How I Made $350 In Two Days With Three Pages and Some Payment Code (2011)
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @tpatke details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $350.
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 ★ 86 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 41 comments
This is misstated:
"You can find the post here. It didn’t have any upvotes (besides mine) for about 10 minutes. Then it slowly started to climb. And climb. By about 1 am it was at the top of the front page and the orders were pouring in! By 2 am I was scrambling to fill orders. I had a huge TextEdit file open with customer names, site URLs, and email addresses. I sent every email, and set up every survey by hand.
By 6 am I had completed processing every order and went to bed. I got up an hour later forwork at 7 am. In those few precious moments of sleep I had made another $40. By the end of the day on Monday I had made over $330 and the number kept climbing.
So now I’m sitting here writing this blog post with a bunch of orders to fill, features to build, and customers to help. My Stripe account also says that I’ve made $350 to date. All from three pages and some payment code."
You made $350 from 3 pages, a payment code, and 5 hours of manual labor from 1AM to 6AM. And the additional hours you spent creating the pages. So that is about $70/hr at best and closer $25/hr if you include the other time investment.
I only mention this because it is a common mistake people make when they see real money come in for the product of their work that they see it as paying $x for the product because they haven't included any value for their own time.
If you are not careful that mistake can have you working below minimum wage :-).
Man, this somewhat distresses me. It is so incredibly easy to add basic automation... write down by hand, really? (Although I really like the custom thank you videos for your first customers - nice touch).
Great story though, I'm glad you cashed out, i guess i just feel that twinge of pain at the fact you could have kept it going for hardly more work, but i understand entirely where you're coming from - so props to you !
What I found particularly interesting about this is just how minimum the minimum viable product was. I think it's easy to lose perspective on the MVP concept and forget that not everything has to be automated right off the bat. Instead of starting out with a web app that automated a process, he started out by offering a manual service, and then automated the job he had created for himself. Very smart.
Hey guys great to see an old article of mine like this posted here. For the people who asked, the site is down because I sold it and the new owner neglected to take care of it :(
Read about the experience here: http://danshipper.com/110636263
Happy to answer questions about it if you have them.
"$350 In Two Days With Three Pages" sounds really awesome (and a bit linkbait-y), but how many hours did you actually work? Looks like you had to do a lot of manual labor.
I am also a bit skeptical about it otherwise, seeing as this is simply a proxy for another service.