Building an $80k/month business with a software testing community
Published in 2016, this chronicle by @rosiesherry details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $80k/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 314 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 59 comments
@rosiesherry - Congratulations for building up a good business along with what I assume a very hectic personal life (4 kids!). :-)
You've discontinued testing services, but I think there is a big market out there. We've been looking for a platform where we can list our website & its high level use cases, and then 1 or more testers can test it out thoroughly. We've tried sites like MyCrowd in the past, but didn't get a great result from them. Most testers just submitted cosmetic bugs and weren't as detail oriented as we'd like.
I'm sure there would be other startups who have similar needs for getting their sites/apps tested and can easily pay for such a service.
Are you (or anyone else here on HN) aware of any good testing services out there or a place where we can find good freelance testers?
@rosiesherry Thanks for this, and congrats on the business. I wish you all the best going forward in your industry (which I had never heard much of before now).
It's incredible looking at the revenue breakdown just how much 'training courses and events' were bringing in compared to the actual 'testing services'.
I'm launching 2 free and open-source toolkits for Web designers/developers next month and your revenue breakdown has convinced me that my initial plan of monetizing on training is probably the way to go.
Do you have any specific tips on how you built up that initial community (besides setting up the forum)? What were some of the specific tactics you used to draw those initial users in?
Interesting post, but I would suggest coming up with an original logo, rather than using another company's world famous logo and slapping a ninja icon on it.
Ministry of Sound logo:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Ministry-of-sound-logo.png
The logo this company (Ministry of Testing) is using:
https://www.indiehackers.com/images/business-icons/ministry-of-testing-920a568a864c438b6509a722e80062.png
Are there any remote testing job sites? There are so many for developers, but I scarcely see any remote posts that would look for dedicated application testers. I suppose this is due to startups cutting costs and leaving developers to test the product. In my experience, such structures are not good either for the developers, nor the company's products.
Wasn't indehackers the domain that posted about the domain squatters who made '$xxx in a month' just the other day? Is this a real site that people go to or a thinly veiled marketing service?