The Importance of Income

2015-11-02

It's scary how much a small number can mean

I'm preparing myself to start launching a long-term project that I have been working on for the past few months. It's something I'm going to be doing on the side and I don't hope to earn much of a living off it -- for one simple reason. Per month, if the service takes off, I'd have to pay around $108.88USD.

I don't really know how that compares to other startups. But considering it's a (so far) one man operation and I'm not expecting to make a living off it, I think it's rather cheap compared to something like Twitter. Also, about $99 of that wouldn't need to be accounted for (pun unintended) until I hit around 500 users, which would mean at least the first couple of months would only cost me $9.88, out of pocket. The $99, by the way, would be for the 'Startup' level of UserApp.io, which I am using for user accounts and payments -- I could ditch it in favor of my own user system (and in fact at some point I plan to), but for now I don't want to focus on that, and therefore must pay the price when I hit the user cap.

So how can I make the project self-sufficient? Well, donations will be a big part of it. There will be two ranks -- a $5 and a $15 -- that will hopefully be able to manage the upkeep cost. These will also be monthly subscriptions, which means if as little as 20 users (out of the 500 cap) bought the $5 rank, that would be $100 I wouldn't have to worry about. A minimum of 8 people buying the $15 rank would make the entire project entirely self-funded, at $120 a month of income.

Now this is making a lot of assumptions, such as if the project will actually take off, or if 20 people in 500 donate, but I think it's a decent assumption that it will work.

Another important factor is investors, but I can cover that another time.