I launched a Mac utility app called DragonDrop (<a href="https://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/" rel="nofollow">https://shinyplasticbag.com/dragondrop/</a>) that got a lot of pretty good press (including getting fireballed — here's the HN discussion <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3946404</a>).
I created a push notification service called Pushover (<a href="https://pushover.net/" rel="nofollow">https://pushover.net/</a>) and wrote its iOS and Android apps. I started the project in January and launched it in March (<a href="https://jcs.org/pushover" rel="nofollow">https://jcs.org/pushover</a>).<p>In contrast to some competing free apps/services, the Pushover mobile apps are $3.99 which pays for the monthly hosting costs to keep the service running. Both apps are highly rated on both app stores and so far the app sales have paid for the domain name and other tangible development costs and are continuing to generate profit. I just purchased a Blackberry phone for development and plan to create a Blackberry app for the service.
I created a few javascript card games, most of them in late 2011, but they really started earning this year. So far have made Spades, Hearts, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Shithead and a couple of solitaires. Revenue has been steadily rising, and is a nice little side income now. <a href="http://www.spades-cardgame.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.spades-cardgame.com</a> is one, the rest are linked from there.
I created fruji.com, a simple Twitter Analytics service and offered $5 and $25 accounts. People just keep buying accounts! It's fascinating!!!<p>This was a weekend project and it performs already way better (a few weeks in) than my 1.5 year startup (which is something completely different).<p>That's some scary shit right there. Purely fascinating.
I created ExportMyPosts after the Posterous acquisition so people could export and backup their blogs' data - <a href="http://exportmyposts.com/" rel="nofollow">http://exportmyposts.com/</a> - it has made more revenue than it costs for the hosting and servers, but not enough to pay a salary or anything. There are a few promo codes left, use HACKERNEWS at checkout.<p>I also made StepStats - <a href="http://StepStats.com/" rel="nofollow">http://StepStats.com/</a> - for better FitBit data visualization; it's free, but enough people have donated money that it has covered all costs involved.
I launched a paid version (<a href="http://amon.cx/plus" rel="nofollow">http://amon.cx/plus</a> ) of my server and web app monitoring toolkit - Amon ( <a href="http://amon.cx" rel="nofollow">http://amon.cx</a> ) back in February and have made something like $3000. It took me 2 months working full time to build it.
I started a temporary email service called Air Mail which has processed over 2 million emails in the last 3 months and is already profitable.<p><a href="http://getairmail.com" rel="nofollow">http://getairmail.com</a><p>wish I had a cent for every email it processed ;-)
Launched <a href="http://cull.io" rel="nofollow">http://cull.io</a> 20 days ago. Revenue made till now $150. Spent: appengine $10, musicbakery: $47. (I don't really know how to cost my time, it's around three weeks to build).
I created a simple website alert-if-down service (<a href="http://pingdipong.com" rel="nofollow">http://pingdipong.com</a>), and it's just started paying for its own hosting. I wouldn't call it profitable. It's not paying anybodies wage. It's not covering the cost of advertising. It's been an interesting and turbulent couple of months. I went into it thinking there was only big name players in the market (pingdom, etc), that it would be an easy market to break into and found out much later that there are a host of similar products out there. And it's really, really hard to sell simple / boring stuff to people.<p>It's utterly true that the development is only a small fraction of the process. People told me before, but I didn't listen. It's also true that the funnel between getting a clickthrough and getting a payment narrows frighteningly quickly. It seems to cost me a fortune to get a paying customer.<p>I wanted to make something useful that wasn't built on VC money, and although it's possible, I'm not sure that there's much success to be had for small players in the web development arena. It's heartening to hear other peoples stories though. Another reason to keep trying. :-)<p>I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that website development is coming to the end of its homebrew phase (much like games and desktop software previously), and it's becoming almost impossible for tiny teams to make anything useful. There still seems to be some space in the mobile market, but that appears to be being swallowed by larger development teams with VC money.<p>And yes, I'm obviously making this post with the intention of <i>also</i> plugging my own service. I hope I've added something extra to the conversation though.
I partnered up with 4 other talented whizzes and started a user experience production agency.<p><a href="http://hnd.sm" rel="nofollow">http://hnd.sm</a> is sincerely 'coming soon' (next week) but you can see how much work we've already done on our Dribbble here > <a href="http://dribbble.com/handsomemade" rel="nofollow">http://dribbble.com/handsomemade</a><p>It's been a blast working with startups and existing brands creating new products, marketing them, and generally creating success through precise user experience.<p>Very profitable already and showing impressive growth.<p>Not a "web app" or socially networked, real time diet planner but we're a business and we're profitable!<p>Started in Jan of this year.
