No I've launched, it worked till november, we got too many costumers and couldn't handle all of them. I decided to stop payments and rebrand everything, make a new bigger team and launch a new website. We do service, therefore we have too many paying costumers now, we don't need any sales for naechst 6 monthes, it's still profitable. But we'll launch in february.
We grew big too fast, our team can't handle too much costumers for now. I've bootstrapped, I have not time now to apply for a VC money and I can't work because I'm in last year of medical faculty, I must concentrate on my exams, medicine is very hard to study. So I decided to not accept any payments anymore in next 4-5 months. Also our initial website and branding was not so good and I thought it would be better if we rebrand and relaunch with a different name. I had bootstrapped that time and built everything by myself. Therefore I deleted everything in website to rebuild it. It's empty actually. Now I hired some top designers from Dribble, I think it will be ready in 40 days. I'll open a Show Hn thread for the launch.
No, as I said I didn't started the content site, because starting startup is much more interesting, easier and brings money fast and easier, if the idea, execution and marketing are well done.
Once it was very easy. Now it's very hard. But still doable. By passive income you probably mean a content website monetized with ads. Some time ago there were people that made millions of dollars only with google adsense. I don't know if this technique still works but I think Google bans every time black-hat adsense users if they manually discover them.
Most of adsense millionaires used this technique: they select most paying keywords (there are several paid tools for that) and they make microsites about this keywords. With some black-hat SEO, they make fortune with adsense. They write codes, and automate the whole process. Some make content aggregation, they don't write anything, everything is automated.
Google updates its algorithm to prevent this kind of abuses, but still, there are too many people smarter than google engineers.
I've read too much about this kind of business. 7 years ago I made a small site to test if it really works. I made a blogspot site with only 2 articles, it brought me 100-200$ per month. I was in high school that time. Than I read some interviews from big content website owners that they make too much money with their website. And I made a decision that I'll learn SEO and build a big content website with a unique idea. I was 5 years long a premium user in SEOmoz. From articles by Rand Fish I discovered Hacker news. And the community blew me away.
I started university and started to build my "unique idea content website" but it was never finished because of Hacker News. I saw that although it's still a good idea to make money with a content website, there is better way to make money and it's more passive than that. It's just simple idea. Start a startup.
I'm still a student at a medical faculty. Last year I started a startup to see what it looks like and if I can build something useful. I bought a domain name for 10$ and 9$ hosting from hostgator. Now it makes 20-30k $ per month and I don't do anything. I'm the owner of my small company and I have 12 workers and one CEO to organize the work, and I continue my study at the university.
After seeing how it's simple to start a startup, (of course starting is not so easy and the idea, marketing also important) I think I'll continue my life as an entrepreneur, not as a doctor.
- user experience and information architecture done right
- visual beauty, pixel perfect and modern aesthetics of web user interfaces
Can we think the web page with a visual beauty and lack of call to action?! Would it be a good designed website? I think no. So, well-designed website has all of important aspects, to call users to action.