5 years of bootstrapping a nutrition & fitness tracking web/mobile app for me.
After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.
It’s a little more complicated than that. I could temporarily take a chunk, compute the hash, then throw it away and report back that I am happily storing the data, even though I’m not.
Anyhow, read the permacoin paper. It’s pretty cool, and it needs a large petabyte data seed to secure the network. Seems like a win-win to me.
True, it started as a hobby, so it’s been fully bootstrapped and I’ve spent less than $2500 on actual marketing to date. Advertising in the Health / Diet space is super pricy, the ROI still doesn’t make sense. CPA >>>>>> LTV
I have a little over 10k DAU for http://cronometer.com/ and it runs on 2 fairly small cloud instances + a cloud database. A single host can handle the load fine, but I keep 2 running to survive failures.
And it took me nearly 4 years to get that many users. We can’t all grow like facebook!
I had been waiting 4 months for my withdraw -- just email their support and ask them to cancel the transaction. They were able to do so for me today, and I can now trade them again (and transfer them out as BTC anywhere).
After the first few months it was only making enough income to cover basic hosting costs and not much else, so I ended up getting a job (well, co-founded a different startup with good funding). In the next two years, I was just doing the bare minimum to keep it running, and it grew 80% each year. Start of year 3, other startup failed and I had spare time to invest in the site and it was making maybe 8000/month in revenues, and the decent yearly growth has continued so that now in year 5 I can comfortably live on the business, and have a few employees / contractors to help with support and development.