Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

[1hakr]

Hello everyone,

I’m Hari, and I’m a serial Microstartup Maker. 2021 has been an amazing year despite the pandemic where I reached my recent goal of $500/day. Compounding works everywhere, even in microstartups. It took 3 years to reach to $300/day but just 4 months to $500/day. The business model of my microstartups is a mix of App sales, subscriptions, affiliates and ads. I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs. My next goal is to reach $600/day.

My Microstartups Rewind 2021

* Revenue - $117K/year (67% ▲)

* Expenses - 3K/year

* All time high revenue - $15K/month in Dec (18% ▲)

* Daily goal - $500/day reached in Dec

Visa List - https://visalist.io

* Revenue - $50K/year (39% ▲)

* All time high revenue - $8K/month in Dec

* Total Users - 2.6M/year

* Active users - 250K/month

AnExplorer - https://anexplorer.co

* Revenue - $50K/year (95% ▲)

* User growth: 130% ▲ yoy

* Active users: 350K

ACrypto - https://acrypto.io

* Revenue - $10K/year

* Active users: 30K

Tech Stack i used: Android - Java Firebase VueJS GoLang

[bArray]

Related:

"Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping" (this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964

"AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups" (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132

"Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup" (2020): https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969

"Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to keep your desk job away" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304674

"Show HN: I made $9000 posting on Hacker News about my microstartup" (2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr

And so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=1hakr

To answer the question "how do you advertise your products?", clearly it is to spam Hacker News until you get lucky.

[AlchemistCamp]

Looking at the OP's history over about the past year and a half, 100% of the submissions have been to his own sites and 100% of his comments are on those threads or in one case linking to one of those sites.

Your comment isn't the first one on these threads to point out the pattern, either, so it's very likely the mods have seen his pattern of using HN exclusively as a marketing channel and are okay with it.

[arisAlexis]

After all that is his business model :)

[melenaboija]

Also seeing the title and the upvotes tells this is one of the topics that matters to the HN community, simply how to make money.

Not saying it is bad, just an observation.

[mattbrewsbytes]

I clicked because I've had ideas over the years (dating back to reading Joel On Software and about Micro ISV's) and the title of this post makes me wonder if my ideas are too big and that's a reason why they never got to implementation.

The concept of a bunch of small/micro things that make hobby level money is interesting.

[seydor]

I think it matters more to be independent. And getting people's attention without truckloads of money is hard nowadays

[throwawayvibes]

Have you never written a HN upvote bot to push your submissions up? It's how it goes.

[oasisbob]

I miss the days when visalist wasn't full of hostile anti-patterns.

Back in 2019, it was easy to recommend to fellow travelers as an accurate source of information. Not so much, now.

I'm sad to see that it funnels users away from official government sites. eg, a US citizen traveling to India is eligible for a cheap e-Visa which generally issues in ~72 hours here:

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html

The big green "APPLY FOR VISA" button on visalist sends traffic to iVisa.com, which is much less useful.

[namdnay]

I doubt the Indian government pays those sweet referral fees :)

Edit: I wish the UN would provide a free honest alternative to this kind of scammy “visa information”site

[MrDresden]

Having a partner that works in a UN run institution as a researcher I have seen first hand how bureaucratic and starved for funds that entity truly is.

Getting funds for paperclips is a massive battle.

[Jugurtha]

How are they passing around TPS reports without paperclips ?

[MrDresden]

From what I hear they used to just staple them together, what with the lack of paperclips.

But now the stapler seems to have gone missing.

Its quite the pickle.

[accountofme]

those red swinglines were on the chopping block for quite some time.

[aent]

Wikipedia is probably the best source for ad-free up to date info on visas:

You just need to search for "Visa requirements for %country% citizens":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_S...

[1hakr]

Visa list has both government website and visa agency link. Users can choose to use what is convenient for them. Visa list also provides all document requirements so anyone can do it themselves.

[earksiinni]

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no?

I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.

Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.

Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?

[halpert]

Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

[nathansherburn]

> validating ideas is (relatively) easy

My experience has been totally different here.

We found people to be biased toward being polite. So we found "being excited" was a bad signal for what to build.

The best signals were when people offerred things that actually cost something e.g. reputation (by putting us in touch with important people), money or time (if they're people who valued their time highly).

