$100,000 from side projects
by Cory ZueAfter more than four years of indie hacking I’ve finally managed to earn $100k from my projects!
The income breakdown is about 50/50 between SaaS Pegasus - a Django SaaS boilerplate, and Place Card Me, a wedding place card generator, with $5k coming from Chat Stats - an analytics tool for GroupMe groups (if you don't know what that means I'm not surprised).
I'm not sure I have any real wisdom to share on this milestone. It's been a long, slow grind with every product. What I will say, is that big numbers aren't as hard as you think. They just take time and consistency.
In my case I started indie hacking with the goal of earning just $1. That took almost 5 months. But the next dollar only took a few days. And now, more than half my amount have come in the last year (something that I think has been true almost the entire time I've been doing this).
My timeline to big milestones looks like this:
$0 - $1: 5 months
$1 - $10: 6 weeks
$10 - $100: 3 weeks
$100 - $1000: 2 months
$1000 - $10,000: 10 months
$10,000 - $100,000: 30 months
There's a complete set of income and effort broken out by product on my open startup dashboard.
On to $1 million!
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That's awesome, thanks for the support! Don't hesitate to let me know if you have any suggestions for how to make it better!
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congrats!!
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thanks!
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Congrats! Awesome achievement. And reassuring too—my Jamstack book's growth has been slow but I'm reminding myself that it's my first product, my wife just had a baby, and I'm working on it gradually while promoting it as well. So it's understandable that it'll take time to grow (and the next product will probably as well!)
I love your dashboard. Is this custom? Where are you pulling the sales data from?
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First off - congrats! We had #2 last September. Definitely changes how much time you have for side-hustles!
But yeah, I'm a big advocate of "slow and steady", even though that's not always what happens in the stories you read about.
Re: the dashboard, yeah it's custom. I export data from Stripe and Toggl (time tracking), process it in Python, and render it in Chart.js. One of those little indulgence projects to have fun on a Friday. :)
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Thanks! This is #2 for us too...it's a whole new world with toddler plus baby, lol...
Very cool, I haven't done an experiment like these charts in a while, especially not on my personal website. This is definitely inspirational!
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Oh sweet. I could use something like SaaS Pegasus.
I spent like 3 days trying to launch with cookie cutter django. Can I use it for APIs?-
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Hey - yeah you can definitely use it for APIs.
It ships with a few examples of how to integrate with APIs using DRF, including a react or vue-based object demo for creating/editing/deleting things, as well as a chart integration, and some other API examples around Teams.
The one caveat I'll add is that it's not designed to be used in projects where your Django backend is for APIs ONLY and you have a completely decoupled front-end built in a JS framework. Some customers do use it that way, but it's not the smoothest experience out of the box.
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Congrats! What do you use to track the earnings and the time invested?
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Earnings are all sourced from Stripe, and then I do a bit of manually accounting to take out any extra costs.
Time data comes from Toggl - I've been tracking all of my time spent working for the last 4+ years as a way to understand where my time goes and hold myself accountable!
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I'm working on something like SaaS Pegasus just in a different space. How/Where did you reach out to people to let them know about it and get them using it?
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The overwhelming source of customers/traffic is organic / SEO.
I started creating content about Django probably 2 years before Pegasus launched, and by the time I started working on it I had a couple articles that were getting consistent traffic for certain related queries. Then maybe 6-8 months before it launched I had a landing page and an email list that I attempted to drive traffic to by "advertising" it on those posts. Post launch, I've doubled down on that strategy by creating and promoting guides for doing various things with Django (that Pegasus solves for you). When I release a new guide it's an opportunity to market the guide (e.g. on reddit, newsletters, etc.), which then also increases the overall awareness of Pegasus.
Also I'll say transparently that some percentage of people find/buy it because they follow my journey either here on Indie Hackers, or on my blog/Twitter where I also do the "build in public" thing. This is definitely a minority of my customers, though.
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Thanks so much for sharing that. I like the idea of doing guides on how to do things, which happen to use your product. That would then help with posting in places like reddit and not just seen as blatant self-promotion.
May I also ask if you find people are more often going with the unlimited project purchase option vs just the one? Was wondering how to go about pricing things. Was thinking keeping it low and then having a small 'maintenance' fee ongoing so they continue to get updates and support.
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Yep exactly! And if they're good enough they get shared even beyond that initial marketing push.
Re: single vs unlimited I don't actually have the data but my instinct is that it's maybe 40% unlmited / 60% single (from a revenue perspective, so much more single sales). For single licenses, I expire upgrades after 1 year and have just had my first few people renew @ $89 for another year. So that's been nice. :)
One thing that is common with boilerplates is that people customize the code so much that they don't bother upgrading to later versions (unless there's something they really want). So I'd keep that in mind if you're planning on making the majority of your business model based on maintenance.
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Great point on the maintenance piece. Will totally have to think about that one.
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Congrats! Way to keep on grinding
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Awesome @czue! Thanks for sharing. I remember being super excited when I ran into SaaS Pegasus, but ultimately I wasn't able to use it, since at the time I didn't see that there was a way to support a custom JS framework.
Glad to see that has changed. Will recommend to a fellow Django dev friend that is about to start his app. On to 1 million!
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Awesome! Feel free to have your friend reach out to me directly on Twitter or email if they have any questions.
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Great Story and helpful for the many of us that are midway in your journey :)
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Thanks. Best of luck!
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This is inspiring. Thanks so much for sharing.
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Glad to hear and you're welcome! Thanks for letting me know.
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