I've built 5 projects and have never made a dollar

I started my journey to web app development in 2015, but only began monetizing projects in 2017, after taking months to learn all about Stripe API and BrainTreePayments. Once I got the hang of it, monetizing everything is a piece of cake. So here is just some stuff I've learned along the way.

IndieHackers is truly what inspired me to actually start developing. Four bosses trying to fire me also helped (I'm still working at the job, while those four bosses.. well, let's just say... "you have no power here" -- karma takes its sweet time, but does its job eventually). Unfortunately, even after 5 years, I don't have the success to interview and say I've started making enough to quit my day job. From my endeavors of building web apps, I've probably made somewhere along the lines of a few grand over the course of my start of monetization. So $2k or so in 3 years. Horrible by any standards, but it has helped me pay for the services I use, such as Plivo or Twilio, or for the server itself.

Unless my business really takes off, earning back the expenses of what my server costs me every year along with the time I've put into everything I've done can never be recovered. This is okay because a lot of my time was spent learning new things, creating new things, and the reward of just having people use my product is something I could say is enough for me too. And it is. I started a blog that is free to read (https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com) which has acquired quite a few readers and fans over the years.

Anyways, first and foremost: i develop for myself. I work multiple jobs that require different tools and several of those tools are "too expensive in the wild" so I had built them myself and end up making about 1-2 FREE projects every year and then I charge for the other 2 or 3 that i make during the course of the year. And then I charge for others to use my projects.

It is not that I want to charge. It is that i have to charge for multiple reasons:

• support of the project
• project maintanence
• validation for the project

So those three things are basically: whoever is using my product supports it therefore they should pay for it if there is not a free version, and even if there is, if you have prolonged use of a product -- and sure, if you just need the basic version and its free, stay on board, get the product for free, but if you need more features, than support the person who is providing you a product or service.

Project maintanence is when people support your project and give you money to keep supporting it. It's very easy to create a free product. In fact, if I didn't monetize my products, I'd probably have them out within a week instead of a month as I'd rid all the testing when it comes to payments and things like that.

And validation of your projects just means people really value you and your ideas and are willing to continue to pay you to help you make them a reality.

So... as fun as it is to create a free poroject: you'll burn out. You'll feel underappreciated. You'll hate people because you'll feel they are too cheap. When I was a younger, I looked up to this programmer who was maybe a year or two older than me. I think I was around 14 or 15, but this programmer would make projects, teach the programming community, etc. At the time, you didn't have a paywall on websites. Instead, you'd include a text file with your address or you'd put it up on your website and tell people to send you money, and sometimes they actually did.

Well what happened.. this programmer got upset with people because no one was "supporting him" for doing all that he did. And unfortunately, as human beings: we can be very appreciative, but quite forgetful just as much. We might all walk past a homeless person and everyone thinks someone did something, when in fact, this guy is still starving.

Point is: he was doing this for people because it made him feel good to do it. Once he changed his thoughts to: "Well I'm doing this for people, so they should pay me." That's a mistake that we all make when we either 1) get greedy or 2) feel like no one appreciates us by validating us with money.

Lessons learned from his ordeal:

1. No one owes you anything.
2. You do everything for you.
3. If you want to share your thoughts, ideas, or projects with others, feel free -- don't expect anything, not a review, a comment, or even someone to even understand it.
4. You can monetize just about everything if you want, but you have to justify why people would ever want to pay for it.
5. Life is a constant learning experience... if it makes you happy, you should pursue it, but do it for you, and no one else.

Last thing I will say is that I am driven first by the creative idea of making something that is both useful to myself and the world -- and second -- by the potential of making money. Yes, I haven't been successful enough to say that the numbers I come up with for pricing out my product have always remained set in stone and lots of people signed up and started using it, paying for it, etc. No, it hasn't exactly worked out like that. Sometimes I have had to drop the price or have no one paying for it at all. But I do love sitting there sometimes, writing out what the features do, and then coming up with a monthly plan with different features at different prices, or maybe even a single price. You just never know!

But to be able to become a true "Indie Hacker", in the sense, of how this whole website became successful itself as it got started: successful interviews. Even if it means only $1k a month which would pay the rent -- is something to aspire to achieving. And of course... to get there.. it might mean you need 10 users, 100 users, or 1000 users. Good luck!