We still haven't found any crazy level of growth though so maybe it is easy and we're just doing it wrong. Who knows.

[cranium]

The book "The Mom Test" written by Rob Fitzpatrick may help you with that. It presents ways to ask non-leading questions and understand the flow of discussion such that even your mom wouldn't be able to lie to you.

It's a short book without fluff, I recommend.

[imeron]

You have to decode what they say. Which is really hard because obviously working on the product yourself, you want to believe they care about your product.

For example: - "This is awesome! I would absolutely use this if it would just have this one extra feature it does not have now." --> I absolutely don't care about this product. Please leave me alone. I have better things to do.

[cloverich]

> but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test.

I think OP agrees w/ you and this is their key point -- you can ignore everything they say and just look at how, or whether, they use it. More generally, I think it helps to try very hard to get at the underlying problems people have, and try to make those problems go away. People will use very terrible software (interfaces) if it solves a real problem for them. I think your signals are good generalizations to be clear, I just think we (all of us) regularly gloss over problems by focusing on tech, design, or otherwise "cool" things. It can be really hard to figure out what problems people actually have, and also whether they are significant enough to change their behavior to solve them better.

[kirso]

If it would have been easy, we would probably have millions of micro-startup founders out there.

I have been doing customer discovery professionally for over 10 years as a sales person and PM and there is no 1 method or silver bullet to predict whether the product will be successful.

Talking to acquaintances is terrible, because they are biased (see MOM test). They will tell you all kind of stories, but ultimately what matters is:

Are they going to pay?

Excitement has nothing to do with revenue which in the end is the blood of a business.

To extend this - there is a patter now on Twitter where indie devs are selling to their twitter friends, but is it a viable business beyond that? I don't know.

What I do know is that the only way to validate a product is to get paid and the market will tell you the truth.

[NithurM]

> NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

Thanks for writing this.

[1hakr]

When I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.

You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.

[bgdam]

> See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people.

And how do you find these 'few people' to pitch to? You would have to find the right people with skin in the game, who are actually impacted by this right? How do you do that? For me, this has always been the part I could never crack.

[halpert]

If you don't have first-hand contact with your potential users, and you don't know where they are, then you likely lack the empathy to build a great product for them.

[TOGoS]

For anyone scrolling by and getting sucker punched by halpert here, I'd like you to know that not being surrounded by people whose problems can be solved with software startups doesn't mean you 'lack empathy'.

[cloverich]

I think boffinism's comment below hits it, but to also add -- its important to try and find a charitable interpretation of comments when possible. Here I think empathy was meant literally as understanding other people's needs and points of view. If you don't know people with some problem directly, and also don't know how to find them -- how sure are you that the problem you are solving is real and in need of a practical solution? You have to understand user needs very well to build a novel product that people want to use. Its not about software startups solving the worlds problems -- I think its just a very general point about solving problems you understand and not ones you don't have any experience with.

To give a more concrete example, I know of a successul life insurance company. It was started because the founders had a bad experience with purchasing life insurance. They then worked with (and as) life insurance agents to better understand the customer (and insurer's) needs. THEN they built a company, one solution at a time.

[boffinism]

I feel like 'and you don't know where they are' is maybe the redeeming phrase in halpert's post. If you have an idea that you think would help some people, and you have no idea where such people are concentrated... maybe it's a sign you don't know enough about said people to really be able to help them?

[axiosgunnar]

He did not say „lack empathy, making you a bad person“.

He said „lack empathy for building this particular type of software“, meaning you would not be getting enough emotional feedback (due to lack of connections).

[throw_me_up]

Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.

[blamazon]

I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

[IndexPointer]

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

[YounesDz]

Not the OP.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.

[catchmilk]

There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least.

What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think about the projects that I maintain(ed), there's almost always something to do, something to fix, some library or tech that's been deprecated/patched etc etc. The idea of just creating a product (let alone a few) that just "works" nowadays and requires minimum attention is pretty mind-blowing.

Does anyone have any advice/books/resources on creating such products?

[badestrand]

You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment.

This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work.

I have a profitable project that is still running on PHP 5 on Ubuntu 14 and it seems that now I finally will have to upgrade things, but it will be a single upgrade now after many years that may take 1 day instead of 20 separate little ones that may have cost 1/2 day each if I always had kept up to date.

