[ekidd]

$12,000/month after taxes is $144,000/year for a single founder company. U.S. median family income was $45,018/year before taxes in 2003. Even for programmers working in Silicon Valley, $144,000/year after taxes is pretty decent.

For comparison purposes, if you sold your company for $3.6 million, invested the money at 4% above inflation, and lived off the real interest, you'd earn $144,000/year.

Now, that's clearly not as nice as an $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft, but it's still pretty sweet. If nothing else, you can comfortably feed your family while working on a new startup. :-)

[mb21]

yes - typo. $1,000/month or 12k/year is not livable in the US.

Thanks for pointing this out. I actually did reread the post, but pre-coffee.

[ChuckMcM]

$1,000/month is great beer money. How much work goes into day to day operations?

One of the things to keep in mind that if something 'only' makes $1,000/month but only takes two or three days out of your time a month its "effectively" paying you $15K - $20K/month because you have those other days to do something else. People who set up linkbait pages (I'm looking at you content farms) which bring in 4x their operating cost just replicate the crap out of them.

[mb21]

1k/month before taxes :( If you are already doing a full time job in software dev, you are probably paying 30-40% tax already.