Is a web app earning $100/month a failure?
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @joshuacc details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $100/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 Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 23 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 37 comments
Yes and No.
You have the wrong approach. You can't predict success and you can't predict what markets will work and you can't prredict what the perfect product for a market is. You have to release products and track ALL possible metrics and tweak consistently.
Basically, even the really big companies have hits and misses. And more misses than hits.
So, firstly, you should be releasing 5 or 10 high quality web apps and seeing which stick and focusing on the ones that do.
That's the first step - finding a market demand.
Second is hitting the value for money/quality/perfect market fit.
That's the second step - after you have found market demand, making the most of it.
An inbox cleaner for $20 is just too expensive. Too much friction - especially for a new product from an unknown developer. You have to minimize regret for users - or rather, potential regret.
Instead of thinking in terms of what you want to make think in terms of what people want to get in terms of value for money. 5 people is too small of a data point. So you have to lower the price anyways - to get enough customers to find out whether there is market demand or not and what things people want and what they are willing to pay for.
So play around with the price a bit. Plus release 4-5 other products and see if you find a market with huge demand - one where even lower value for money sells well.
To me, it is only a failure if the time you put into it can make you more money or fulfill you in a greater way if you put it elsewhere.
$100 may not be much, but if you are constantly churning out $100/month side projects and working very little to keep them up and running, that turns into big money fast.
On a side note, I must admit that at $19.99, I would not buy an app with the sole purpose of cleaning out my Twitter inbox -- maybe I'm not the target audience, but that seems like a lot of money for something that does a very specific task -- one that could be easily implemented by Twitter at a later time.
If earning $100/month is a failure, mine will be an epic failure. I'm totally not earning anything, plus it's still running totally based off my own wallet.
A way to indicate whether it is a failure or not is whether or not it continues to grow, if you're targeting a very specific market it is very unlikely that you will earn a lot of money (I personally don't have that much amount of email that I need InboxCleaner to do some job for me...).
If however it is an awesome thing, people will get to know it and start using it, then it won't be a failure.
Depends on your intent. If you quit your day job to work on it and were hoping to make a living, then it's absolutely a failure. If it was a side project you were working on in your spare time, and you made it to learn and/or have fun, maybe not. I'm working on a project of the latter sort...it's not the kind of thing that can generate a significant revenue stream. But it was fun to write, it will be fun to use, and if it can pay its own hosting costs, that's an added bonus...
Hi everyone, blog post author here, and I'd like to apologise if this reads like a bit of a grumpy whine, despite the fact that the tool's making money :)
I'm currently experimenting with various marketing efforts), and they do sometimes seem like an uphill effort, with very few definite answers other than "Experiment and see!"
I'm trying to work out how far to experiment with this one, and will keep on writing updates as they happen :)