[spiffytech]

> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done.

I think part of making this distinction comes down to whether the creator thinks the product will ever be 'done'. A lot of products are run with the assumption (implicit or explicit) that they'll keep getting updated as long as they remain viable as a business. Either approach is a valid but they're both choices. Though you may have to choose right from the start, as for some products only one of the two is viable.

[elliottkember]

> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done.

This is a very insightful comment. For my last project, I spent a long time doing the opposite of this. A good lesson to learn.

[kingcharles]

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year.

The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)

The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.

[xuki]

> The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m.

I was under the impression that most private trackers run without a profit, at least the reputable ones. Are you telling me PTP/BTN/HDB sysops are loaded?

[kingcharles]

I would guess so. It might be harder to take payments now than it was then, though, which would add friction and lower your revenues. I bet hosting is cheaper now, though.

Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.

We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.

Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.

[frontman1988]

You made 13 mils and yet didn't have money to pay bail and are now broke? Your comment history doesn't seem to add up.

[kingcharles]

The site made $13m. I stated in my comment above that I was only making about $150,000. Which I frittered away on bullshit toys. I had no savings at all.

[agopaul]

That is impressive. How much time do you think you spent on non-coding activities? I imagine that running a torrent tracker probably took a good chunk of your time.

[kingcharles]

Really? Practically zero. We would just promote users to be staff and let them get on with it. When we had enough complaints against a staff member (they would all become Hitler eventually), then we would fire them and upgrade another member.

[ruang]

Is it getting harder these days to come up with new similar ideas, maybe due to legal pressures?

[reilly3000]

Mostly due to intense competition… from people inspired by post like this and information marketing courses.

That said, there is always opportunity for someone with a bit of drive and some specific domain knowledge.

[darthrupert]

> private TV torrent tracker

Cool, I used to run a service where I break into peoples' homes, take everything I can carry and sell them on. With this business, I was able to make $35 million in 2014. Non-taxable income, obviously.

[kingcharles]

The income was taxable.

Yes, our site was ethically wrong, but I'll add that the studio holding the copyright to most of the items on our site used our site to download their own material and it was brought up in board meetings. The studio staff would occasionally send me PMs on the tracker when we got something that was pre-release and ask us to take it down until it had aired on TV.

After we closed down the studio borrowed the name of our site and set up their own legal streaming service, finally.

[twox2]

Great analogy! Oh wait, it's not and your comment offers nothing of substance to the conversation.

[darthrupert]

If you want a deeper point, here it is: are all "microstartups" sleazy, almost illegal scams that generally make the world a worse place? Based on this thread, it seems so.

Datamining, ad networks, peddling, piracy.

[kqr]

I mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time.

If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.

[vxNsr]

Alternatively, the OP means he spends 10% of his work time on this, not 10% of the 8760 hours in a year on it.

[kqr]

10 % of their work time is not a very well defined amount of time, though. If this is their only occupation, then it's 100 % of their work time. If they have a different primary occupation, then 10 % of that depends entirely on how much they spend on that!

[vxNsr]

You might be over thinking this, most people think of “work time” as 40 hours a week. So just think 10% of that, i.e. 4 hours.

[stanislavb]

I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.

[cpursley]

Postgres is nearly always the right choice. But I've had major breaking changes in the Ruby ecosystem really bite me in the past.

[sekl]

I’m a solo dev running a few large, profitable websites, and the one running Rails has simply not been feasible to update recently with all the breakage it brings. Especially Webpacker is a major pain and I regret going down that path. Active storage has been another (lesser) pain point.

[pcbro141]

https://www.indiehackers.com/

[bemmu]

I’ve made a living online from a bunch of different things, and there’s always something in the world that changes in a way that forces you to change your thing as well. Sometimes quickly, when an API changes, sometimes more slowly as you get more competition for example.

And even if not, you’ll still always think about your project to figure out how to get the next 5% of extra revenue from it, and stress about whether you’re doing things as well as you could.

I don’t recall ever having something where I could just kick back and relax.

[nicbou]

On the other hand, you usually get to decide when you work, so that long, almost uninterrupted vacations are always possible.

