Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

Looking at the OP's history over about the past year and a half, 100% of the submissions have been to his own sites and 100% of his comments are on those threads or in one case linking to one of those sites.

Your comment isn't the first one on these threads to point out the pattern, either, so it's very likely the mods have seen his pattern of using HN exclusively as a marketing channel and are okay with it.

Also seeing the title and the upvotes tells this is one of the topics that matters to the HN community, simply how to make money.

Not saying it is bad, just an observation.

I doubt the Indian government pays those sweet referral fees :)

Edit: I wish the UN would provide a free honest alternative to this kind of scammy “visa information”site

Wikipedia is probably the best source for ad-free up to date info on visas:

You just need to search for "Visa requirements for %country% citizens":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_S...

Visa list has both government website and visa agency link. Users can choose to use what is convenient for them. Visa list also provides all document requirements so anyone can do it themselves.

Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.

You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.

Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.

I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

Not the OP.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.

You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment.

This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.

I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year.

The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)

The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.

I mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time.

If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.

I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.

I’ve made a living online from a bunch of different things, and there’s always something in the world that changes in a way that forces you to change your thing as well. Sometimes quickly, when an API changes, sometimes more slowly as you get more competition for example.

And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.

I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.

I'm one of these "inspiring" people. :P

You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.

3 possibilities I can think of:

- automatically scrapping websites - paying someone to do the work manually - who knows, there might be a database that someone else maintains, free or paid, and the website just displays the information

Or a mix of all that.

Well, how would you operationally define updated? Would you, as a traveller, be satisfied if it's no more than two days out of date?

How long does it take to check and update the information for one country? Let's call it 90 seconds when you have the routine in. (Maybe every tenth time you check you have to actually change something in your database and that takes 10 minutes, the rest of the time you change nothing and that takes half a minute.)

There are about 200 countries in the world, so updating them all takes on average five hours. If you only need to do that every other day, that's quite literally 10 % of your time to do manually.

Now it could probably be optimised -- some countries might not be as popular destinations, and others might not change their rules as often. This is data you get for free from the effort of maintaining it. You can use that to adjust frequencies and I'm sure get it down to just 3 % of your time or less. That's while still doing it manually!

Then if there are some places that are really popular or change really often, you can start automating the updates for those countries. Since they are the ones you'd spend the most time on updating manually otherwise, you can probably get it down to less than 1 % of your time.

But never forget to start by doing things that don't scale. You can get very far with a good manual process. Automate only when you have a good manual process and you've driven the last inefficiency out of it.

One thing which worked for me when i look back is, i spend less than 4 weeks to validate an idea, if it got traction, i worked on it more, if it didn't then i moved on. Validate and fail fast.

Cheers mate!

Also very curious about this. I went to his websites with the goal of finding out how I could give him money. It was incredibly difficult for Visa List - and all I got to was a buymeacoffee page that couldn't possibly be the only source of income. If OP is making money off of these from users then they could make way more by having an obvious CTA in the nav to give him money.

Its different for different for different microstartup. Everything i did is through organic channels for Visa List it SEO for Apps its ASO. Once i got the users, it was easy to tweak and optimise revenue generation.

Addendum to this question, if you don't mind: How do you choose what your next microstartup will be?

i use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.

If companies made their ads informative/interesting in some way instead of pure propaganda mind poo with dumb jingles, puns and foolish attempts to sound humorous perhaps I wouldn’t black hole them all so much with Adblock and pihole

uBlock Origin's element picker (not zapper - that's temporary) is your friend here. Works to get rid of basic overlays.

cloudflare is a life saver!

Simple solution: just sleep more!

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

affiliate, subscription ands ads

My general approach is t make my business fully automated. Once i do that, i have time to thing in different directions.

Organic channels are your lifesavers, the ones which will make your microstartup successful, so start working on them from day 1.

I have few things planned for 2022.

Anyone have invite code? I would love to join. Email address in about.

Cheers mate! Its summation of my microstartups in 2021. ACrypto is actually available on both android and ios. you can check it out https://acrypto.io/

thanks

Yes there were a few. But I try to always keep the cost of failure small. This is how I try to be frugal.

