I just built a "business" that is on track to generate about $10k per month (I've made about $5k in the first week). There were some links to it here on Hacker News, but it's a site that sells iPhone design & development tutorials that I've written: http://designthencode.com. I've only published one full tutorial so far, but am working on others. The response has been great, and it's exciting to see something I've been working on for about 6-7 months actually generate real revenue.

Every person here at HN is talented enough to create a $10k/mo business. It may not be as easy as what the article suggests, but you can do it.

Also, I should note that I did it all on the side & the weekends. I have a full-time job as well.

I'm not sure "simple" is the word I'd use, but yes, I think it's definitely do-able.

They key (as someone who has done it) is to look for niche B2B opportunities. Find a need and fulfill it better or cheaper than existing players. Exploit newer/cheaper tech or SEO knowledge that the existing guys don't/can't get.

Think of it this way: you need 500 businesses to pay you $20/month to get to $10k/month. If you can get 1 signup a day, you're there in < 2 years.

One example: we run nextproof.com that lets wedding and portrait photographers sell prints online (think of it as a shopify for photographers). There are way bigger players in the market (pictage, smugmug, printroom, etc.) but we have ~2,000 users. Half of them are on a paid plan at between $9 and $99/month. The other half are on a free plan BUT we still make money on them through transaction fees. So, after 3 years, it's well over $10k/month.

Another option is premium content or tools targeted at these niche businesses. This could be in the form of WordPress themes/plugins, eBooks, DVDs, etc. We did an SEO DVD for photographers and sold 1,000 @ $79 each.

Most of the "ideas" I come up with are along these lines. I have tons of them.

Getting six-pack abs is simple. Build muscle and burn fat by eating healthy, exercising and lifting weights. BUT... you've got to do that every day for a long time before you get results.

It's the same with building a successful $10k/month business. Find a niche, solve a problem people are prepared to pay money to have solved, market your solution and deliver on your promises. But all that won't happen in a week will it? Because of this, most people will give up before they get to the top of the mountain (or before they have six-pack abs).

The article and above comments are basically saying that you don't need an expensive gym membership and a highly qualified personal trainer to get six-pack abs. You can do it yourself by, as you note, by building muscle, burning fat, and eating healthy.

The above advice is meant to help those who are inclined to focus and work hard, but it's worth noting that it takes nothing away from the gourmands and loafers of the world: they (and I) will not have six-pack abs. Period. Those unwilling or unable to change their lifestyle would be best served by finding something else to do with their time.

I don't think anyone (myself or the OP) claimed it can happen in a week (or other short period of time).

The formula is simple but the implementation will always be up to the individual.

callmeed, my comment wasn't a counter-argument (I upvoted your comment), I was just adding on my 2 cents .

SmugMug was a bootstrap too.

"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, it’s perfectly possible to build a $10k/month webapp business that can set you free."

If you follow Amy's blogging on Unicorn Free you'll have a seen a recent post where she talks about how long it has taken her and Thomas to get Freckle to where they are now - about 2 years (http://unicornfree.com/2011/drawing-back-the-curtain/). Both Amy and Thomas hustle their tails off and yet it has taken them two years and a lot of hard work to get too where they are (not to mention the years before that leading up to it). The point is that there is very rarely an easy route, but there is absolutely a possible route if you're passionate and you hustle. You'll be lucky if you only fail a couple of times before you land on something that gains traction, but you can do it.

Yep. It took us about 3 years to go from zero to $10k in net-income a month. The good news is that getting to $20k took significantly less time.

If you don't mind me asking, how long did it take you to get to $2k? That's always the number I find interesting, since it's my mental threshold for "allows a person with no children to go on eating ramen noodles in a cheap apartment."

I've been working on Pluggo for 1.5 years and I'm just coming up to 1.5k month. Now something to keep in mind is, due to me not understanding how to choose a market when I started, it has taken way longer than it needed.

I was silly to choose the twitter market because (a) everyone wants the tools for free (b) It's the most competitive single tools software market EVERYONE and his uncle made a twitter client (just like me) (c) It is impossible to SEO because EVERYONE and his uncle made a twitter site.

Even so, with all of that going against me, I've still been able to reach 1.5k month and it's now starting to really pick up due to valuable lessons I've learned from other bootstrappers along the way. Like Amy Hoy (above with the $10k/month) who's obviously a little bit cleverer than me!

I should also mention that for 6 of those months I did "absolutely nothing" with Pluggio. Because I didn't believe in it. Because it wasn't doing well enough according to my Entreporn expectations.

Yes, I let it slide for 6 entire months. If I had spent that time working on it, it would be at least 5k now.

I think the first 10k a month app will inevitably be the hardest, but like Justin says it'll be a lot easier than becoming the next Facebook or Google. Most people chase/fantasize about being the next Google because they think it will buy them freedom. If you are lucky enough to get close, depending on how you play it, it might do exactly that for you. But I agree with Justin the odds are just so small it's difficult to justify spending your life in eternal lustful pursuit of such dreams.

