Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides.
It's definitely work, but once you're up and running, it's a lot nicer than having a day job.
Which one is your most profitable? On average how long did it take to become profitable? Were you able to live off the first sites profits or did it take all 3 to do it? Do you have a family? I ask this because I do and if you do whats your method for time management and is it enough to support one. Great businesses by the way!!
S3stat is the one that let me pack in the day job. Twiddla kicks in enough to bring the total up to "Senior Dev Salary, anywhere but the Bay Area".
Neither one grew particularly fast (aided by my only charging $2/month for S3stat when it launched). It was probably 4 years before it was enough to scrape by on, then 2 more after that before it looked like I'd be able to live off it for real while raising kids.
The big upside is in free time. I can ramp the two established products down to close to zero hours/week for months on end to focus on building the next thing (and playing with the aforementioned kids). Every time I tried that with a normal Software Engineering day job, they stopped sending me money. SaaS just keeps ticking away in the background, and is happy to pay me whether I'm in the office or not.
How are you promoting your products? I am part marketer and part developer, but I am finding it difficult to market to developers :)
I recently launched http://www.smsinbox.net for Twilio devs, and am slowly gaining some users, but finding it very difficult to reach the target audience, and/or get visitor/user feedback.
The landing page looks a bit too sparse (and unprofessional), which would turn me away. [1] Consider filling it out a bit more with: screenshots, pricing, a privacy policy, etc.
Take a look at s3stat.com above for a good example, it's much more polished without much more content.
[1] I send a few thousand SMS a month via Twilio for thesimplepostcard.com
I suggest integrating this with every single help desk software you can. They all provide integrations. We were looking for something like this earlier in the year as it pertains to customer support and using SMS as a channel.
If help desk isn't the answer, then maybe another type of platform. Generally, I think you need to ride the coat tails of larger platforms.
(Note: I do realize this is developer focused today, but it didn't necessarily need to be.)
This. I've been building useful things too. But reaching out to and promoting them has been the challenge. Most of my ideas are in the consumer space though.
Hey s3stat looks AWESOME! I'm working on a product that's built on the back of S3 as well (https://shubox.io) so this might come in super handy for me and my customers. Do you have an affiliate program my any chance?
Thank you for the compliment :). If you have any questions or want any sort of demo feel free to drop me an email - joel @ my domain above. Would love to hear how I might be able to fulfill your needs!
Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides.
It's definitely work, but once you're up and running, it's a lot nicer than having a day job.