We all know examples of paid online services that became profitable. For example Balsamiq, Tarsnap and Bingo Card Creator.<p>I love to build small tools that do something useful. But they do not offer enough value to charge for them. Imagine tools like "When will the sun rise today in city X" or "How much taxes are in $X" etc. Some of them are used by tens of thousands of people a month. And I get a lot of "thank you, that's cool and useful" emails.<p>So far I'm not making any money from them. When I slap adsense on them, I only make a few bucks. Like $0.5 per 1000 visitors. Even if I optimized that to $2 per 1000 visitors, it still would be just around $150/month for all my websites.<p>But since I love doing these little, interesting projects, I will probably make more of them anyhow. Most of the projects I have in mind are little tools that cater my own curiosity. Nothing people would pay for. Like "find all xkcd comics related to a topic" and stuff like that.<p>Do you guys think there is a way to make a living like this? Are there any examples of profitable websites, created by one guy that have some informative value but not so much that people would pay for it?
A few years ago I was getting into iOS audio development and I started blogging about CoreAudio. My website started getting some traffic so thought I'd put together a really comprehensive tutorial on how to play MIDI files on iOS. I started selling it on my site for around $19.99 and started making a couple of hundred dollars per month. Then one of the founders of <a href="http://www.binpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.binpress.com</a> reached out to me and asked if I'd consider putting my component on their site. I decided to go for it and with the added exposure it started bringing in around $400 - $500 per month. Then I decided to spend my spare time making components to save other developers time on common tasks. I developed a piano plugin and then a chat component (<a href="http://www.binpress.com/app/chat-messaging-sdk-for-ios/1644" rel="nofollow">http://www.binpress.com/app/chat-messaging-sdk-for-ios/1644</a>). The chat component did really well so over time I built it up - currently it brings in about $2k per month in sales and loads of consulting work. Because of the chat component, I was approached by the Founders of Firebase because they wanted to shut down an online chat service they had called Envolve. They asked if I'd be prepared to make an alternative service and take on their customer base. I took on the project and developed a new chat called Chatcat (<a href="http://chatcat.io" rel="nofollow">http://chatcat.io</a>). Currently, I'm making about $4 - 5k per month in passive revenue from Binpress and the chat. On top of that I can easily make another $5k in freelance work. I'd definitely recommend this as a low risk path to generating a really stable passive revenue.
I hate having to be vague here, but suffice it to say there exist a few developers-oriented web applications which did one small thing well apiece. One day, a Silicon Valley company tired of paying $500 per lead to AdWords just sent them bolt-out-of-the-blue offers. Suffice it to say that the numbers involved were fat yearly salaries for nights-and-weekends style projects.<p>If you want to catch a bolt out of the blue, getting together a coherent commercially valuable audience increases your chances. That said: the easiest and best way to make money is to make something people want and trade it to them for money. If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web developers use every month then turning that into six figures is straightforward.<p>P.S. "They do not offer enough value to charge for" is a solvable problem, either by adding value or by using equivalent engineering time to build solutions to problems that matter to people with money. I mean, it's not like BCC's for loop and random number generator are a commandingly high bar of technical prowess to justify the $29.95 price tag.
I created sendtodropbox.com (email attachments to Dropbox) as a side project about 3 years ago. After the initial prototype, two-ish rewrites, and monetizing it with a freemium model, it's now got 1100 paying subscribers and brought in $20k in revenue this year. I did the whole thing myself (aside from the website template design, which a buddy of mine helped out with). This doesn't technically fall under the "informative value" category, but going solo on a project to make it profitable is definitely possible.