[AussieWog93]

I'm one of these "inspiring" people. :P

You're not 100% wrong - there is always stuff to manage, but there's a big difference between a full-time job and a side project that you spend a couple of weeks maintaining.

[djacob93]

Hey Hari,

this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know. I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website https://visalist.io, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid

[monsieurbanana]

3 possibilities I can think of:

- automatically scrapping websites - paying someone to do the work manually - who knows, there might be a database that someone else maintains, free or paid, and the website just displays the information

Or a mix of all that.

[kingofpandora]

Or the information isn't up-to-date ... This is the kind of thing you always should check on an embassy or other government page.

[sillycube]

Finally, the visitors will go to the official site to verify the visa requirements. When the covid is around, the visa requirements are changed by the gov frequently

[kqr]

Well, how would you operationally define updated? Would you, as a traveller, be satisfied if it's no more than two days out of date?

How long does it take to check and update the information for one country? Let's call it 90 seconds when you have the routine in. (Maybe every tenth time you check you have to actually change something in your database and that takes 10 minutes, the rest of the time you change nothing and that takes half a minute.)

There are about 200 countries in the world, so updating them all takes on average five hours. If you only need to do that every other day, that's quite literally 10 % of your time to do manually.

Now it could probably be optimised -- some countries might not be as popular destinations, and others might not change their rules as often. This is data you get for free from the effort of maintaining it. You can use that to adjust frequencies and I'm sure get it down to just 3 % of your time or less. That's while still doing it manually!

Then if there are some places that are really popular or change really often, you can start automating the updates for those countries. Since they are the ones you'd spend the most time on updating manually otherwise, you can probably get it down to less than 1 % of your time.

But never forget to start by doing things that don't scale. You can get very far with a good manual process. Automate only when you have a good manual process and you've driven the last inefficiency out of it.

[jackdh]

5 hours every ten days is not 10% of most people working time.

Assuming an 8 hour work day that's closer to 30%. Even at 12 hours that's 20% and that's not including weekends.

[kqr]

I think we can both agree that 10 % of someone's working time is not a very well defined amount of time. 10 % of your total time seems like the more reasonable interpretation.

[powerapple]

5 / (8*10) = 0.625

5 / (8*10*5/7) = 0.875. (excluding weekends)

If you take into account annual leaves, say 25 days, it is still below 10%

[u2077]

Obviously everyone’s path is unique, but could you tell us the most important things you learned along the way?

For example, my side project was not built for scale (was just a hobby at the time) and now needs rebuilding. I also wasted too much time perfecting things I thought mattered, but didn’t affect customers.

[1hakr]

One thing which worked for me when i look back is, i spend less than 4 weeks to validate an idea, if it got traction, i worked on it more, if it didn't then i moved on. Validate and fail fast.

[allenu]

Can you elaborate on your success rate and how frequently you work on new ideas and retire failed ones? I'm curious how you decide to pursue an idea and how you measure if something is working now that you've done this for a while.

[arrayjumper]

How do you measure traction? And what should the measurements look like in 4 weeks for you to be able to say this might be worth spending time.

[1hakr]

I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. Traction is something you define for yourself and your product.

[jsncbt]

How would you mostly validate these ideas?

[1hakr]

I would always try to do a quick launch, take no more than 4 weeks and launch it on PH, IH, Reddit, LinkedIn. The long term growth strategies are entirely different thing. But you will get basic validation. You are trying to fail fast.

[sushid]

I get that PH is Product Hunt but what is IH?

[1hakr]

IH - Indie Hackers

[scottharveyco]

Indie Hackers

[quickthrower2]

Thanks Hari for the inspiration! I am a fan from Australia. As well as the success, Hari does give a lot to the meetup community here and I got the impression he has a very strategic mindset.

[1hakr]

Cheers mate!

[MattGaiser]

What was your process to monetize these? As to me they seem to be in very competitive verticals.

[teaearlgraycold]

Also very curious about this. I went to his websites with the goal of finding out how I could give him money. It was incredibly difficult for Visa List - and all I got to was a buymeacoffee page that couldn't possibly be the only source of income. If OP is making money off of these from users then they could make way more by having an obvious CTA in the nav to give him money.

[chii]

the visalist page has a popup asking users to either re-enable ads, or subscribe (which i presume might be paid? didn't look further).

