Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by csallen 3544 days ago
https://IndieHackers.com is a side project of mine that recently hit $1k/mo. I launched it here on HN a couple months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425).

It's pretty meta to be posting this here, because Indie Hackers is basically a huge collection of interviews with developers who are making money from their apps and side projects. I only include interviews with people who are willing to share revenue numbers, employee count, etc. There's also a forum/comments section where you can ask your own questions to the interviewees if you find my questions lacking :)
1 comments
stockkid 3544 days ago
What is the main source of revenue for Indie Hackers? Congrats on hitting 1k/month.
link
csallen 3544 days ago
Sponsorships account for 97% of my revenue right now. I send out a weekly newsletter, and in the first couple weeks I asked if anyone was interested in sponsoring the site. At least 4 or 5 companies have reached out to me since then.

I've also dabbled in Amazon affiliate links, but those don't seem to be quite worth it yet.

link
vsax 3541 days ago
How do you evaluate what to charge the sponsors? My site http://thelogo.site showed up on the front page of HN and then ever since traffic has been growing. I have been just making money off of leads through the site asking for custom logos(on average about $2000 per month). But some people have enquired about sponsorship.
link
stockkid 3544 days ago
I am going down a similar route with my project RemoteBase.

But I am realizing that my scalability is limited because I can have only so many sponsors on the site. If there are too many sponsors at the same time, they start to lose value.

I think it might be worthwhile to diversify the revenue source from sponsorships in my case, and perhaps yours too.

link
csallen 3544 days ago
Right, I've been concerned about the same thing. I can make roughly $1k/mo from every extra 100k pageviews/mo, and I have a lot of room for traffic growth, so I'm focusing on that right now. But eventually I'll hit a ceiling beyond which it's hard to grow traffic, and I'll have to find out what to do from there. Hopefully that won't be before I can pay my rent etc from the revenue!

I'm going to be writing about all my decision-making in a lot more detail on the blog pretty soon (https://IndieHackers.com/blog). Indie Hackers is all about transparency, after all.

RemoteBase is cool, btw! I'd love to feature you on Indie Hackers this week if you're interested.

link