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$30K per month from https://www.improvely.com

A few thousand per month from https://www.w3counter.com



I'd love to hear more of your story - seems like you have the perfect gig. A lot of your customers seem like small/medium sized businesses. How did you go about acquiring them?


Wow, so is improvely is run just by you? 30k a month is impressive. I checked out your blog, but have you ever had anyone else working on it or have you always maintained the full stack?


It's always just been me. This is a lifestyle business for me, and I don't really feel time-constrained at all. The variety of skills you have to develop to run a software business alone is what makes it interesting to me; I never get bored with the work since there are so many roles I can choose to take on each day. There's always something new to learn on the horizon, and great motivation to do the learning (like ack! you're about to have more traffic than one server can handle, better learn how to handle that!).

The only downside to working alone is being on-call 24/7/365 for the servers. I have a good alert system that will wake me up if anything goes wrong overnight, though most components of the stack can fail without taking down a site. Lots of load balancing and warm failovers at a second host just in case.


Cool, inspirational that you were able to get the business up to that level alone.


Great saas's! how much $$ from this saas you paying to servers?


I notice you have the 4-tier (299/149/79/29) pricing system. I'm curious what percentage of your revenue comes from each tier.


It's actually "$299+" which links to a page with even larger plans (299/599/899). I also do custom pricing when that makes sense. There are customers at every price point. Nearly everyone starts at $29/month but as their business grows with Improvely's help, they grow into larger plans as time goes on. That keeps our interests aligned, and also keeps the average customer LTV growing every month without changing prices or upselling other services.


nice stats. i have signed up for w3, proceeded to add a site, noticed i cant make the counter invisible, saw the pro signup page, closed the site. maybe you should consider to let the first site added to be free with pro features and charge for the next sites , or maybe for a 60 day period and then ask for pro.


Thanks for the feedback. W3Counter has around 79,000 users despite never being advertised; I don't really care to grow it faster by giving away more. The PRO features cost money because they cost me more money -- they include real-time reports that take more server resources to scale.

W3Counter's always been a pet project I built for myself, back in the days before Google Analytics existed, that I've just been happy to see pay for itself. The site turned 10 this year.




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