About 7 years ago I invented and patented CreditCovers : "skins for credit cards". They are widely regarded in marketing circles as the single most effective way to start an offline conversation about a brand - called a "new dawn in viral marketing" by BusinessWeek.<p>CreditCovers.com is a near fully automated business at this point. I set up a deal with a factory in Brooklyn to handle print / pack / ship and wrote software to handle batching orders to them daily and updating customers.<p>Also, I created a DIY tool for people to customize their own which cut down on tons of e-mails of people asking for custom covers and having to do graphic work. <a href="http://creditcovers.com/DIY" rel="nofollow">http://creditcovers.com/DIY</a><p>It's been cool. Ton's of press, customers include people like Google, Ben Cohen - founder of Ben & Jerry's, celebs, Obama, etc.<p>Because CreditCovers are so effective, our single greatest marketing tool is just to give them away which always results in a positive ROI on referrals.. So that said, anyone who wants one with their start-up logo / dog / gf / mom / whatever on it can go get one... Use code 'hackernews' to get $10 off an order and get one free. (You will have to create it yourself using our tool at creditcovers.com/DIY - there are photoshop templates as well)<p>Also - we have a generous affiliate program of 50% if you'd like to partner on either 1 off or bulk sales - hit us up. order@creditcovers.com
As someone else mentioned, the only method I've seen work is either a niche with very high CPM rates, or to garner a lot of traffic.<p>On the ton of traffic side, there are a lot of examples, but Google has nuked countless of those over time.<p>eg: <a href="http://www.markosweb.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.markosweb.com/</a><p>They were once one of the top ~1,000 sites in the world, and that site was generating over a million dollars per year via AdSense. They'd show up for nearly any search for a random domain / site in google. A lot of sites were using that domain info technique to spam traffic (they'd show things like pagerank, alexa rank, estimated value, blah blah).<p>Well that concept is still functional, just not as lucrative. Today you can find "sites like X" sites that are plentiful in the serps. There is still a lot of traffic in it.<p>Some presently still successful examples (some are spammy, some are less so; Google has hit some of these hard this year; if you asked most of these sites, they'd claim they're valuable tools):<p><a href="http://www.semrush.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.semrush.com</a><p><a href="http://www.network-tools.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.network-tools.com</a><p><a href="http://www.ip-adress.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ip-adress.com</a><p><a href="http://www.prchecker.info" rel="nofollow">http://www.prchecker.info</a><p><a href="http://www.intodns.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.intodns.com</a><p><a href="http://who.is" rel="nofollow">http://who.is</a><p><a href="http://www.aboutus.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.aboutus.org</a><p><a href="http://www.similarsites.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.similarsites.com</a>
I just sealed a deal yesterday, making mid-3 figure /month revenue with a sponsor for a weekend project of mine: <a href="http://hacker.surf" rel="nofollow">http://hacker.surf</a><p>HackerSurf launched a few days ago on HN, and sat on the front page for about 12 hours. Here's a recap on how it all went down here: <a href="http://scotthasbrouck.com/8000-uniques-from-weekend-node-js-project-to-the-front-page-of-hacker-news/" rel="nofollow">http://scotthasbrouck.com/8000-uniques-from-weekend-node-js-...</a><p>A small example of a small project leading to recurring revenue. I'm writing another blog post for tomorrow on going from launch to solid revenue in 48 hours, I'll followup here with it.
The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community. Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and filtering content (<a href="http://iosdevweekly.com" rel="nofollow">http://iosdevweekly.com</a>) to producing content (basically all sites from the smallest blog up to BuzzFeed). The metric if there is one is how engaged your community is. Do they open your regular cadence newsletter? Do your current readers forward your newsletters? You can game social media all you want and in the end the real thing is are you providing value to people in the community you are contributing to/part of. All those people who sell 2,000 books with a single email spent hundreds of hours growing their email list one by one. It is easy to write one blog post that goes viral. And to get them to come back and read what your write next - that is harder.<p>Grow your community, give back, deliver something unique that you can provide on a regular basis.<p>The reality is you don't own anything if you work for a company. But if you have 100 or 1000 mailing list opens - that is all yours.<p>The rhetorical question is do you want to make $12,000 a year or $120k/year. The catch hear is $120k is salaried and NOT geometrically scalable while the $12k refers to your own sales/ad revenue. That what you own and have built is scalable.<p>It is all about influence and/or providing what people want.
I'm making ~ $100 per month from this little tool [0] I created over weekend.<p>[0] <a href="http://portchecker.co/" rel="nofollow">http://portchecker.co/</a>
I'm not sure if this site qualifies as "small" enough, but I think Ken Pomeroy does pretty well with his site kenpom.com. He takes college basketball box scores, runs a cron job that does some mathematical analysis and puts the results on his site. He has built the site out in the last few years, but there are still only a handful of dyanmically generated pages on his site (rankings, team stats, player stats, game stats). A subscription to his site costs $20/year and I would guess he has several thousand subscribers (myself included).
