Is it hard to build a web app that makes at least $1000 a month?
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @ljdk details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $1000 a 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 ★ 264 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 121 comments
"Its hard, but not THAT hard!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
6 years into building web-apps and finally I am just now seeing a few bucks rolling in (still <$1000 month).
I wasted lots of time, primarily pursuing the wrong kinds of business models (free!!!) or putting effort into the wrong areas of a business, ultimately burning out because things weren't working.
But, even if you've picked a good product with a good market, for the un-initiated engineer there's this mysterious delta between being able to build something (anything!), and making that something successful. My recommendation (because its working for me), is to find a co-founder who is a business guy employed at a successful small software company. Painting with broad strokes here, but try to pick a sales or marketing guy over a biz dev guy, I think they are connected better with the product.
You've heard this advice before. Its true. Engineers think of the world as meritocratic. But good product != success. You need someone to help you get past this way of thinking.
Both the question and the answer are all kinds of silly. You can't start a project with the end goal of making $1000 a month, or you will surely fail. Instead, you've gotta motivated to solve a problem you've identified and then you need to execute on it.
Coding isn't everything either. You may be a fine developer, but you're forgetting about design, marketing, customer support, dealing with crisis when your project does good, dealing when depression when it doesn't…
Don't make a plan to get to $1000. Rather, build something cool, and when $1000 does or does not show up at the door, be thankful and learn from the experience. And try again. Iterate.
Define "hard." It is an eminently achievable goal to build a business which makes $1,000 a month. That isn't a "get into the NFL then win the Superbowl" goal, that is a "get into college" goal on the relative-risk-of-total-failure continuum. The process of doing it is fairly well understood and focused application of effort towards it makes it quite likely that you will succeed.
It does require a bit of a mindset change. You have to stop thinking of yourself as a "skilled developer", for one, since development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast.
Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.
Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.
Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.
Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space
It's not hard at all. Here's what you need to do:
1. Pick a tool you can build which will make money for people.
2. Build it for people who will pay.
3. Market to them.
4. Build it.
5. Ship it.
6. Market to them. (Over and over. It's not a one-time thing.)
I've done it, and I teach other people to do it. (But the thing is - once you reach $1000, you might as well go further since the first $100 is the hardest, once you get that, you have proof and you begin to have leverage for word of mouth and client success stories and yadda yadda yadda.)