I'm sorry to roll out the cliché, but gaining time is more likely to make you happy and free. And a few slow grown bootstrapped 'dipshit companies' are much more realistic and likely to provide you with that time along with a boatload more autonomy. Instead it seems everyone is aiming to be the head of the next big thing and indebted to VC's in to the bargain. What do I know though, perhaps it's not all that bad...?

I do think that with a couple of $10,000 a month semi-automated apps in your pocket you've got a lot of choices. Especially if you are young. It can give you the free time to really work out what you want to get out of your life. With time to think you might find it's not what your doing and/or aspiring to right now.

For me if my startup ever starts to make 10K+ a month it'll simply mean trying to spend a little less time sat behind my keyboard. Spending more time outdoors travelling and experiencing the world instead of too much time indoors reading about it sounds like a good plan to me.

But that's the opposite point...

The original article seems to be arguing $10K is something like a "sweet spot" where lots of micro-entrepreneurs could comfortably stay. I would contend that if an entrepreneur is able to get to $10K/month with ease or with difficulty, they've probably got the resource to go to $20K, and then $40 look promising etc. That requires extreme hustle of course but so does staying at $10K.

IE, there's no "sweet spot" or stable spot. It is more like either failure or "lift-off".

I don't think the point is that it is 'easy' to create a $10K/mo - but that it is easier to build that, than to build a Google/Facebook.

I think he went overboard by imploring EVERYBODY to stop trying to build those types, and build a lifestyle business - but the criticism is valid.

We, the industry, is caught up with the $10M Series A round, and the major IPOs and acquisitions. When it's just as much of a major victory for a small company - one or two employees doing $10K - $100K/mo.

That's pretty major.

I think it is doable. Not for ALL types of technology - e.g. not Twitter, Google, or FB.

But certainly for many webapps.

Think of it like being the new 'professional', where professional is an accountant/lawyer/doctor. You no longer have to go to med. school for 7 years, but you have to invest time in learning about everything it takes to build and launch a successful webapp (which I would argue is just as grueling as med/law school).

The major difference is that it scales beautifully. If you can put the systems in place to earn $10K, you can relatively easily go to $100K/mo.

Indeed,

Most of $10K/months business that continue along that I know of are consulting. And a lot of consulting is essentially continuing your connections with a larger enterprise but from the outside.

I think there's a simple logic to this.

If anyone has duplicatable way of getting to a $10k/month from their labor, they also have a key to building a business; they could just recruit people, teach the recruits their methods and split the profits in any number of ways. Thus, they would almost certainly have a business that could expand to $10 million a year fairly quickly (if you have the kind of business where you could add servers or machine instead, so much the better).

Now reason that there are VCs is that the number of businesses which can bootstrap to $10 million/year are inherently a subset of businesses that can be financed to $10 million/year.

Now, we know that if A > B and B == C, then A > C. Thus the number of VC-financable opportunities to build a $10 million/year company are inherently larger than the number of easily duplicable schemes that could allow a single individual to make $10K/month.

That leaves the "totally unique" ways, that depend on each person's special qualities and can't duplicated. If you're working on the web, how many of those are there?

It's not easy. It's very hard. But relatively speaking, compared with building "the next Facebook", it's extremely achievable for a lot of people.

Read patio11's comments here, amd read his blog. It's an example of a simple lifestyle business

Shrug That depends on what I go on to do with it, right? If AR or some other idea goes big, then it gets retroactively upgraded to be the amusing "when it was still scrappy" backstory.

I'm totally happy with where I am in life today, and there are a bunch of happy places I could see myself in two years, lifestyle business or no. A word of caution: not everyone selling Obama cereal intends to be doing so forever.

Here's how you do it. 1) Stop reading Hacker News. 2) Pay attention to problems people have. 3) Build a solution and charge money for it. 4) Spend 2 years marketing it (i.e., talking to your market and learning) and making it better.

It worked alright for me and my business partners and we spent the first year working part time on it.

I'd love to know how I can get one of those consulting/programmer-for-hire jobs for $10k/mo.

Do these things really exist? How do you find them?

Yes they really exist. Some niches pay more like 20k+/mo pretty easily. Consulting at 150/hour isn't that hard. If you want specific advice learn an eCommerce framework really really well or become a deployment specialist for large clusters of JBoss/Weblogic/Websphere.

Just go back to the job that used to pay you $6K/month...

In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.

A short-term contractor with highly relevant domain expertise can charge 2-3x what the same person would be getting on salary. Finding clients reliably is the real trick of course, I wish I knew that.

$10k/mo is just a decent salary. If you're a good consultant, you're looking at more like $25k/mo. And that's accounting for slack time.

It didn't say it was simple in the post, it said it took 2 years.

My question is: if you've built a function where f($1.00) = $1.25, why stop at $10K/month?

What I'm really saying: if you stop at $10K/month, you haven't actually built that function.

The missing part of that function is that time is a scarce and necessary input.