Hacker News Reader

Comment by midnightmonster | Hacker News Reader

If he's using PayPal's micropayments pricing (Fees = $0.05 + 5%), he's made just shy of $12,000 on the site so far.

I can't decide what I think about that number, except that I expect it goes farther in Romania.

One of the wonderful things about being a small business on the Internet is that there are several favors (SEO considerations, viral marketing, word of mouth, network effects) which make double-digit YoY growth practically a given. (You are more or less incapable of saturating your market, something that larger businesses have to worry about -- what does Facebook do after signing up nearly every American who uses a computer regularly?)

If you keep at it, the miracle of compound interest will do all the rest.

Compare that to a more traditional day job, which typically gives you a higher starting salary and then increases at 2 to 4% a year, with SHARPLY limited options for ever getting out of that bracket no matter how good your performance is.

Well, if the price gets to $40, he would have roughly 40,000 users. That's roughly $800,000 in gross revenue. (20,000 * $40.)

Assuming the operating costs are low, this site could bring in a life changing amount of money for one person.

Edit: It's interesting to think about whether he'd make more money with the price going up logarithmically.

The practical effect of the money + cheap location is that it gives me a few months of development time that I can pour back into the site. It's more of a bootstrapping technique than a straight-up scam.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com