I'm not an Adsense specialist at all, but I suggest you might give it a little time. Adsense learns how to improve the value of your ads because it understands your visitors better over time. My Adsense income has increased 600% over time without me doing anything (still a small site, not enough to pay the rent, but nice extra). Of course other factors than just Adsense learning might have influenced it, too (ie more competition on ads or whatever), but still - my experience has been good.
FYI If you haven't seen it check out this github list & discussion about web business models: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732</a>
Adam Bard's recent work is a good example: <a href="http://adambard.com" rel="nofollow">http://adambard.com</a><p>As is Kevin Lynagh's <a href="http://keminglabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://keminglabs.com</a> - He also made Denizen (I think) <a href="https://getdenizen.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getdenizen.com/</a><p>I have no idea if any of these are profitable, but at least you get some ideas. Searching "site:news.ycombinator.com microbusiness" also brings up some good examples, for instance: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243</a>
One way to make money from an activity is to sell products and services to people doing the activity. Supply companies in Denver probably were more consistently profitable, and their owners and employees probably lived longer, than the miners who stopped in on their way into the mountains to dig for gold, silver and lead.<p>Use your experience with what you do to create books and other resources for people who might like to do what you do.<p>Create a hosting service that is structured to support that community really well.<p>Etc.
I'm certainly nowhere near making a living, but I have a few simple tools that generate adsense income. The sites generate international shipping documents. It was something I needed myself. Targeting businesses in a small niche helps with the per-click value and organic search rankings, I believe. So I don't need a huge number of visitors.<p>I feel good about actually providing value. And they are useful tools for me and I make a little money (about $150/month).<p>I've made a few consumer-oriented tools, including a baby name site, a meat temperature guide and office football pool site. I have not generated enough traffic to make ads worthwhile, but I suspect the pay-off would be low anyway. These sites would require thousands of visitors a day, and it would take a lot of legwork to generate that sort of traffic.<p>A few others that I use regularly that I did not make:
<a href="https://identitysafe.norton.com/password-generator/" rel="nofollow">https://identitysafe.norton.com/password-generator/</a>
<a href="http://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xml-converter.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xml-converter.html</a>
<a href="https://www.xml-sitemaps.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.xml-sitemaps.com</a>
Since you have traffic, you could work on monetizing in other ways than adsense. Think of a product that visitors might be interested in and try to sell them that.
I'm on the same boat regarding adsense you need a lot of traffic or extremely profitable keywords to make any substantial income.
I read recently on a similar Ask HN that <a href="https://www.conferencebadge.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.conferencebadge.com/</a> is making a good income, and it can be considered 'little' I presume but they actually charge for their product/service.
Some tools lend themselves to starting small and expanding through add-ons, pro features or alternative versions. The example that comes to my mind is GreenSock (<a href="http://greensock.com" rel="nofollow">http://greensock.com</a>) which started as small, simple Flash (ActionScript) library, but evolved into a large set of animation related libraries and plug-ins covering also HTML5 (JavaScript) and offering various licences starting from free to commercial/paid.<p>I don't know the internal details, but I have used it on multiple occasions over the years and the impression I get is that it evolved from a free, personal side project into more professional product and company. I suspect that the creator also gets commissioned projects as additional revenue stream. And judging from its consistent evolution over the years it must bring profits that justify working on it!
Why not gather all your products under one roof? Create a website that gathers all the other tools, choose a theme for it and everything, then start taking donations or charging small amounts of money for a monthly subscription to all your products or paid accounts that to use some extra tools
Depends on what you think of as free/small. My startup, <a href="http://reviewsignal.com" rel="nofollow">http://reviewsignal.com</a> is a free service people can use to look up web hosting companies. it's automatically tracking all the tweets about major hosts and publishing the results. It's profitable and free, but was a lot of works (not sure how small it really is). I've also built a lot of tools closer to what you're describing, things like <a href="http://listmanipulator.com" rel="nofollow">http://listmanipulator.com</a> and <a href="http://domainling.com" rel="nofollow">http://domainling.com</a> but none of the smaller projects come anywhere close to being a sustainable living.
Incidentally, for those interested in this sort of thing, <a href="http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/" rel="nofollow">http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/</a> has a laser-focus on bootstrapped startups that makes for a very pleasant site.
