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Comment by semireg | Hacker News Reader

$500/month (3 figures) is a great milestone. I remember talking to a mentor that said, “you have something people will buy, stop working on features and focus just a bit on marketing.” It was good advice because now I’m regularly generating revenue of 4 figures per day.

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.

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Hey, can I just say, I really appreciate and respect your pricing strategy on the design app.

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.

I was reluctant to offer a subscription because of how much I personally didn’t want to use one. However, it’s proved useful for many reasons: 1) seasonal use e.g. agriculture, 2) flies under radar of some approval and expense report requirements, 3) longer term trial, i.e. many subs cancel and convert to one-time, 4) lowers friction for users that might otherwise pirate.

Exactly. So much value you're offering here. I wish more vendors had your attitude.

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.

>> “you have something people will buy, stop working on features and focus just a bit on marketing.”

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.

I really like your design app's home page -- modern, inviting, disarming, and attractive. Did you build it? If so, can you talk a bit about what technologies you're using and the design process? If not, how did you go about deciding on a contractor to build it out for you?

Thanks for sharing your story!

This is the 3rd big rebuild of the site.

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.

Hey! I’ve used Label Live a lot. Great app and excellent value. Thank you!

No no, thank you!

I'm at $500/month for my side hustle Chrome extension SnipCSS: https://www.snipcss.com

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.

What's your conversion rate?

Inspirational post, thanks for sharing.

Question: on your design app, is the bulk of your revenue reoccurring or onetime?

It’s about 20% recurring and 80% one time license sales.

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!

How do you collect money and pay taxes and stuff? Did you start a company for it?

Yes. I already had an LLC for consulting. The other side hustles are dba “doing business as” and registered trademarks.

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