About a week. Back in January 2004 I bought a domain, a design template and set up a copy of the free osCommerce shopping cart. I created packages of advertising services, put them in the store, then started posting on webmaster forums with advertising sections, and participating in the forums with the site in my signature. Total time from idea to working website was two days.
I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales!
I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as well.
I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live.
I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.
First month = $495 in expenses. $20 for my first month webhosting. $99 for Dreamweaver (I was still hand-coding HTML). $375 for that damn Verisign SSL certificate.
First month I made $300, so was a little in the red. Second month I made $700 and was profitable ever since.
First 10 musicians were just people I knew. After that were friends-of-friends since the first 10 were so happy with my service. Then some people started mentioning it in their newsletters, and more strangers kept signing up.
That whole first year, the site did almost nothing. I didn't even know PHP+MySQL at the time, so it was just a hand-coded HTML site that let you put a CD in a shopping cart, and enter your payment info. Whatever you entered was emailed to me, and I'd copy it by hand into my merchant account to charge their card, then copy it by hand into a label printer to mail their order, then copy it by hand into Eudora to email them a thank-you email.
Though this was 1998, yes I think the same approach applies today.
Fair enough. I was only 11 in 1998 so I don't have any idea what the fraud/security situation was like (and should have thought about that before posting criticism). I'm sure CD Baby made the transition to more secure methods as soon as it was more apparent that sending CC information via email was a bad idea.
I was just surprised to see that, since it's such a well known Bad Thing now.
Absolutely. The concept of coming up with something to sell (or resell), setting up a barebones store, doing some test advertising and seeing results in just a few days is timeless. It's even easier today than in the past since creating a good looking ecommerce site is easier than ever with all the store builders and payment services available.
If you've ever seen Tim Ferris's book "The Four-Hour Workweek", he suggests that exact system, except without accepting payment and without having the product available yet, so that if people do try to order from you, you've validated that there's a product-market fit before investing time and money into an elaborate website, stocking inventory, etc.
Depends on what level of ramenability you're setting your bar at. Here are some of my milestones for S3stat:
6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point).
18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.
30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city.
40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first job out of college.
That's for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month.
So I guess the answer to your question is: longer than you think. But once you're there, it's pretty nice.
Consulting. In the short term, it blows the doors off of any entrepreneurial thing you could do.
The only problem with consulting, though, is that you need to keep doing it to keep getting paid. As such, the key seems to be to consult in short bursts and use the runway to bootstrap product stuff.
Short answer: 5 months with my new startup (to reach about $1500/mo revenue).
Longer answer: I've completely immersed myself in startups for around 3 years and spent a full 1.5 years on a startup which never reached ramen profitability nor got funding. I don't think I'd have been able to reach ramen profitability in 5 months without the learning I did in the previous one.
I also write weekly on my personal blog and almost every post has some form of reflection comparing the previous startup with what I'm doing for my current startup: http://joel.is
I suppose I theoretically could have bought all my ramen with bingo profits after about 2.5 ~ 3 years, although a) I kept working at the job for another year, b) actually doing that would have resulted in an "interesting" discussion with Immigration, and c) you probably shouldn't use this as a comparable since I was very, very part-time on things.
1.5 yrs part time for my work on bliss, of which a little over one year was with a commercially available product. Once RP, I went full time.
This was aided by both shrinking my outgoings as well as growing revenue. I cut out as many monthly outgoings as possible, went PAYG with my mobile phone, stopped spending daft amounts of money on wine... You've got to work out what's more important - cable television or your startup?
Probably around 8 months - 1 year for us (https://wonderproxy.com). My co-founder and I were both employed full time elsewhere so we used revenue to expand constantly, becoming profitable wasn't on our short to-do list.
This greatly depends on your experience level, how much work you put in every day, the type of business you are in, you're personal situation, and quite a few other factors.
If you're at the top of your game (you know what you are doing - have experience of 5-10+ years), I would say if the income does not come in after 3-6 months, you're wasting time and effort.
Otherwise it could take years to get things right before you find out that the market for your idea is not there.
My startups first iOS game, Quotiac, was making ~$7/day within two days of making it on to the App Store. It took me about three months of full time development (programming + asset creation) to get there. My monthly expenses at the time were nil, so every penny earned was considered profit.
I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.
Interesting question, thanks for posting. I'm selling Chinese tea (a physical product sold online), so it's different from these SaaS guys, but it's about 3 months from launch and covered 1/3rd costs, but about 6 months since first line of code.
I got 5 orders the first day, a couple the next, a few more the next day, then I started advertising on search engines. Sales exploded. Over $100,000 by the end of the year... which is a lot of $10 sales!
I was simply buying up different types of ad space at wholesale rates from various networks/services, then packaging it in smaller chunks for individual site owners in the $10-40 range. The site paid for itself in its first week. A few years later and net profit, rather than revenue, was past six figures as well.
I'm not so much in that business anymore, but it was my first entrepreneurial endeavor beyond slapping ads on articles I'd written, so I was proud of that success. I later replicated the story several times with products that were income-you-could-live-on-full-time from the day the websites went live.
I really need to do it again, too. I've since sold off those businesses to pay for two college degrees, then for a new car and downpayment on a home... while my current freemium+premium services bring in enough to cover the mortgage, I need to get back into product building to get some money in the bank again.