How I Built A $600/mo Product In One Day
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @burningion details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $600/mo.
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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 45 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 15 comments
I'm intrigued that you have that many buyers on wpplugins.com. Are people signing up for your support contract, or is that really 40 purchases in the first month? Do you expect this volume to continue, rise, or trail off?
In any case, I had a reasonably successful plugin a while ago that I still get occasionally pestered to update... I'd be a lot more motivated to do so if I thought I could release it to a marketplace and net a few hundred a month.
How can you say people might be pirating it, if you say that wpplugins.com requires that plugins are released under GPL?
In fact, I am wondering how this works. Are plugin authors providing support as an value added service?
Otherwise, what is to stop someone crazy enough to buy all the relevant plugins and release them on their own site(pay or free) ?
You took us from concept to implementation to actual usage. Along the way you included just the right amount of implementation info (your use of google alerts) and pointed out why you made some choices (wpplugins vs. other). Well written.
I shall second Jun8 - need more articles like this.
I'm mostly curious what the revenue curve is on this project - was the majority of the earnings within the first week? How do sales dwindle when using this route?
Either way - great job and very informative.
i'm curious when you submitted to wpplugins.com. i wrote them off as dead after my plugin sat pending for a week last month. they didn't respond to my emails, either.