Bootstrapping My Side Project to $6k/Month

My first real job ever, as a software developer, was developing software for internet marketers. It would spam your links to a bunch of RSS submission forms. I was relatively young at the time; this was back in high school.

My career stayed around that internet marketing world for a few more years after that, working as a contractor.

I had similar feelings as OP at the time. When I first went into it, the negative impact my software would have didn't really occur to me. I was wrapped up in the nerves of interviewing for the job, the emotions of writing my first commercial software, trying my best to do my best work. I thought of everything _but_ the impact of the software.

I made something like a few grand on that contract. A lot of money for me at the time. The internet marketer who paid for it made 6 figures off it. He resold it to other IMs who would then resell it to the final end users.

A few months after that code went out into the world, I was reading articles on one of the websites that my program spams (most popular blogs at the time had ways to submit links to them). I stumbled into an article where the website owner was complaining about the program, and how much it was spamming their site. They wanted some way to contact the author and have their site removed.

My stomach sank in that moment. I felt terrible.

Lucky for them, the program had an auto-update feature. So I removed them from the list and pushed the update. Still, I've never forgotten that horrible feeling...

There are always more corners of that internet marketing industry that feel "less scummy". I kept working in that world, a bit more picky in what I worked on, but the truth was ... there really was no good that comes from the internet marketing industry.

About half way through college I get fed up with the whole thing and abruptly quit the contract I was on at the time. I remember sending the email out, walking out of my dorm, hoping on my bicycle, and just ... riding. I rode forever. Lost in thought about what I was doing with my life. I ended up riding for several hours into the night, just trying to burn off all the emotion.

These days, I would never do that kind of work again. But I can appreciate why I did the work at the time. We don't really think about that kind of stuff, the impact our work can have, until later in life. It's a fact of human biology. And when you're first entering the job market, the money and getting into the swing of "adulting" is enough to fully consume you, leaving precious little thought left to give to what impact your work might have.

I don't think anyone should be ashamed of stories like these. It's all a part of growing up and learning about the world. We should celebrate those self aware enough to realize their mistakes and grow from them. There is so much more life left after young adulthood.

Thanks for the writeup, @EO-IO. As other have said, it's a 'skeezy model', but as you've said, you know this and were sharing for the lessons learned more than to promote this model - which I can certainly appreciate. All in all, I found it to be a pretty good read - and a peak into a world of generating revenue that I may have not otherwise been as aware of.

I do have a question. As I read, it does seem that you're driving the point of 'native app' pretty heavily without substantiating the emphasis; as if it's a large feature/benefit/sales-point. So, "Why native?" As primarily a hybrid developer currently (Angular 4 + Cordova / some Ionic), there have been leaps and bounds made in the arena of hybrid dev - and arguably the entry point for hybrid dev is much lower than it is for native. Of course you could still have created the same business with either stack, but since the article seems to be promoting 'native', I was hoping you could share some insight into what made native superior to hybrid here?

Thanks!

"This guy had made hundreds of apps in less than two months, and was making 10 times what I was making from the software sales!"

If the only thing you wanted to change was to get a cut of your user's revenue, and you already had a product which worked, and which users found, why did you have to spend one year changing everything e.g. making it a web app, having to find new ways to find users, etc.?

Couldn't you have just altered your pricing model with the existing codebase? Just write an additional new server-side component to handle the billing, keep the existing client software, keep the existing methods to find new users?

So I came up with the idea to get my users to share it, so that I didn’t have to. To do so, I set up a very enticing referral program:

> Users could share their referral link and get a 10% cut of the ad revenue from every app the referred user makes, forever.

For example, if user A brings in user B, and user B makes an app that brings in $10/day, user A would get $1 every day without lifting a finger.

If user B decides to upgrade to a premium account, user A would get a commission every time user B pays his subscription.

This sounds like a pyramid scheme...

I couldn’t understand why users who were making a thousand dollars in ad revenue each month, didn’t upgrade their accounts, after all it only costs $25. Turns out, a lot of these users were living in countries where they couldn’t have a Visa card or PayPal account, and just couldn’t pay me even if they wanted to.

I was highly interested when the author said he moved to Morocco to lower living costs. I was hoping he would have insights in how to overcome problems like this. I find it fascinating that these users are somehow receiving money online, but can't pay for things online.