This year has been an exciting one from the very start!<p>I've had several successful (read: awesomely profitable) new ventures this year, such as an ad network that I established and sold to a private party for a solid 5 figure amount within a month.<p>On one of my more established networks, I was able to grow the unique impressions by over 100k a day within 2 weeks of focusing on it. I also established a domain parking system that already has over 500+ domains parked on it and growing quickly.<p>During a random latenight coding session, I created a unique new channel/model of selling category related emails to advertisers bidding on a CPM basis real-time, and lining up another venture to integrate with this platform.<p>These are but a few of the cool things currently being worked on by myself and my growing staff. Hoping to be hiring on more talent on soon and probably getting a swanky office in La Jolla, CA soon.<p>Have some pretty exciting plans for the year!
Developed an iOS photo editor (<a href="http://proc.es" rel="nofollow">http://proc.es</a>) which keeps me from starving. Though, come to think of it I am a little hungry.
Hi, I've launched a website in January to find all your bills in one place sponsored by big french brands and it became profitable in may
<a href="http://greenbureau.fr" rel="nofollow">http://greenbureau.fr</a>
Great thread! I love seeing actual projects people are working on.<p>I wrote a 55-page eBook on starting a profitable drop shipping business which has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month (<a href="http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ecommercefuel.com/profitable-ecommerce-ebook/</a>). I started writing in late April and released it May 15th.<p>Since I'm giving the eBook away and my monetization goals are mostly long term, revenues have been very minimal - less than $100 in affiliate commissions so far. But in 2.5 months since I launched the blog, I've received nearly 10,000 visits and almost 600 subscribers which I've been really happy about...
Not quite 2012, but I started work on CircleCI (<a href="https://circleci.com" rel="nofollow">https://circleci.com</a>) in September 2011 and it's a real business now.
We (littleheroes.com) launched an iPad app to read kids books purchased on our site. We were fortunate in that we already had a customer base to market to.
I launched a service recently that sends people a new technical interview question every other day (www.InterTechTion.com). Subscribers are slowly growing daily and people seem to really like the service. I'm a first-year college student (so I'm new to this stuff) and am trying to figure out how to get advertisers to sign up. Any advice?
I launched the Pest Management Roundtable (<a href="http://pestroundtable.com" rel="nofollow">http://pestroundtable.com</a>) in February. After several months of good ol' fashioned hustling (mostly email marketing + telephone interviews and sales), I'm up to nearly $500 in monthly recurring revenue. It's not quite "ramen profitable" yet, but I've been picking up customers quickly the last 2 weeks, so at this rate I'll get it there within the month. A recent milestone was that last week I interviewed the owner of the 10th largest pest control company in the US (Joe Clark, of Clark Pest Control in California). He joined the Roundtable immediately following the interview.
I started <a href="http://boxysign.com" rel="nofollow">http://boxysign.com</a> 2 months ago. It is a way to share and sign documents with just a link! It's been profitable from the start - ableit still on a very small scale.
Launched <a href="http://www.TrickedOutTimeline.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.TrickedOutTimeline.com</a> on HN in february (see <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522255" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3522255</a>) and have made ~$2500 on around $100 costs from advertising and hosting on google app engine. Nothing huge, but good for a weekends work with a friend!
I created <a href="https://www.pageblox.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pageblox.com</a>, a layout tool for web designers. I've been getting between 1500-2000 uniques a month, so when I turn on the paid version, I should be making at least a few hundred a month depending on how the conversion rate turns out...
I started Startup Threads Monthly (<a href="https://StartupThreadsMonthly.com" rel="nofollow">https://StartupThreadsMonthly.com</a>), a subscription service for startup swag, at the beginning of the year and is profitable. Have 200+ subscribers, thanks in part to HN! Will do a breakdown soon.