[teaearlgraycold]

Ah, I do have ad block that might have blocked ads and the pop up. Didn't see any indication of a subscription system.

[1hakr]

Thanks for the suggestion mate, Appreciate your gesture.

[1hakr]

Its different for different for different microstartup. Everything i did is through organic channels for Visa List it SEO for Apps its ASO. Once i got the users, it was easy to tweak and optimise revenue generation.

[beningrad]

Addendum to this question, if you don't mind: How do you choose what your next microstartup will be?

[1hakr]

I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build.

[dzhiurgis]

> See if it's already being solved

how?

[TuringNYC]

Thanks for the share. I'm curious if you have a favorite best-of-breed vendor stack you use? Do you try to optimize much on the tech or just do whatever works? I'm curious about several things specifically: who do you host with? SSL certs? CDN favorites? automation tool favorites? which hosts do you use to scale out?

[1hakr]

i use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.

[hiptobecubic]

Yeah I think people way overestimate how much scaling they will really have to do. If you write something reasonably efficient you can serve a surprising level of traffic with just a regular ol' big-fat-server and a cache.

[potamic]

Got blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.

[suifbwish]

If companies made their ads informative/interesting in some way instead of pure propaganda mind poo with dumb jingles, puns and foolish attempts to sound humorous perhaps I wouldn’t black hole them all so much with Adblock and pihole

[Case81]

it's the opposite for me. If they were actually interesting, it'd be way worse for me.

[trishmapow2]

uBlock Origin's element picker (not zapper - that's temporary) is your friend here. Works to get rid of basic overlays.

[andrewf]

Congrats! You mention compounding - what input to your success has been compounding? Eg revenue per user, success with SEO or other marketing channels, increase in underlying demand for travel/crypto, number of products shipped, something else?

[herpderperator]

Damn, every single one of those websites load literally instantly. 8ms latency from me. Cloudflare does wonders if you set it up well.

[1hakr]

cloudflare is a life saver!

[reneherse]

Thanks for sharing this update and being so transparent about your earnings! I've found your posts inspiring and it's great to know your projects continue to grow.

[Flankk]

You must be terrible at business. Your companies only make money while you're sleeping.

[dkersten]

Simple solution: just sleep more!

[falsenine]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

I have two questions:

(1) What learning pathway would you recommend a total beginner in programming to follow in order to develop their own microstartups or side projects?

(2) How do you come up with an idea for a given microstartup? Is it an organic process, or is it more about thinking actively of potential business plans? Do you have any advice regarding idea generation?

[Glench]

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

[wly_cdgr]

I notice that your AnExplorer file explorer app is a hefty $9.99. How do you get sales at that price point? Word of mouth over time?

[phreack]

How does Visa List make money? I'm not sure I can find its business model besides ads, though that might be it.

[1hakr]

affiliate, subscription ands ads

[liamwire]

Do you know which is the largest contributor?

[Uptrenda]

What is your long-term approach to growing your businesses? Feel free to share what you've learned about customer acquisition for micro-startups. Sure people would find that knowledge VERY valuable - and nice work dude. You're successful. I plan to do a bunch of stuff myself this year. Cheers.

[1hakr]

My general approach is t make my business fully automated. Once i do that, i have time to thing in different directions.

Organic channels are your lifesavers, the ones which will make your microstartup successful, so start working on them from day 1.

I have few things planned for 2022.

[westoncb]

Out of curiosity, how do you have 350k users for AnExplorer and only earn $50k/yr if it's selling for $10/copy?

(I'm just wondering if there are some unseen costs or something to selling an app for a fixed cost like this.)

[icco]

If folks enjoy these types of posts, check out https://www.indiehackers.com/, which is an entire community of folks like this.

[huksley]

Anyone have invite code? I would love to join. Email address in about.

[nomad1234]

Would love to get an invite code myself. Thank you, mine is also in the about.

[guessbest]

Is "My Microstartups Rewind 2021" a thing or is that the term for the summation of all your endeavors? Also, have you considered iPhone apps? If not, why not?

Anyway, best of luck to continued success and growth.