* I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build

* I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it.

* I do a public launch in IH, PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit. In few weeks if I reach the goal that I set at the beginning, then I continue working on it to improve. If not then I will drop it and move on the next.

You have objective in making this choice, most people cling on to the sentiment.

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

I have the same question, would be glad if OP could answer. I so far had success only using Google Ads, but I also pay them 50% of my sales (which I do not know if it is a lot or not)

You running PiHole?

Not OP, but...completely bootstrapping it?

1) Learn the tools to build your product.

2) Research some product / markets, see what other products are out there. Chasing some noble idea, or "hidden gem" just to gain first-move advantage isn't all that, IMO. It's almost always better to join an existing market where proof of concept has already been done for you. Even better if the existing products are stagnant or lacking.

3) Figure out a business and marketing plan, doesn't have to be the most complex thing in the world - but it forces you to do some research before just diving into something blindly.

4) Start developing your MVP. Reach out to users in the relevant places, which means going to forums, twitter, subreddits, etc. Try your best to get user feedback, iterate your product on said feedback. Any money you get from donations, purchases, gifts, family, whatever should go towards infrastructure and marketing.

5) With enough users, look into how you want to monetize your product. Ads? SaaS? Purchases? Lots of ways, but they all have their pros and cons.

But, to be honest, it's a lot of work for a single developer. Especially if you're not already experienced with all the various aspects. You're basically gonna be doing everything on a smaller scale. Lots of things to learn, lots of things that can go wrong.

And importantly, it can take years to build up a userbase large enough to live off the project. Sometimes you never grow to that size, and the product life-cycle has peaked, on its way downwards.

The people that do this kind of stuff, have tried and failed multiple times before. But there's always something to learn, which you'll take to the next project.

There are four things need to have a potential microstartup. #1 Problem that has business potential and big enough #2 Audience who has that burning problem #3 Distribution channel to get the solution into users hands #4 Business model aka pricing fit for the Problem-Audience

I empathize with you. I applied for disability and am really limited in my ability to work. But I want to create income-generating businesses so I can have income that's not directly tied to my time and effort.

Depending on your disabilities it may be a tough road. The common wisdom is that most businesses fail — it takes a lot of skill, creativity, luck, and hard work to make a business that generates income, even for people without disabilities. I would say if money is your sole objective you might be better off doing light contracting work.

For generating business ideas, you might look at this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen. He lists a lot of the pitfalls about business ideas he's seen when interviewing indie hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

You might also want to limit your idea generation to businesses that will reliably generate income month-to-month (if that's important to you). And if you want it to be lucrative you might consider a business that solves problems for other businesses (since they tend to have money and are willing to spend it if your service is valuable — it can be hard for consumer apps to be very lucrative).

One thing I learned as someone with limited abilities is that it helps to be very clear about your own goals and spend some time thinking about a roadmap of what tasks (marketing, developing, etc) will help get you there. This is so you can minimize wasted time and effort, which is extra precious when you're limited.

I made https://extensionpay.com and it generates a couple hundred dollars a month with very little ongoing effort. It also helps other developers generate revenue from their browser extensions, so that gives me a good feeling.

Most of these 'makers' are on Twitter and I found them to be helpful in answering things there.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Subjective opinions vary and when you put out art people will criticize you. Even people who like your art might question why it doesn’t sell. If your art makes money, whether that be picasso or bored ape type art, people will be far more reluctant to criticize your style and execution after all, other people are paying a lot to acquire your art, there might just be something to it, something the critic is missing, so they might shut up and look for that. Peer pressure is a thing, when other people are putting their money where their mouths are, instead of being flooded with cheap criticism, you might be drowning in demand from sycophants.

added tech stack to the post but i always learnt things based on what was need to built my microstartup.

True and its available for phones, tablets, TV's and watches

i don't have a newsletter yet but i regularly post on twitter https://twitter.com/1HaKr

I love solving problems by building solutions. I Travel every now and then. Make a backlog of new ideas, keep pitching them to friends, work on my current one. One step at a time. I took things very slowly instead of rushing and getting into pressure.