Ask HN: How long did it take for your startup/side project to break even?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2014 where @j-rom convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 55 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 51 comments
My side project is a simple and fairly specialized electronic gadget. I don't pay myself a wage. I spent maybe a few months of sporadic evenings, and a few hundred dollars, to design and produce a half dozen prototypes that I gave away. My only hope had been to not lose my shirt. People who received those prototypes wrote favorable reviews on web forums -- a boon that I actually hadn't anticipated.
A possible milestone for break-even was when I was able to use the same PayPal account for booking sales and for all of my business expenses. That took roughly another few months, so maybe nine months all told.
My biggest cost is my time, even if I don't hang a number on it, because I've got a finite amount of it. I try to keep a running estimate of dollars profit per hour of work. To expand the business at this point, I have to let some older models slide into oblivion, and come up with something that can attract a higher price.
My sideproject, fantasysp.com, cost basically nothing to start around 7 years ago. I found free baseball boxscore data online and bought the domain and ran it on hosting I already had. The main cost was my time involved to code everything.
"True" costs didn't arrive until I thought I actually had something worth investing in. Which meant I had to purchase boxscore data for the sports I couldn't find.
So to answer your question... ideally your project should cost very little to start with. Once you discover that you might be on to something, then slowly increment costs. Baby steps.
Never.
Well, in terms of money. But my side-projects that I wrote to make me more productive have been paying off since shortly after starting to write them. The most useful one for me is Phoenix[1]. Although that'll soon be useless to me when I switch to Linux after finally becoming a nerd[2].
[1]: https://github.com/sdegutis/phoenix
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7450019
It hasn't broken even yet, and I have no idea when it will. I've probably spent $10,000 over the past seven years on gear, classes, and consumable materials for it, but I'm finally starting to see some monetary return on my investment.
Of course, I'm talking about photography, which I do because I love it and not because I expect to make money at it. I'm ok with it being permanently in the red and have no intention of ever trying to make it my primary source of income, as that would suck all the fun out of it for me.
It took us about year and a half, as a side project to breakeven at http://startuplift.com - That being said, we did pivot a couple of times and keep changing the product, offer and pricing. We started at the beginning of 2011 and it's not almost middle of 2014. I recently quit my job and investing myself full-time, and now I feel we are finally getting closer to our 'sweet spot'. Should've have quit a long time ago, when I started seeing some intitial interest.