[1hakr]

Cheers mate! Its summation of my microstartups in 2021. ACrypto is actually available on both android and ios. you can check it out https://acrypto.io/

[GurnBlandston]

How many products have you built and later shut down as a failure? How long have you been building microstartups? How many tries did it take to get the 3 successes in your post?

[kbrannigan]

This is very inspiring. I'm so happy to learn that this sort of business model exists. I always thought it was either fail or make $1M a month, no in between.

Good job

[1hakr]

thanks

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

Do you have a process for ideating new microstartups? Or are your microstartups based on problems you experience in your day to day life?

[1hakr]

Yes there were a few. But I try to always keep the cost of failure small. This is how I try to be frugal.

* I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build

* I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it.

* I do a public launch in IH, PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit. In few weeks if I reach the goal that I set at the beginning, then I continue working on it to improve. If not then I will drop it and move on the next.

You have objective in making this choice, most people cling on to the sentiment.

[daniel1969]

To which specific groups you post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit?

[turtleTome]

Indie hackers : IH? What's PH?

[turtleTome]

Ah, Product Hunt

[Glench]

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

This is great! Thanks!

[reducesuffering]

What are the key insights into coming up with a monetization strategy and converting users to paying customers?

[holgersindbaek]

How do you make most of your money on visalist? Is it affiliates or ads? I have a solitaire website myself (https://online-solitaire.com/) that has ads, but I haven’t tried out affiliate links yet.

[pigiou]

Congratulations!

I have a question, how do you maintain the validity of the information you provide at visalist.io ? These things changes really often (especially the covid-related stuff). Do you have someone that researches and updates the information? Is there an API for this?

[ryanSrich]

For subscription sales, how are you driving growth? Google ads? Organic search? Selling always turns out to be the most difficult part. Building an idea and even getting a few people to sign up is doable, but I struggle with anything beyond that.

Congrats by the way!

[pigiou]

I have the same question, would be glad if OP could answer. I so far had success only using Google Ads, but I also pay them 50% of my sales (which I do not know if it is a lot or not)

[navalsaini]

Hari, would you have advice on marketing my microstartup. I made an app halfchess.com TIA

[daniel1969]

Where have you learned about design? Your apps look awesome. My look like command prompt. Is there any course, book, tutorial, blog that you would recommend?

[masteruvpuppetz]

visalist.io would not let me browse the site asking for adblock to be disabled. Even though there is no adblock running. ..and these guys making $500 per day?

[locusm]

You running PiHole?

[catwoe]

How did you validate the AnExplorer idea? What is it that makes this app unique among all the alternatives that exist? Thanks and congrats

[umen]

Can you please share how do you setup your web application for example your visalist site .

i mean how do you handle the scale and how did you setup the hosting

thanks

[notreallyserio]

Were there any other projects you tried to launch but didn't work out? If so, what do you think was different about them?

[diordiderot]

The material design for ACrypto looks great!

[orionblastar]

Any hints on how others can do this? I am on disability but if I can earn more with Microstartups it would be better.

[TrackerFF]

Not OP, but...completely bootstrapping it?

1) Learn the tools to build your product.

2) Research some product / markets, see what other products are out there. Chasing some noble idea, or "hidden gem" just to gain first-move advantage isn't all that, IMO. It's almost always better to join an existing market where proof of concept has already been done for you. Even better if the existing products are stagnant or lacking.

3) Figure out a business and marketing plan, doesn't have to be the most complex thing in the world - but it forces you to do some research before just diving into something blindly.

4) Start developing your MVP. Reach out to users in the relevant places, which means going to forums, twitter, subreddits, etc. Try your best to get user feedback, iterate your product on said feedback. Any money you get from donations, purchases, gifts, family, whatever should go towards infrastructure and marketing.

5) With enough users, look into how you want to monetize your product. Ads? SaaS? Purchases? Lots of ways, but they all have their pros and cons.

But, to be honest, it's a lot of work for a single developer. Especially if you're not already experienced with all the various aspects. You're basically gonna be doing everything on a smaller scale. Lots of things to learn, lots of things that can go wrong.

And importantly, it can take years to build up a userbase large enough to live off the project. Sometimes you never grow to that size, and the product life-cycle has peaked, on its way downwards.

The people that do this kind of stuff, have tried and failed multiple times before. But there's always something to learn, which you'll take to the next project.