My second company (Sense/Net) ran it's second ever event this year, 44Café. It was a one day event alongside the UK's biggest infosec exhibition. We didn't make any money from it (in fact it cost us about $5,000 all in) but we did the event to raise awareness of the main conference[1] we're organising for September, which I hope will bring a return in (although the olympics are doing their best to make anything in London ludicrously expensive).<p>I'm also working on something for our first external event (i.e. an event organised on behalf of someone else), which will be really cool if it goes ahead.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.44con.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.44con.com/</a>
Wrote and launched <a href="http://app.net/emptyinbox" rel="nofollow">http://app.net/emptyinbox</a> with my wife as a spare time project over the course of a few months. It's an inbox zero assistant for Gmail on iPhone. I am my own app's biggest fan, I use it almost daily and love it to death. :)<p>Unfortunately a crash bug was in the first version for people running the iphone app on an ipad, which wasn't discovered until after an AppAdvice review came out which drove tons of downloads...so that led to a bunch of 1-star reviews. But reviews since the fixed version have been very positive.
Define profitable, it's extremely easy to build something that generates revenue.<p>The difficult part is to build something that provides enough revenue to support 1+ employees, office space, etc
I started building <a href="http://www.splatsearch.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.splatsearch.com</a>
A comparison engine with big plans to compare everything in the world.
One online marketer and 2 developers building it.
Currently the live version is a very different snapshop from the dev version which we roll out soon and just has 14 million sample products.
We bootstrapped it and it probably just about profitable even though its barely live.
Over the last couple of weeks I created <a href="http://hipdial.com" rel="nofollow">http://hipdial.com</a> with a friend. You can buy your own, dedicated, PIN-free phone conference line from us.<p>We've opened doors to the public teo weeks ago and are already paying for the servers. Press launch following next week. It's all very exciting :) Once things relax a bit we'll definitely share our experience on some kind of blog.<p>Would love some feedback if you have a minute, too.<p>Edit: typo in URL, oops
Started a curated ecommerce site for vinyl lovers that's been profitable since day 1: <a href="http://vinylloop.com/" rel="nofollow">http://vinylloop.com/</a>
I launched <a href="https://www.rootredirect.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rootredirect.com/</a> in April and it's paying its bills. It provides high-availability root domain redirection for websites that use CNAME-based services like EC2+ELB, S3/CloudFront, and Google App Engine. Plus other features not offered by your DNS provider, such as cacheable 301 responses and page redirects.
I started TimePanel (<a href="http://timepanel.net" rel="nofollow">http://timepanel.net</a>) this year. I've always had the desire to build a product, and wanted a time tracking and invoicing solution that was extremely fast and simple. TimePanel is the culmination of that.<p>Number of users is slowly growing, and I just released its 3rd beta update; looking to formally launch very soon.
I released a service called <a href="http://www.formactivate.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.formactivate.com</a> where I convert form fills and web based leads to phone calls. It decreased the time between initial lead submission to when a you can get the prospect on the phone.<p>We started to get a ton of activity after I integrated with Wufoo.com via the webhook API.
I started a WordPress Plugin (<a href="http://wpadpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://wpadpress.com</a>) and it's now generating a close to a 4 figures monthly income. I'm working on lots of improvements and will be joining hands with Theme authors for promotion, so it might turn to something serious in the future.
I started a business text-messaging service, and succeeded in my first two sales calls with local businesses. It was instantly profitable and is growing. Currently I am not ready to sell it nationally, as I am refining and adding some new features for a new client, or I would link it.
I created "I Want An App That" (<a href="http://www.iwaat.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.iwaat.com</a>), a web app discovery engine. No real business model has been implemented but so far affiliate revenue has been paying for hosting costs and other services.
I've built <a href="http://AppCod.es" rel="nofollow">http://AppCod.es</a> - a tool for App Store SEO. It was launched around february 2012, in march we got covered by Techcrunch (instant break even) and our sales were increasing month by month since then.
I launched a web site about alternative fuel LPG, mostly about fuel stations in Europe (<a href="http://www.mylpg.eu" rel="nofollow">http://www.mylpg.eu</a>). At first it was a test to feel the market, but now I found out it has potential.
Wedding planning app for Mac - Weddinglan(<a href="http://weddinglan.com" rel="nofollow">http://weddinglan.com</a>) About $800 per month, but hope for more profit after next version which will include also iPad version
Beware of posts like this from what is basically a new account with only as much karma as this post has received.<p>Sharks and all that: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4017843" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4017843</a><p>(Am I paranoid much?)
I recently started <a href="http://simplyhire.in/" rel="nofollow">http://simplyhire.in/</a> . I started working on this about month back ( may starting ). Couple of local startup has started using it. This looks good.<p>But right now unable to push beyond these local startup, lack of networking etc. Let me know if guys can help.