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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

How you monetized it. At what point did it become profitable? What do you think the draw was for membership?

We monetize it mostly with AdSense, we tried other ad networks but nothing quite compares. Adsense combines near infinite inventory with the highest RPMs I have seem anywhere.

We were "profitable" right away because our costs were so low and because we designed the site to run in auto-pilot, requiring very little maintenance. Even so, it took 2-3 of years before we were generating enough revenue to consider quitting our day jobs.

What kind of traffic/numbers did you need/have before you had sufficient revenue to consider quitting?

Thanks so much!

We were serving 20-30 million impressions monthly when we started working on it full time. At that time we could live comfortably with our revenue although we still couldn't afford that orbital laser canon quite yet :)

so it takes 2-3 years from idea to launch to profitable? my question if that's not correct is how long does it take you to go from idea to today? at what point of the timeline when it becomes profitable?

thanks.

I guess it is a matter of how you define profitable. We were profitable right away but our profits were insignificant. I would say the "big moment" for a bootstrapped business is the day you quit your job and go full time.

Every business is also different but if you could charge your customers at least 2x more that it would cost you to acquire a customer through PPC - you could scale quite aggressively to "quit-your-job" kind of profit in a short period of time.

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