Bootstrapping a $30k profit/month company from our undergrad internship earnings
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @n9com details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $30k.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 110 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 34 comments
I'm skeptical of the 30k profit/month title. I think it's just linkbait to promote their game. If you look at their app ranking history (registration needed):
http://www.appannie.com/copterkid/ranking/history/#start_date=2009-07-26&end_date=2011-09-01 ↗
they are nowhere to be found in the overall rankings, and even their rankings in the games category tops out at 700ish. Plus, they only sell the game for 99c. I've had apps that sell for 2.99 that are in the top 200 overall paid list on iphone, and I've never come close to 30K/month for a single app.
My most recent sales data (for an app that has gone as high as #97 on the iPhone top paid list) indicates that the #200 top paid app on iphone gets about 300 sales per day. If you factor in Apple's 30% thats about $210/day. So even if their app was in the top 200 (which they were never even close to), it would only generate $6300/mo in revenue at 99c.
It just doesn't add up. Unless the 30K/month is talking about a completely different app?
The most interesting part to me was that they are designers who considered the programming to be the most important part. As a programmer, I find the design to be the most important part.
The perspectives are very interesting.
From a programming standpoint, I can pound out the code to just about anything, but when it comes time to create the awesome graphics for the game, well, that's where I either have to cut corners or pay a lot of money.
I liked the cliff-hanger he left us with too. Day 4: Disaster! And that it was Apple's fault ...
But what happened? Did the glitch get fixed? Did sales pick back up? Where's his Twitter feed so I can see when the next post comes out?
I don't find this as interesting as an app or website that makes money while you sleep. In fact, I don't even consider it bootstrapping. By this metric, I "bootstrapped" a similar business myself, along with every other freelancer out there.
Nothing worth doing is easy - inspirational stories like your's always seem to involve near crash-and-burn dips (whether that part of the story actually gets told, or not).
Here's to not giving up - keep up the great work guys!
Interesting post, but I'm not a fan of these multi-part blog posts, I rarely end up seeing the 'Part II' post that I really wanted to read about in the first place.
Why not just write the whole story in one post?