dang mentioned in this thread[1] about a monthly side project thread. But I haven’t seen one for June, so I thought I’d post one.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881

Clickable: http://blog.riverofnewsapp.com/2010/10/how-much-money-can-yo...

I saw you've got a good amount of advertisers on the site already (as well as the cabin). Is it because the cost of hosting & S3 that makes it still not profitable?

It's mainly my (meager) salary + the cost of a full time moderator that's standing in the way at present. S3 and hosting are pretty affordable in comparison.

Just curious, how did you find your initial paid customers?

Yeah, I think if your app is listed on top 10 of all paid apps, you can make a lot of income very quickly.

Just some math: $2.99 * 2500 copies/day * 30 days * 70% to LB = That is a whopping $156975 a month!

Wow. That is impressive. Few questions:

1. How long did it take to write the plugin? 2. How did you find your paid customers? From what I heard, most WordPress users don't want to pay for themes or plugins. 3. And why did you decide to sell it for that kind of high price? Were there troubles at the beginning because it was a free download before?

Thanks!

1. A few hours 2. Forums, blog sponsorships, PPC ads and holding #1 organic rank on all the relevant search terms 3. Sales were slowing and I lost interest in putting more into it, so I sold it while it was still valuable

http://flippa.com/blog/case-studies/dan-grossman-on-selling-...

The site looks great! Just curious, how did you find your initial paid customers? Is it just through word-of-mouth or did you do anything more specific?

Thanks. Once we got the marketing pages/admin features to a place we thought were worth paying for, I posted a link on HN and from that we got covered by Mashable and several others. That got us profitable.

Now we're working on getting to that next level where one of us can stop freelancing and get a check from Mocksup every month.

For MailFinch, does it take a lot of time to operate since you have to print the paper out and mail it?

Yeah, it can get tedious and time consuming. Though, at this stage, I've got a pretty cool process hacked together (think temps, cronjobs and sweat) so I've gotten a lot of my own time back to work on other things.

How long did it take for Basecamp to take off and become profitable?

Basecamp was profitable fast. We were doing about $5000/month after the first 6 weeks. We only had a few people at the company so our overhead was really low.

That was very impressive. Did you guys just spread the word through friends and do a lot of marketing at first?

Yeah, that's what makes the internet a great place to start business. You don't have the risk to lose tons of money if your business falis.