$50,000 Profit From A Side Project

Pawel Urbanek writes about his experience building a Slack app.

It’s called Abot, and it allows team members to anonymously post feedback and polls.

Pawel started building the app about 5 years ago and says it has mostly been running on autopilot the last 2 years 🤖

It’s now earning him about $4000/month with very little expense or time to maintain…

Abot is sitting on AWS, and the monthly cost of EC2, RDS, and Cloudflare are ~$50. Required time involvement for occasional demo calls, invoicing, security updates, and housekeeping is around 5 hours a month.

Pawel’s write-up is well worth reading as he’s brutally honest about the ups and downs of being a self-employed solo developer…

I’ve released a dozen commercial side projects. Most of them suck up hundreds of hours, made a few dollars and died out. But every $ they made has always felt different than my 9-5 salary.

Abot is the only one that kind of made it. 50k profit might seem like a lot. But if you divide it by the nolife after work hours I’ve spent to generate this “passive” income, you’d hardly get a junior dev hourly rate. But it’s fun.

Also, I’m guessing all that experience building his own apps is a big reason why he can charge $10,000+ for consulting projects 🤑

(Pawel also seems to have gotten a lot out of Y Combinator’s free Startup School, which is now open for registration.)