(2019-05-17) Benson Transforming My Simple Daily Habit Into $20,000 Per Month IndieHackers

Buster Benson: Transforming My Simple Daily Habit into $20,000 per Month - Indie Hackers. 750 Words is a site that I built on a whim in 2009, and it's still going strong. It turns 10 years old this December! It's a site that allows you to practice a daily habit of private journaling. (DailyWriting)

265 people have written 1,000 days in a row, and 68 people have written 2,000 days in a row.

At the time I would build a website for pretty much anything, and this was probably one of 20 that I built in the five years or so that I had spare time in my life. All of the others have either been retired or eventually died from lack of usage over the years

750 Words was supported through donation for many years until I ended up running into too many scaling problems and deciding to make it a pay site ($5/month for new users. (PayWall)

it did give me the budget to scale it better, and supports my wife who now runs the community and support queues.

I built the first version of the site using Ruby on Rails and jQuery on a shared server in about a week

The biggest struggle has always been responding promptly to all the people who had lost passwords or that had broken a streak for either personal or bug-related reasons. (UserSupport)

Because it's about writing every day, and the day ends at midnight, there was often a big surge of people writing at the end of the day that would cause the site to crash and then streaks to be broken

On December 16, 2009, I launched the site with a blog post

On March 1, 2010 it was featured on Lifehacker and caused my first outage. On March 19 I did an interview where I mentioned that 11,000 people had signed up and 1,500 people had completed their words that day, up from 425 the week before

We passed 20,000 registered users in April 2010

For reasons that seem ill-fated in hindsight, I launched a new website and business called Health Month that August. I think I figured it would be easier to make money with a behavior change site than a writing site, and I raised money for it and hired people and all that. For a while it seemed to be working, but eventually it became clear that the writing site was actually the better business. Who woulda thunk!?

published a post asking the users of 750 Words what I should do with the site

Most people surprisingly voted to turn it into a pay site, so that's what we did over the next couple months.

By the end of 2011, we had 100,000 registered users and about 1,000 paying users

Eight years later we have 430,000 registered users and 4,000 paying users

The vast majority of our revenue comes through the $5/month subscription that kicks in after a 30-day free trial.

last October I decided to take a break from full-time employment to write a book about having more productive disagreements (to be published by Penguin/Random House in 2020) and to consider the possibility of turning 750 Words into a lifestyle business that can support me and my family fully.

To that end, once I'm done with my book, we're planning a Kickstarter to help fund a big update to 750 Words that would bring it a mobile app, localization, support for writing groups that want to encourage private journaling in classroom and other group settings, and a bunch of other things that are all sourced directly from current members of the community.

I think it's important to build something valuable before you try to make a living off of it. Starting with a free site, moving to donations, and eventually to a subscription model was the right order for us to do this in.

I'm a big fan of intentional unoptimization.

What I found for myself is that creating a place to dump uncensored thoughts to clear my brain out is a valuable thing, because it makes everything else I do 1% clearer and authentic.

The biggest thing required to do this really well is to not try to do other things at the same time.

HackerNews thread including Buster participation.I should also mention that the salary we draw is in no way sufficient to actually support a family of 4 in Berkeley, so since quitting my tech job last October, we've been draining our savings and preparing to find a way to turn this little business into something that could sustain us longer term. I call it our flying rickshaw (the opposite of a rocketship). Outcome still uncertain.