On reaching $1000/month in side projects

My side projects just crossed $1000/month.

95% passive.

95% profit.

Seems like a dream. I still can't believe it. When I started I thought it would take longer.

In 2021, I started hacking together projects on the side. Before that, I made attempts to make games. I wrote about moving on from game development here.

The first product I made was https://bulkimagecrop.com. I made it out of my own need. There was no existing tool that did exactly what I wanted. It started gaining traction on Google. For the same keyword, "bulk image crop", it ranked # 1. The traffic was low but still people were using it every day. I had a feedback form at the end of crop and people would take time to say that they loved the tool.

The first testimonial, I still remember was

Super ce petit logiciel. Ça fait un moment que je cherchais, mais pas une usine gaz.

On Google Translate it translated to, "Great little software. I've been looking for a while, but not a gas plant."

I didn't understand what it meant so I went to French subreddit and asked. I found out that gas plant is an expression to explain something complicated and hence my tool was simple. Here's the link to the Reddit post 3 years ago.

I was over the moon.

Then I got many positive comments following that and I decided to add monetization. At that time I was convinced no one would pay for it as it's quite a simple tool. I thought about Ads but that would disrupt the simplicity of the tool. I decide to add a buy me a coffee button.

To my surprise, people were donating. I earned a total $135 over 1 year. The tool was growing steadily. The incoming money while nice was too negligible for me to muster up the motivation to improve the tool.

I decided to add a paywall. Crop 100 for free, after that pay $10 once, and crop for lifetime. I did it through Gumroad. Through paywall, I earned in 1 month what I was earning in one year on donations.

If people are donating/supporting your product, you can definitely charge for it and make more money.

Then Gumroad increased their fees way too much and also they don't payout to Pakistan so I moved to Stripe.

After some time, I lost motivation to improve the tool again because it still wasn't paying that much. I increase the price from $10 to $29. It increased sales by ~2.5x.

Alongside, I shipped many other projects. https://imagecompressr.com also makes ~200 every month.

On average, I was still netting $500/month from two tools.

I used to see BulkImageCrop's conversion rate and it was pretty bad and I never understood why. I thought, maybe I should change UI and make it more pretty or something. I didn't do much about it though. I remember talking to someone on X who made a tool in a similar niche and had a better conversion rate.

Fast forward almost half a year, a guy randomly sent an email asking for a feature. I built the feature for him and when I wanted to add paywall to that feature, I searched for paywall code in the codebase. I realized that the code only existed in one place where it should be in 4 places. I was dumbstruck. I found a bug that I wasn't charging almost 75% of BulkImageCrop users. That explained low conversion as well.

I added paywall on that and hit $1000/month.

I tried to calculate how much I left on the table and it was approximately $15000. I wasn't sure if I should be happy about finding the bug or sad about leaving money on the table.

It has been very interesting journey so far with lots of twists, learnings, and hiccups.

I look forward to $3000/month at which point I can retire and start placing asymetric bets.