And yeah, I love developing... think I'm up to 20 apps or so now.. most are complete. https://notetoservices.com

Hi Roland - Great question and topic. A few thoughts on this:

• Your most precious commodity is your time. Hence, in Economics, we would say that there is a big opportunity cost for your time.
• That said, you obviously want to make sure you spend your time on things that you love
• Right now, it sounds like you are at a stage in life where you can afford to spend time on these projects, and likely the biggest benefit from your building (and tinkering) is a tremendous amount of learning
• But to be sustainable over time, you'll want to figure out how to monetize some of your ideas, which will ultimately help you scale them further and build even more products
• Continue to test and learn, and don't be afraid to charge for your products. If they are good, people will gladly pay if it solves a problem for them.

i've been doing this for 22+ years. i've probably done over 40-50 apps / projects (of all sizes) in my lifetime that had potential to build revenue... even more one-off scripts or extensions for a browser or local workflow-y-ish stuffs...

building software is easy.

building a company where more money comes in than out... that's really fucking hard.

it's taken me most of my life to figure out the latter... the former... as a software person, was kinda easy in comparison.

you're on the right track — keep shipping! and this is the right place to do it too!

You can always sell your projects to others who want to market them and monetize them. check out indiemaker.co

I totally know what you mean, i've also built several SaaS platforms before that i never charged for. However i really regret making a lot of these decisions.

• Had a crypto tracker app, had thousands of users in no time, didn't charge a single one... mistake mistake...
• Had an ico tracker app, thousands of users, most important youtubers onboard, didn't chage anything...
• now i have https://betanotify.com which I'm hoping I can monetize.
• Had an android app with 700k users, ...

I learned a lot, that's for sure, however, I really regret not monetizing any of those. You never know when an opportunity like this might come up again, I really feel like i lost a lot...

Motivation is a very major point right now, I feel like i would never make an app again that would gain as much traffic as my previous ones...+ be honest, money kind of motivates, right?

I would definitely switch the mindset. You're not obliged to provide someone anything for free, don't feel bad. If you created anything that solves someones problem, you should be paid. Doing a project or two for fun is ok, but not all. Who knows what people are willing to buy, you can't tell it until you test it.

and for the end, here's what @kitze said on this topic https://medium.com/@kitze/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent-8b348e12baed

Great story and thanks for sharing! This reminds me of the proverb, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” .. let your driving force define your next move.

Should I be changing my mindset towards earning money off my projects?

Whatever makes YOU happy :)

I'm in the same boat as you on the first point and hardly spent any money during most of my life. This resulted also in the drawback that I worked for wages far too low in the beginning of my career, as I simply didn't realize how much money is usually changing hands.
However, now I see things a bit different. People are spending tons of money on all kinds of stuff. A 20$ / mo subscription is effectively nothing for somebody with a job. And don't even get me started on businesses. And after seeing how much businesses spend on employees (effectively, not just wage) and on other stuff... Paying 1000$ as a business? A sum not even worth mentioning.

Regarding point two:
I had similar views in the past, but those changed once I spent some years working as a software developer. I had to implement some things that I disagreed with from an ethical point of view and worked on some products that neither I day-job and or the end users liked.
Could I have kept working my unfulfilling job during the day, to build free software at night? Sure, but this it seemed like a loss-loss situation. Most time spent on the day-job. Too little on things that I actually enjoyed.
Now instead I'm trying to build something that I like, the customers enjoy and that pays the bills. Without having to conflict with my moral standards.

Was it a mistake to ever work on free products or to work as an employee? No, at the time it was the right choice. But now I feel like I can spend my current skills more efficiently in another way.

I started 4 prior startups over the past 6 years that made me a sum total of $50.

My current startup is now at over $7000 per month MRR and rapidly growing.

Sometimes it just takes a few casts of the rod until you hit something big. But be warned, even in my current startup, it took over a year to get our first sale, and then another year to reach $1K MRR. After that, it just snowballed...

I would second the comment from @sanathpollemore "whatever makes YOU happy".

