How I made $18k on CodeCanyon
Published in 2018, this chronicle by @maxko details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $18k.
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 ★ 41 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 8 comments
Congrats! Even for a freelance developer in the US, this is significant money, and doesn’t require directly trading time for money.
And the most important thing is that you’ve built a solid foundation to improve upon. Most people can’t ship as much as you have, and most don’t have the foresight to write a blog post about it.
I’ve started to notice similar things on the economics of themes and plugins on Themeforest. Unless you’re a top selling theme/plugin the revenues don’t often provide enough to encourage updates. I’ve had a few themes I bought go not-updated for years, so I have to switch to more popular and robust themes that I know will be supported.
I hope you were just doing this as a side project. Doesn't seem like it was too lucrative at ~$800 a month. And why delete the plugins off Codecanyon?
Great blog post; interesting, relevant, and to the point.
Does anyone know of any other hubs for content creation that don’t keep such a steep % of $?
Why delete it though? Was support too much?