I enjoyed the 2012 edition : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088538
Impatient to learn about the accomplishments of the community.
Invoiced provides simple invoicing for the small business/freelance crowd. It is bootstrapped, profitable, and currently producing 4-figures of MRR. I learn something new every day and get to work with awesome people (customers).
What app did you create?
I might take a break at some point to blog about my experience. It's been an incredible journey so far.
How does getting paid via stripe / paypal work? Do your customers provide their own stripe / paypal details? or does the payment from your customers' customers go through you? is there any commission involved?
Our PayPal integration is even simpler. Just provide your e-mail address and we generate Pay via PayPal buttons for your invoices. Again, no commission.
This was our first time launching a serious product as a side project and it's been a blast. I actually wrote up a few thoughts on launching side projects last week [4], largely based on our experience with Geocodio.
[1] http://geocod.io [2] http://opennear.by [3] http://happykitchen.dotsqua.re [4] https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a...
*edit: I'm very curious to know, what about this comment is worthy of downvotes.
it's hard to imagine that you recouped all of your time/money/expenses not to mention that going forward, you can work on it full time -- all as of day one.
Yes, it's a single person project. The initial release took a long time; I was working on it between freelance projects. I'm using a custom jQuery MVC implementation on the front end, some twitter bootstrap, and a couple of 3rd party plugins (i.e. ckeditor, nanoscroller, pdfjs, etc)
Congratulations :)
For example, I want to specialize my landing page depends on visitors location. For example I want to change if user comes from US H1 and H2 message. Can you build something makes this possible?
$.get("http://ipinfo.io", function (response) {
if(response.country == "US") display_us_message();
else if(response.country == "TR") display_turkey_message();
else display_generic_message();
}, "jsonp");
Bear in mind that the team is based in India, so our salary and other expenses cannot be compared to Silicon Valley, but in India we pay market rates.
Was profitable within 2 months despite some idealistic pricing on my part. The feedback and kind words from my users over the past year has been incredibly humbling.
We share a monthly report every month, here's our last report: http://wpcurve.com/june-wp-curve-monthly-report-people-produ... if you're interested.
When we had to put cardforcoin.com on hold, we built coinforcoffee.com [4], which lets you spend bitcoin at Starbucks. It's also "profitable", and I think we're going to see some big numbers when we expand to other merchants in a couple months.
[1] https://cardforcoin.com [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/card-for-coin-trade-s... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7157180 [4] https://coinforcoffee.com
This is bootstrapped using freelancing. We are currently at $800 MRR and growing.
I'm having a lot of fun helping people get more freedom of choice in their lives!
[0] http://fivestar.io [1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/03/fivestar-finds-the-best-pro...
i did a search for sennheiser and got an excellent breakdown of headphones. also i don't mind that a price range can have two different options if they're far enough apart. that's a nice touch.
The self-publishing route for authors is a very interesting development. I believe it is going to be one of the more interesting strategies for monetizing content on the web. Take the best of modern web technology (version control, bug reports, quick iterations) and apply it to producing books---meaningful information products that can be sold at 60%--95% margins. What's not to like?
It's basically a more modern / contemporary artificial flower arrangements. Stuffs you see in Neiman Marcus selling for $400. She sells for $200 or less.
We have no outside funding (we were invited to the YC interview, but weren't selected).
We now invest our time between this and one other unannounced project.
Life is good.
Got to build a lot of cool things because of it (Themes and Extensions installed via separate apks, Overlays, Animations). And it's profitable.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xlythe.sao...
Currently at 4 digit MRR, and almost full. The program is capped at 40 customers.
Also went indie dev in 2013, but selling product is way harder than selling service.
Why are your prices defaulting to Canadian dollars? I imagine it's pretty off-putting to the (much larger) US market just south of your border.
We're profitable technically, but I would only say "gross profitable" not "net profitable".
(Couldn't afford to pay minimum wage for someone to do this)
On the up side, its a B2B so there are opportunities to cross sell a better product if we come up with one
We are already profitable, but that's not saying much since we have almost no expenses.
"Connect to Exmas"
http://www.thingsunder15.com and http://www.myfancysauce.com
both slightly profitable.
Also that trading can be an creative act (expressing your belief about yourself, in risk-taking in buying a leveraged option call or a conservative index fund with stop loss; your personal conflict resolution and problem solving when the market moves against you) and a simple decision to invest in an index fund is not trivial but can be just as nuanced in making any complex decisions. But in the West, we put so much credence in "hustlin'" that we become penny-wise and pound-foolish.