from Hacker News

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

by 1hakr on 1/4/22, 3:31 AM with 173 comments

• by bArray on 1/4/22, 8:53 AM

  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.

• by oasisbob on 1/4/22, 7:25 AM

  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.

• by earksiinni on 1/4/22, 5:27 AM

  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?

• by catchmilk on 1/4/22, 4:43 AM

  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?

• by djacob93 on 1/4/22, 5:29 AM

  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

• by u2077 on 1/4/22, 4:17 AM

  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.

• by quickthrower2 on 1/4/22, 5:08 AM

  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.

• by MattGaiser on 1/4/22, 4:19 AM

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

• by TuringNYC on 1/4/22, 5:17 AM

  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?

• by potamic on 1/4/22, 6:01 AM

  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.

• by andrewf on 1/4/22, 5:59 AM

  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?

• by herpderperator on 1/4/22, 5:15 AM

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

• by reneherse on 1/4/22, 4:47 AM

  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.

• by Flankk on 1/4/22, 4:02 AM

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

• by falsenine on 1/4/22, 5:46 AM

  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?

• by wly_cdgr on 1/4/22, 6:29 AM

  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?

• by phreack on 1/4/22, 4:53 AM

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

• by Uptrenda on 1/4/22, 5:19 AM

  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.

• by westoncb on 1/4/22, 6:56 AM

  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.)

• by icco on 1/4/22, 3:37 PM

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

• by guessbest on 1/4/22, 5:12 AM

  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.

• by GurnBlandston on 1/4/22, 7:39 AM

  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?

• by kbrannigan on 1/4/22, 3:52 AM

  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

• by c_o_n_v_e_x on 1/4/22, 5:22 AM

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

• by reducesuffering on 1/4/22, 5:26 AM

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

• by holgersindbaek on 1/4/22, 7:06 AM

  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.

• by pigiou on 1/4/22, 8:13 AM

  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?

• by ryanSrich on 1/4/22, 4:50 AM

  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!

• by navalsaini on 1/5/22, 9:59 AM

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

• by daniel1969 on 1/11/22, 9:52 AM

  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?

• by masteruvpuppetz on 1/4/22, 8:08 AM

  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?

• by catwoe on 1/15/22, 6:20 PM

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

• by umen on 1/4/22, 7:07 AM

  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

• by notreallyserio on 1/4/22, 5:20 AM

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

• by diordiderot on 1/4/22, 8:25 AM

  The material design for ACrypto looks great!

• by orionblastar on 1/4/22, 4:13 AM

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

• by Dippidang on 1/4/22, 9:07 AM

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

• by velokick on 1/4/22, 4:31 AM

  What are your stacks for these projects?

• by ninjaa on 1/4/22, 5:08 AM

  AnExplorer also fills a massive need

• by mesozoic on 1/4/22, 8:28 AM

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

• by PinkMilkshake on 1/4/22, 11:16 PM

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

• by masonic on 1/4/22, 4:15 AM

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

• by moneywoes on 1/4/22, 5:36 AM

  What is your marketing stack?

• by ninjaa on 1/4/22, 5:08 AM

  Visa list is brilliant

• by asennoussi on 1/4/22, 4:53 AM

  Are revenues Net revenues?

• by flashu on 1/4/22, 2:58 PM

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

• by carlodenaro on 1/4/22, 9:54 AM

  nice show of your microstartup, tech stack for visalist?

• by mtsx on 1/4/22, 11:07 AM

  Any hints ?

• by Ostrogodsky on 1/4/22, 5:19 AM

  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?

• by twomoonsbysurf on 1/4/22, 1:14 PM

  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.

• by sillycube on 1/4/22, 7:12 AM

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