I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr).
Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.
A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.
Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) is a private journal that can be done all through email. It emails you daily, you reply. As you build up entries it will start sending you past entries in the daily emails.
Some of the better use cases include:
* Keeping a developer journal (I see a few others here are working on something along those lines as well)
* New parenting journal
* Daily journaling
The open source option you mention is at https://dabble.me and has a free hosted option as well. I open sourced the project in hopes that devs would contribute as I was a big OhLife user myself, but instead we all just started competing.
I've also reached out to the OhLife guys about 1) open sourcing their code, and 2) letting their users know alternatives exist. After a pretty late reply, all I got back was a 1 liner saying they weren't interested.
Sidetrack: Does your 17yo daughter really want to have her journal on a service her dad runs?
You might check out VidCast at http://dabble.me - it has a bookmarklet compatible with Twit.tv making your experience with finding a video on Twit.tv & casting it to your TV a bit more streamlined.
Thanks, got that bookmarked. It works except for the live stream, which I found casts well from the Twit Cast Android app. So between these two, Chromecasting is working out well for me.
The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happ...
Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.
A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.