Hello everyone,<p>I’m Hari, and I’m a serial Microstartup Maker. 2021 has been an amazing year despite the pandemic where I reached my recent goal of $500/day. Compounding works everywhere, even in microstartups. It took 3 years to reach to $300/day but just 4 months to $500/day. The business model of my microstartups is a mix of App sales, subscriptions, affiliates and ads. I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs. My next goal is to reach $600/day.<p>My Microstartups Rewind 2021<p>* Revenue - $117K/year (67% ▲)<p>* Expenses - 3K/year<p>* All time high revenue - $15K/month in Dec (18% ▲)<p>* Daily goal - $500/day reached in Dec<p>Visa List - https://visalist.io<p>* Revenue - $50K/year (39% ▲)<p>* All time high revenue - $8K/month in Dec<p>* Total Users - 2.6M/year<p>* Active users - 250K/month<p>AnExplorer - https://anexplorer.co<p>* Revenue - $50K/year (95% ▲)<p>* User growth: 130% ▲ yoy<p>* Active users: 350K<p>ACrypto - https://acrypto.io<p>* Revenue - $10K/year<p>* Active users: 30K<p>Tech Stack i used:
Android - Java
Firebase
VueJS
GoLang
Related:<p>"Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping" (this): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964</a><p>"AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups" (3 months ago): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132</a><p>"Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup" (2020): <a href="https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969</a><p>"Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to keep your desk job away" (2020): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674</a><p>"Show HN: I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup" (2020): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr</a><p>And so on: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr</a><p>To answer the question "how do you advertise your products?", clearly it is to spam Hacker News until you get lucky.
I miss the days when visalist wasn't full of hostile anti-patterns.<p>Back in 2019, it was easy to recommend to fellow travelers as an accurate source of information. Not so much, now.<p>I'm sad to see that it funnels users away from official government sites. eg, a US citizen traveling to India is eligible for a cheap e-Visa which generally issues in ~72 hours here:<p><a href="https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html" rel="nofollow">https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html</a><p>The big green "APPLY FOR VISA" button on visalist sends traffic to iVisa.com, which is much less useful.
You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?<p>I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.<p>Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.<p>Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?
There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least.<p>What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost <i>always</i> something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.<p>Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?
Hey Hari,<p>this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know.
I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website <a href="https://visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https://visalist.io</a>, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid
Obviously everyone’s path is unique, but could you tell us the most important things you learned along the way?<p>For example, my side project was not built for scale (was just a hobby at the time) and now needs rebuilding. I also wasted too much time perfecting things I thought mattered, but didn’t affect customers.
Thanks Hari for the inspiration! I am a fan from Australia. As well as the success, Hari does give a lot to the meetup community here and I got the impression he has a very strategic mindset.
Thanks for the share. I'm curious if you have a favorite best-of-breed vendor stack you use? Do you try to optimize much on the tech or just do whatever works? I'm curious about several things specifically: who do you host with? SSL certs? CDN favorites? automation tool favorites? which hosts do you use to scale out?
Got blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.
Congrats! You mention compounding - what input to your success has been compounding? Eg revenue per user, success with SEO or other marketing channels, increase in underlying demand for travel/crypto, number of products shipped, something else?
Thanks for sharing this update and being so transparent about your earnings! I've found your posts inspiring and it's great to know your projects continue to grow.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.<p>I have two questions:<p>(1) What learning pathway would you recommend a total beginner in programming to follow in order to develop their own microstartups or side projects?<p>(2) How do you come up with an idea for a given microstartup? Is it an organic process, or is it more about thinking actively of potential business plans? Do you have any advice regarding idea generation?
What is your long-term approach to growing your businesses? Feel free to share what you've learned about customer acquisition for micro-startups. Sure people would find that knowledge VERY valuable - and nice work dude. You're successful. I plan to do a bunch of stuff myself this year. Cheers.
Out of curiosity, how do you have 350k users for AnExplorer and only earn $50k/yr if it's selling for $10/copy?<p>(I'm just wondering if there are some unseen costs or something to selling an app for a fixed cost like this.)
If folks enjoy these types of posts, check out <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/</a>, which is an entire community of folks like this.
Is "My Microstartups Rewind 2021" a thing or is that the term for the summation of all your endeavors? Also, have you considered iPhone apps? If not, why not?<p>Anyway, best of luck to continued success and growth.
How many products have you built and later shut down as a failure? How long have you been building microstartups? How many tries did it take to get the 3 successes in your post?
This is very inspiring. I'm so happy to learn that this sort of business model exists. I always thought it was either fail or make $1M a month, no in between.<p>Good job
How do you make most of your money on visalist? Is it affiliates or ads? I have a solitaire website myself (<a href="https://online-solitaire.com/" rel="nofollow">https://online-solitaire.com/</a>) that has ads, but I haven’t tried out affiliate links yet.
Congratulations!<p>I have a question, how do you maintain the validity of the information you provide at visalist.io ? These things changes really often (especially the covid-related stuff). Do you have someone that researches and updates the information? Is there an API for this?
For subscription sales, how are you driving growth? Google ads? Organic search? Selling always turns out to be the most difficult part. Building an idea and even getting a few people to sign up is doable, but I struggle with anything beyond that.<p>Congrats by the way!
Where have you learned about design? Your apps look awesome. My look like command prompt. Is there any course, book, tutorial, blog that you would recommend?
visalist.io would not let me browse the site asking for adblock to be disabled. Even though there is no adblock running.
..and these guys making $500 per day?
Can you please share how do you setup your web application for example your visalist site .<p>i mean how do you handle the scale and how did you setup the hosting<p>thanks
The Power of Habit book suggest that if you want to be X you have to behave like X, what was your routine, not now, but in the period between starting from zero and reaching, say 4k MRR?
Super inspiring OP! On VisaList, for example, it's great to see you've had your product picked up into the news by various publications.<p>Thanks for sharing your revenue/expense numbers.<p>- Do you have a blog/personal site?<p>- Do you have github/gitlab / other open source projects?<p>Just want to learn more about what ya do, and how ya do what ya do.