Building a product should be fun, at least you like to devote your time to it. If all your focus is to make money in the very beginning, it may not sustain you in the long term.

Getting revenue is always hard, if you didn't make a penny in the first few weeks, months, you would easily doubt yourself, "am I doing the right stuff? is it worth my time working on this sh**t, instead if I get a job, I could earn much more!", these kind of mindset will come, then you gave up. I think a lot of people have trapped in this forever dead loop.

If you think spending $500 is a loss, then you may be wrong. I mean, think about how much expenses would be spent on coffee, Netflix subscription, ski season pass (which I'll renew every year), those could easily add up to couple of hundreds, or thousands. And you won't think it's a loss, because it's your hobby, you like it.

Point is the thing you worked on should really be the one that you like to do, and should really be the one which solves real problems. If these two things combine together, I don't see a reason you cannot make a dollar.

Just keep doing, be persistent, most importantly, be happy!

I've made hundreds of random products/SAAS/tools and never made a cent off any of them so far. Spent hundreds of dollars marketing, and thousands of dollars on freelancers and other things.

If the only way you look at something as succeeding is if you make money off it. I would strongly suggest you stop making products and just freelance with your time. You will make $X for every hour you work.

What you should focus on is making a product that YOU need/like/love and build it for you. If it's a product that you truly need (and there isn't a million others out there) there are certain to be others who also need it. And if you poor your heart into it, it will be good.

It may take a year or two to actually make money, if you look at most product revenue graphs they don't make money for a while (obviously there are outliers who make a ton in a month, but typically it takes a long time).

I'd say maybe just take a step back and analysis things a bit more, what are you actually looking to get out of these developments. If it's money, I would either freelance or build enterprise software and work on your selling skills.

“I've built 5 projects and have never made a dollar” - Same here. I’m proud of them and I use them in my portfolio.

I'm suffering from the severe form of "shining object" syndrome so starting from 2004 I've built a zillion of products and made... maybe $100 totally :(
So, second.

Should I be changing my mindset towards earning money off my projects?

Absolutely.

I've had a real focus on building platforms, which can be pretty difficult especially because you need to build a strong community before you can slap on ads or find sponsors.

That's fine, as long as you stick long enough with a project and don't give up until you've reached that momentum. I've built a community-esque platform in the past and i know it's a struggle until you get enough traction to hold on to valuable users that you can then serve ads to.

It almost seems contradictory to put a price tag on the things I'm building, since putting up any barrier to access my software means less people are getting utility out of it than I want.

Look up the definition of "freemium". You can see even most SaaS companies having a free tier or a demo version. You don't have to sell a 500$ product to users who have just found your site.

Something super simple, like an "ad free premium" for 1$ a month will be appreciated by a lot of users. Or you can do unlimited streams/messages/whatever. Get creative.

Let's say you build a marketplace. Instead of charging 20$ a month for a membership, charge 0.5 % commissions on all trades. As the community grows you'll make exponentially more money compared to linear growth of the membership fees.

I totally hear what you're saying, and it this current climate, people will be more careful about what they will spend their money on. Netflix, Amazon, Spotify subscriptions all add up. Whatever you're charging people for it has to be worth it or else they will be reluctant to pay even if it is only $5 a month.

It depends on your personal goals, if you don’t need the $ and just want to keep building stuff you enjoy, keep doing what you’re doing.

If you want something more sustainable, build software that people pay for.

It is a nice feeling to get free users, but bear in mind that when something is free the value perception and impact is incredibly low (in most cases).

If someone is paying you hundreds, or even thousands of dollars they are getting a huge tonne of value from your product and it’ll likely make a bigger impact than something acquired for free.

If you can hit the sweet spot of building something you enjoy, while serving customers you care about and making a living it’s a great place to be.

Hey me too! Way to go us! :) woot woot

If you're spending the time to create something people want to use, then you should be charging. Your time is worth something. Also server costs, domain, etc have to get paid somehow. Now the pricing itself is a different story. But always charge more!

i have this opinion that if what you are building is not making cash, discard it, you build product to sustain yourself, you have bills to take care of, it is better to monetize your product when you get traction, it is beneficial for everyone, you arent an ngo:)