I had set a goal to be ramen profitable by the New Year. I'm not as of yet, but still happy with the progress I've made.<p>That said, I'm curious. What is a fair goal to set? How long did it take you?
I don't know how meaningful this is, because I was fully employed for all the time under discussion (and going full-time while only ramen profitable would cause me to have a very unpleasant discussion with the immigration office regarding my worth to Japan), but here you go:<p>I coding in late June 2006 and launched on July 1st. Ramen profitable where I live is about $1,000~$1,200 a month. Off the top of my head, I spiked up to that on October 2007th, and have sustained it since about October 2008th.<p>You can check my numbers to see if my memory is faulty or not: <a href="http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats" rel="nofollow">http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats</a> . Sales and expense graphs are on the left hand side. I don't have a profit per month graph simply because it would show wild swings just because of the timing of expenses -- sometimes AdWords will have two bills in one month and then none in the next, for example, just due to minute differences in timing.
If you mean 'earns enough to cover monthly living expenses', about thirty months for the ad-supported bedbugregistry.com, and one week for pinboard.in (thanks to an enthusiastic plug from Daring Fireball which resulted in a large number of paid signups).<p>My limited experience with project revenue is that it's quite spiky, so that you have to be earning considerably more than a minimal amount before you can have confidence that you'll be able to cover your bills in a given month.
Well, my "startup" is not a web site, but a brick & mortar business, so the dynamics are a bit different. The business managed to pay for its own operating expenses from day one, thanks to some careful budgeting on our part. We broke even our first year (making back all of the initial money we had invested in opening, which, again, had been carefully budgeted and kept as low as possible) and started making a profit our second.<p>We just finished our 5th year in business and last year's earnings were down, thanks to the economic problems plauging, well, everyone. We ended up making less than we did in year 4, but only by a very small margin, and it was still more than we had made in year 3, and still profitable.<p>We've been very careful about how we manage finances from day one and given a lot of other local businesses that didn't make it through the year, I'm calling 2009 a success.
If you actually want some advice, you might need to divulge some more information. Start with how much do you need in order to be ramen profitable & how you plan to make it.<p>Example: Some people mean doing some consulting on the side. Timeline's don't really apply to them.
This question is kind of general. It depends on your niche market and luck. I do suggest you follow Seth Godin's blog as he gives a lot of insightful advice you can use as startup.
<a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/" rel="nofollow">http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/</a><p>It might help though if you give more details.
How long ago did you start/launch? Are you relying mostly on ads so far or paid upgrades?<p>Much depends on how well and wide you promote it. It's an idea with good potential, us south asians do face this problem quite a bit =)