Anyone know any startups that are becomming more well-known / popular that are actually making money (how?) in this terrible economy without depending on advertising? Thanks!
I'm not sure what your popularity metric is, but here at GitHub we're making plenty of money on subscriptions for private code hosting without a single advertisement on the site. We've also never taken any outside money. GitHub was designed from the very first line of code to make money off of recurring fees for premium features while bringing in traffic, goodwill, and buzz by making everything free for open source. So far so good!
Someone asked a similar question awhile back:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375417" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375417</a><p>Some of the better comments:<p>Some startups and annual revenue numbers (unsourced):
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375896" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375896</a><p>Someone who modeled 37signals revenue:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375771" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375771</a><p>Nextproof and bigfolio.com
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375575" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375575</a><p>Hope that helps!
I like patio11's thing: <a href="http://www.bingocardcreator.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.bingocardcreator.com</a><p>Well, I don't really "like" it, as I could hardly care less about bingo cards, but it's a nice reminder that there is money even in what seems like really weird niches.
Why do you rule out depending on advertising? :/ Is income from advertising not real money?...<p>FWIW Mibbit makes real money, all from advertising at the moment. Premium paid accounts are planned, but it's a lot more work than just putting some useful adverts up.
We've been making revenues for a while at HubSpot (<a href="http://www.HubSpot.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.HubSpot.com</a>). Business model is simple: monthly subscription for access to software that meets a need (internet marketing).<p>We've never sold advertising before (though we do have decent traffic on <a href="http://grader.com" rel="nofollow">http://grader.com</a>).
We just sell merchandise -- t-shirts, posters, etc. We were thinking about doing advertising stuff, but since we're a video game site, we decided to just give our users what they wanted (swag) rather than what they go out of their way to block (ads). It's been working exceptionally well, though that's largely attributable to the talent of our designers.
likely a bit diff from the core web app focus on HN, but we are a startup online retail site, launched in late September, smack dab in the midst of the big meltdown and fared pretty well in the 4th quarter. December provides a natural lift for retail, so Jan numbers will be very interesting but overall we did much better then projected and seem to be gaining decent traction in our niche: www.hoodiepeople.com
thanks - these comments help. economy is terrible (cant just say you have a great idea and you want to postpone thinking about money) and ad based revenue models arent really getting a lot of love these days...makes sense to look at examples of successful startups that dont depend on ads to see what they did right