Thank you for sharing your story again.
I am one of your biggest admirers and you have been a constant source of inspiration for me for a very long time. I'm currently working on my MVP to do something similar to you.
Thank you so much for everything. Hope to catch up for coffee or something when it all clears.
Also impressive what you've accomplished with them as a solo dev.
Congrats, Pietz!
Is most of your NL revenue from user subscriptions or ads or ...?
It's mostly non-recurring memberships because I don't really like subscriptions as a customer myself either, and most people go nomad and actively need the site only for the first few months and then go off on their own, and a subset of those stick around. Which is fine with me. I don't like to create a very addictive product. I think I have a healthy balance of new people and long time members right now.
Ad deals are really hard to predict, usually a VC-funded company (ironically) asks to promote their remote work or nomad related product and they'll pay anywhere from $5k-$30k/mo to promote it on my sites. But those deals can last just a month, to 6 months for example. But ads are not stable income like memberships are for me, so I try not to rely too much on them.
I have slowly transitioned to reducing the reliance on other job boards as I got more job posts myself.
But then I also have to add there is probability involved in here. I'm rational enough to understand it's a probability equation of who actually makes it to the other side and can sustainably pay their bills with something they made for a long period of time. Most fail, some do okay and a few do really well.
You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all:
https://nomadlist.com/open
https://remoteok.io/open
I have no funding, no debt, no employees, just revenue and profit margins are somewhere in the 80%-90%.
Nomad List got started when I was traveling and working remotely ~2013/2014 and wanted to discover more cities that would fit the criteria of nice weather, affordable and fast internet. Since then I've added hundreds more criteria and it's become a giant database, and also a community. The community is how it makes money as people can pay to join the site and access a chat, a trip planner, a forum and many more features.
Remote OK is a much more simple business as it's just a job board. It got started because after building Nomad List a lot of people around me wanted to start working remotely and traveling but didn't have remote jobs. There was like one remote job specific job board back then and it was quite limited. I thought "why not aggregate remote jobs from traditional non-remote job boards". So I did that, and slowly started selling my own job posts on the site which is how it makes money now.
The Coronavirus has substantially affected my business:
Nomad List especially has been affected losing over 50% of its revenue. The site is made for people working remotely and actively traveling so that is to be expected during this crisis. You can even see the complete disruption the Coronavirus brought to traveling members of my site, scroll down to "Trips Taken by Users" on https://nomadlist.com/open.
Remote OK is less affected and might even get a positive effect out of this crisis since remote work becomes more popularized and mainstream during and after this. There is in fact a rise in jobs posted, scroll down to "Job Posts Sold" on https://remoteok.io/open.
Personally I'm less affected financially since I don't have employees and I've saved most of my revenue over the last few years, hardly spending anything. Most people have told me to repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more, but I did the opposite. That means I have a very solid cash buffer now so I can weather this storm quite well. I feel sad/scared about other businesses with high costs that might not be so lucky, especially the employees involved.