I have a history of sites like that too. None of them ever made any money. I finally bit the bullet and started working on <i>one</i> site that does something that I charge money for: <a href="http://www.liberwriter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.liberwriter.com</a><p>It's not perfect in a lot of ways - no recurring revenue - but it's done <i>way</i> better than any of those fun projects ever have, in terms of making money. I've also learned a lot more because I have real customers that get angry if things go wrong, or are very happy when things go right because I'm solving something that's a real problem for them.
I do run small website called Notation Training <a href="http://notationtraining.com" rel="nofollow">http://notationtraining.com</a> it is up and running for about three years and is doing quite good. I do run AdSense there, making around 200 USD/month and then I am selling premium version for $4 which quite some people buys as well. I guess I could be more aggressive with selling the premium version, but I am quite ok with it. There is very little maintenance going to this product and it makes quite nice extra money for me.
If the tools are useful enough to attract backlinks, you might want to find a company that's audience would find value in your tools, and sell it to them as an seo strategy.
Here's the simple formula...<p>1. Content Development: Build a linkable asset (content or tools that people are compelled to share).
2. Outreach: Develop a targeting list of people who would likely link to your tool, and nurture a relationship with them.
3. Get Rich.<p>Packaged right, to the right company, you can probably charge $5k-$20k for the tool and another $5k/Month for outreach.
A little CSS formatter tool I developed - <a href="http://procssor.com" rel="nofollow">http://procssor.com</a> (now part of MaxCDN). The Mac app was profitable before I sold it 2yrs ago.
Perhaps instead of assuming that they don't offer enough value to charge, you could spend some time figuring out who would value them enough to pay for them.<p>e.g., when will the sun rise in city x -> send me an email 5 minutes before the sun rises in city x (because I told my girlfriend who's working overseas that I'd call her when the sun came up).<p>There is probably value in what you're doing. The trick is to find out who values it, for how much, and how can they pay you a possibly tiny amount with low payment overhead.
I wrote this Wordpress Bitcoin plugin for fun:<p><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/" rel="nofollow">https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommer...</a><p>Eventually got about ~15 BTC worth of donations.
Free version is fully functional, paid version allows very detailed performance configurations for serious stores.<p>Making about $300+ sales per month on it, fully passively (in $$$ and BTC as well)
Along these lines, I have a small app I want to improve and monetize. Problem is that the value is pretty low and it's doubtful that it would ever rise above $5/use (and that's really pushing it!) and it would be very occasional use. Is PayPal the best I can hope for with low sales volumes and low sales amounts?<p>Are there recommended forms of micropayments/low overhead payments available at the moment?
I built a pretty thorough tax calculator tool at <a href="http://www.tax-rates.org/income-tax-calculator" rel="nofollow">http://www.tax-rates.org/income-tax-calculator</a>. Building it was a great experience, and I monetize it with ads and affiliate links during the tax season. It was certainly worth the time put in, and I am currently exploring options for expanding it into a paid app.
I have built a few free products too. I use them to advertise my sisterly paid products. A few of my free products: <a href="https://getsimpleform.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getsimpleform.com/</a>, <a href="http://redirectapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://redirectapp.com/</a><p>You could try accepting donations or use it to build your portfolio for consultancy projects.
I just started a document conversion API. Its only making $20/mo now but I think I can build to $2k/mo after a little more refinement and some advertising steps. But this is not make a living money. Combined with some freelancing gigs and other SaaS things it becomes living money.<p>The biggest upside is the stable revenue which allow you to be even more creative.
We are building "Create your own HackerNews"<p><a href="http://www.postatic.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.postatic.com</a><p>We are not charging yet, but planning to quite soon. Plenty of users so far with interest in paying. Not entirely sure how we'll go, but we're pretty sure it'll bring in some profit (or fingers crossed!)
Without any experience doing what you're doing, I would say listen to what your users tell you. Review their emails and they'll tell you all you need to know about what they are looking for (enhancements maybe)? Learn to build a premium model after what they are asking for.
<a href="http://rebrickable.com" rel="nofollow">http://rebrickable.com</a> - a tool to show you what LEGO sets you can build with the parts you have. It has a large collection of fan made creations, all with building instructions.
I have made about 100 USD from pgxplorer. The site is in a bit of a limbo after my server crashed and I got a bit busy with dayjob. But looking to inject a couple of booster shots and also working on pg as a service platform as we speak.