[Ostrogodsky]

You make good points, but let me ask you something without malice or bad intentions, have you put any of this in actual practice?I have always been fascinated about the huge gap between giving good advice and actually following it. I am talking from personal experience here.

[1hakr]

There are four things need to have a potential microstartup. #1 Problem that has business potential and big enough #2 Audience who has that burning problem #3 Distribution channel to get the solution into users hands #4 Business model aka pricing fit for the Problem-Audience

[CTmystery]

Good list, thanks! For the projects in your post, how did you solve #3?

[extradhungel2]

what about competitors? do u research competitors that might have already solved the problem also?

[Glench]

I empathize with you. I applied for disability and am really limited in my ability to work. But I want to create income-generating businesses so I can have income that's not directly tied to my time and effort.

Depending on your disabilities it may be a tough road. The common wisdom is that most businesses fail — it takes a lot of skill, creativity, luck, and hard work to make a business that generates income, even for people without disabilities. I would say if money is your sole objective you might be better off doing light contracting work.

For generating business ideas, you might look at this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen. He lists a lot of the pitfalls about business ideas he's seen when interviewing indie hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

You might also want to limit your idea generation to businesses that will reliably generate income month-to-month (if that's important to you). And if you want it to be lucrative you might consider a business that solves problems for other businesses (since they tend to have money and are willing to spend it if your service is valuable — it can be hard for consumer apps to be very lucrative).

One thing I learned as someone with limited abilities is that it helps to be very clear about your own goals and spend some time thinking about a roadmap of what tasks (marketing, developing, etc) will help get you there. This is so you can minimize wasted time and effort, which is extra precious when you're limited.

I made https://extensionpay.com and it generates a couple hundred dollars a month with very little ongoing effort. It also helps other developers generate revenue from their browser extensions, so that gives me a good feeling.

[tluyben2]

Most of these 'makers' are on Twitter and I found them to be helpful in answering things there.

[Dippidang]

Seems, money is your strongest motivation. Money money money. Your work is beautiful. How about emphasizing that?

[bijant]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Subjective opinions vary and when you put out art people will criticize you. Even people who like your art might question why it doesn’t sell. If your art makes money, whether that be picasso or bored ape type art, people will be far more reluctant to criticize your style and execution after all, other people are paying a lot to acquire your art, there might just be something to it, something the critic is missing, so they might shut up and look for that. Peer pressure is a thing, when other people are putting their money where their mouths are, instead of being flooded with cheap criticism, you might be drowning in demand from sycophants.

[velokick]

What are your stacks for these projects?

[1hakr]

added tech stack to the post but i always learnt things based on what was need to built my microstartup.

[ninjaa]

AnExplorer also fills a massive need

[1hakr]

True and its available for phones, tablets, TV's and watches

[mesozoic]

What strategy do you use for marketing and growing your site visits/app downloads?

[PinkMilkshake]

If this is not too personal of a question, what do you do with all your free time?

[masonic]

"I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter."

[1hakr]

i don't have a newsletter yet but i regularly post on twitter https://twitter.com/1HaKr

[moneywoes]

What is your marketing stack?

[ninjaa]

Visa list is brilliant

[asennoussi]

Are revenues Net revenues?

[flashu]

qq: what tech stack are You using for iOS and Android apps?

[carlodenaro]

nice show of your microstartup, tech stack for visalist?

[mtsx]

Any hints ?

[Ostrogodsky]

The Power of Habit book suggest that if you want to be X you have to behave like X, what was your routine, not now, but in the period between starting from zero and reaching, say 4k MRR?

[1hakr]

I love solving problems by building solutions. I Travel every now and then. Make a backlog of new ideas, keep pitching them to friends, work on my current one. One step at a time. I took things very slowly instead of rushing and getting into pressure.

[Ostrogodsky]

Thanks so much

[twomoonsbysurf]

Super inspiring OP! On VisaList, for example, it's great to see you've had your product picked up into the news by various publications.

Thanks for sharing your revenue/expense numbers.

- Do you have a blog/personal site?

- Do you have github/gitlab / other open source projects?

Just want to learn more about what ya do, and how ya do what ya do.

[sillycube]

How many people are there in your team to manage 3 projects? Are you solo? Can you share how you allocate for the projects?