[fearless]

The $1.2M revenue number looks completely made up by the article submitter. The article makes no mention of this or any other specific monthly revenue number.

I would expect a service like this to have very high churn as people export a list and leave, so the actual recurring revenue is likely much, much lower.

[cpayne]

The article says the platform has a ‘few thousand’ users. Let's be conservative and say 2000.

40% of basic at $295 = $236k 40% of pro at $295 = $396k 20% of basic at $295 = $398k

Equals $1.03M. PER MONTH! With one staff (I think the zero staff is a stretch)

Overheads would be significant, but still, let's say they are 90%.

He is still earning $100k per month profit. Not a bad business...

[tempestn]

Why do you figure overhead would be anywhere near 90%? It sounds like he's basically automatically scraping this info, and it doesn't need to be done at any particularly fast rate. He's probably leasing a single dedicated server for a few hundred dollars a month and working from home. I expect his overhead is near zero.

[personjerry]

I think he was just being conservative to make a point, that EVEN at 90% he'd be making a LOT of money.

[tempestn]

True. I just figured it was unnecessarily conservative. He said, "Overheads would be significant," which I don't think is actually true. I agree with the general principle that it's a lot of money.

[cpayne]

What @personjerry said. His accountant must loose his mind.

In my experience, hosting is a lot more expensive than everyone thinks. That being said, choose a number - 40%, 60%, 90%.

I've never seen a business that generates THAT much revenue with such low overheads. Awesome business!

[tempestn]

My experience has been different I guess. I run a small web-based business serving around 50,000 visitors a day. We don't do anything particularly bandwidth-intensive, but we spend less than $500/month on our server and bandwidth.

This guy's traffic would be considerably lower than ours I would think. Most of his resources are going to be going to the scanning effort. But that can run at a continuous rate around the clock, which is the most efficient way to utilize resources. And it doesn't need to be done completely quickly: it looks like he'd be fine completing a full scan in under a month. That shouldn't require particularly high-powered hardware.

So, I can't imagine this guy could possibly be spending more then $100k/month on hosting. Honestly I would be surprised if it was more than $10k. I was just trying to clear up what I saw as a misconception.

[nreece]

The number comes from the article author: https://twitter.com/StartupDailyANZ/status/64975823165332275...

[prawn]

The article mentions enough figures that you can derive the figure yourself. 2-3k paying customers, plans are $300-1k/mo and the plan breakdown is hinted at.

[forgottenacc56]

How do you get from "unexplained" to "made up"?