[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.