Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
427 by sanity31415 | 204 comments on Hacker News.
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them. My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month. Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo. Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs). We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it. The website is called 33Mail ( https://33mail.com/ ). My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction. But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively. I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.
427 by sanity31415 | 204 comments on Hacker News.
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them. My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month. Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo. Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs). We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it. The website is called 33Mail ( https://33mail.com/ ). My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction. But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively. I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.
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