Who else is bootstrapping – or has bootstrapped – a project with an ad-driven business model?
I'm building a project that is fully relying on ads, with a value proposition pretty similar to TripAdvisor: free access, seeking for decent audience and monetization through in-app ads.
I have no experience with starting such a business and I guess that at beginning there's literally no revenues to balance the infrastructure costs.
I'd be curious to hear how others are approaching/bootstrapping this kind of businesses?
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Super interesting. I'd also like to learn more as I'm planning to do something similar. Growing a blog and eventually trying to monetize it. At what stage should one start adding ads?
Hey, I might be able to help you a bit here.
I have bootstrapped (before I even knew that term) an app to 30k daily unique users and I'm monetising it completely through ads.
Infrastructure choice: the only choice that could have made it work for me at the time (I had nothing to invest in it) was to build it on a complete pay-as-you-go platform, in this way I managed to start with literally zero dollar for the first months where users slowly came in (FYI: I went with Azure and never switched from it).
Of course this depends on what you plan on doing, for what I'm building now, there are some intrinsic costs and this would not be possible, but I've found that when you WANT to do something and have literally no money, you usually find very smart workarounds.
Monetisation: this is very slow, like very very slow. You will probably use and ad-network to provide you with ads inventory and those pay very little (like 0.001 cents per thousand impressions), but this really depends on the ad-networks and a thousand other factors, just know that to make any significant amount of money, you are going to need a TON of users. Also working with ad-networks is a nightmare.
Let me know if you want to know anything more/else.
Good luck!
hey , can you share what you did with AZURE , i mean how did you setup your stack ?
when you say "pay-as-you-go" do you mean serveles ?
whould be very intresting to hear how you did it
So, I've actually made a bigger post about it, which is super funny, so here you go: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-built-a-30k-daily-users-app-completely-monetized-with-ads-4f3ba91599
Thanks filippo_b! Very helpful. You mean ad-network agencies such as AdMob right? Maybe a good strategy is to try finding partnerships after gathering a good enough audience (around 100k a month) and switch to a model "per thousand clicks" instead of impressions.
So, I've actually made a bigger post about it, which is super funny, so here you go: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-built-a-30k-daily-users-app-completely-monetized-with-ads-4f3ba91599
I would also be very interested in successful examples of using ads only.
I think the challenge with this approach is with where are you going to send those who click on an ad? If you send them to a signup page right away that will probably won't convert well at all, so you'll need to experiment with different landing pages and content creation anyway.
There are many examples , in face . each bit site that dosn't charge you with money .
Just enable your ad blocker and you will see ad's
cards games , file uploaders , image editors , porn ...
I now realize that I misunderstood the post. I was reading it as being about a product that only relies on paid ads to bring in users, without other forms of marketing. Should have paid more attention.