-control, WYSIWYG interface-builder all built-in and integrated.

And looks like roughly $250k over a year? Not freaking bad! Congrats and thanks for the transparency! You must be feeling great right about now.

Cool, but what are the total expenses? You said unusual expenses are 16% of revenues, but how much are "usual" expenses?

Cost of running my websites ($100) Amazon S3, Cloudfront fees ($60) PayPal , 2Checkout transaction charges (roughly 3.5%) Electricity ($50) rent ($100) Salary for my VA ($250) Internet Provider Fees ($30) Skype + Phone ($25) Some misc. expenses Office Comp. Backup fees - $10 Website backups - $15 Email Newsletter (Aweber) - $70

For a detailed breakup - see here: http://startupdesi.com/costs-of-running-web-business/

I did not include my hours in to this. But then I never do it.

How did you get started, and what were your original plans? Was it to deliver in person training? Perhaps you should go on Mixergy.

Well deserved success from someone who obviously knows what they're talking about (and selling). A big congrats!

Awesome! Many congratulations man. It is very impressive and very much appreciate you sharing the details.

Is http://www.khanacademy.org/ your competition?

Very nice. It looks like you worked your ass off on the site and it definitely shows. Well done.

awesome! thanks for the detailed explanation as well, i wish you all the best

I got this message when I followed the link to his vbaclasses

Your computer or another computer on your network is compromised with a virus. This allows online criminals to use it as part of a botnet to send spam and attack websites.

Am I the only one?

I think this is the cloudflare message. You can complete the captcha to get in.

Deleted comment

Nope.. $100k (US).

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