I am a big fan of Paul's blog and I've been reading it for quite some time. Congrats on making so much with your blog! It's definitely inspiring for a recent college grad to be making so much from a blog. Hope to see Skribit take off!

Congratulations on Paul generating real cash flow! I'd love to see a essay written by Paul on how he started his blog and what he think made it popular. So many blogs, even good ones, fail to break critical mass. I do blog and day dream of being a professional blogger but realize it really is hard work.

Would you consider yourself a professional blogger if you were blogging to support your revenue-generating startup activities?

I get a metric truckload of business value out of having my blog -- links, business opportunities, rankings for key terms, etc. This is grossly disproportionate to the pennies I would get if I showed ads on it.

This also lets me scratch the "I like writing, dagnabit" itch.

I'm glad that Paul is making some cash from his blog, but $1600 a month is peanuts for a 3 year old site. A blog 1/10 as popular in a lucrative niche with some decent search traffic would make 10x as much.

Yeah I agree. I never tried to whore my site out with ads either though, so I can't really say I tried to make much money off of it. Now that I might be more reliant on it, that might change.

Wow congrats on making enough to pay the bills from the blog alone. Although it could be rough when student loan repayment becomes required... would that be too much?

Anyway good luck, hopefully you can "build the hand glider before hitting the ground" as the saying goes

twampss, who are you? You've (successfully, thanks!) submitted some of my posts in the past here and am wondering who you are.. you have a blog I can read too?

Just another big fan of your blog! Given the content you write about and the quality of the HN community, I'm usually surprised if I'm the first one to submit a post from your site. It's a perfect fit!

No blog on my end currently - took it down a while ago and haven't found the time to get it started up again. Hopefully soon! My email is [this username] at gmail dot com. I am always up for a good chat! Keep up the great work!

I've only just recently released stable version of my service (like a day and half ago), but my startup goal at least for th early part of 2009 is gaining some traction. Particularly the valuable kind that Paul Buchheit talks of with finding that 100 people that really like your service. Though my service is aimed at bloggers so that might be a little hard I think.

These goals sound very familiar to me - survival being the key one, although we hope to do a bit of growing too...