- Up Hail is an app developed and made profitable by Avi Wilensky that compares rideshare and taxi fares.
- He claims that it was easy to get adverts on his website and that he now receives payments each month.
- Wilensky advises minimizing infrastructure expenses and points out that new technologies can further cut costs.
This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with New York City web developer Avi Wilensky regarding the development and marketing of the Up Hail web application. It has been condensed to improve clarity and length.
I spent a weekend in 2014 creating a basic website that contrasts rideshare and taxi prices. The website, known as Up Hail, has been compared to the ground transportation equivalent of Kayak. It assists consumers in comparing costs for cabs, Uber, Lyft, and other modes of transportation.
Up Hail started out as a weekend side project and a free online resource; it was never meant to turn a profit or grow into a company. By coincidence, though, Mashable included it in their list of the year's top web tools. That inspired me to upgrade the site's functionality and search engine optimization.
Today, the site receives thousands of visitors per day from organic searches and earned media, and the ads placed to monetize the traffic have generated consistent six-figure plus income.
The website is primarily automated, functioning as a passive source of income. AWS is the only ongoing cost, coming in at less than $100 a month.
In the early days of ride-hailing and ride-sharing, I had the idea for Up Hail the year I launched the website.
The major players in the market were still not everywhere even though they were growing quickly. I wasn't sure if there was a service in the location where I was planning a trip outside of New York City. Neither the Google search results nor the internet had any helpful sites that contained the information I was looking for.
My investigation revealed a pattern: other people were seeking out the same details. A new niche opportunity may arise when a large number of people are looking for something and there are few resources that can answer their questions. I made a straightforward directory that included the costs and services that were offered in each city in order to fill the void.
In the doctor's office waiting room, I drew a rough design on paper to begin the site's construction.
Designing on paper, in my experience, helps me concentrate on the essential features of a software application by eliminating its distractions. In addition, I was able to create the first version of the app using only my own time and no outside resources thanks to my background in web development.
I then used my hand-drawn sketches to generate some low-fidelity computer wireframes using Balsamiq, a program that eliminates design and color distractions so you can concentrate on the layout. I suggest it to anyone who wants to mock up an app or website because it's easy to use.
For other kinds of projects, I would normally turn the wireframes over to a qualified designer, but since Up Hail was first intended to be a low-budget side project, I tackled it on my own. I built a simple front-end user interface using Bootstrap, an off-the-shelf front-end component from Twitter, based on the wireframes. After that, I spun up a cheap virtual server, a database, and a Python-based web framework with the business logic to create a basic back end.
After paying $12 for the domain name uphail.com, I pointed it to the new server. This was where the original version came from. The website was made public on a number of forums and websites that announce the release of new products. I was so busy with my client services business that I didn't do anything else on the site for several months after that.
I almost forgot about this site until a few months later, when I happened to look around in Google Analytics to see how it was doing.
One day, I noticed a sharp increase in traffic, so I clicked to find out more. The day proved to be auspicious as Mashable featured the website on their yearly compilation of top web products.
To my surprise, this ramshackle website that I spent several days building made the cut. This provided the encouragement I needed to improve it. I came up with a few fresh features and put them on the website. I updated the website's look and made the pages more search engine friendly.
Eventually, the efforts were rewarded, and people started finding the website through natural searches. The website was highlighted in other significant media outlets, and this earned publicity increased search visibility. Before long, thousands of people were visiting the website every day.
The next action was to monetize these visitors by placing advertisements on the website.
It was easy to get started with ads by creating a Google AdSense account, getting it approved, and then copying and pasting some code into the pages. Since then, even when I don't work on the website or make any changes to it, Google has been depositing a lump sum payment into my account each month.
I suggest the following four pointers to build up a web application for passive income:
1. Set up an automated infrastructure
One of my best quotations comes from Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels: "Everything breaks, all the time." There used to be frequent outages on my website. Not only can outages be embarrassing, but they also prevent ads from being served, which costs the company money. An outage can negatively impact a website's search engine ranking as well.
Because of this, websites must be carefully designed for high availability. Automation reduces the amount of time spent on infrastructure and revenue disruptions by keeping a site up and running smoothly and increasing its resilience to outages. Your passive income stream disappears until you take action and fix it if your website crashes while you're sleeping or on vacation and it isn't capable of healing itself.
Maintaining the servers' uptime and smooth operation during manual testing cost me numerous hours. The product should come first, not the web infrastructure. Before the code is released to production following updates to the site code, automated checks are performed. Automation notifies you when issues arise in production that require attention.
2. Use ad networks to monetize your website
When I first began using ads to monetize the Up Hail website, I tried to keep the revenue passive by not having to spend time attempting to sell advertisers ad space directly, handling payments, verifying clicks, etc.
This is where ad networks come into play; selling ad space through a network keeps the whole thing passive. Although there are other options, I went with Google AdSense since it is the industry leader.
Ad networks operate by putting web page real estate up for auction and selling it to the highest bidder. In order to optimize revenue, the network must also provide users with the most pertinent advertisements. For these services, the network charges a large percentage of the revenue, but they also handle all the work. They send money directly into my bank account once a month.
Almost anyone can sign up and get started for free, self-serve. Creating ad units and placing them on websites used to require a fair amount of manual configuration, but these days the entire process is automated.
3. Reduce the cost of acquiring new users.
The economics of buying traffic and then monetarily generating that traffic through ads won't work for many publishers who make money through advertising. If all of the traffic to your website comes from Google and Facebook ads and you rely solely on display advertising to make ends meet, you're likely to be losing a lot of money.
My strategy was to look for less expensive ways to get traffic, like organic channels. Since organic search accounts for the majority of Up Hail's traffic, I gave SEO a lot of attention when developing the website.
The website has tens of thousands of pages, and every one of them is optimized around a different set of distinctive keywords. My website was able to get search engine visibility from the start thanks to this "long tail" strategy.
Competitive terms usually take some time for new sites to rank for, but for non-competitive niche terms, you can see results almost instantly. Getting media attention and press mentions is another effective way to increase search visibility without spending any money, but it does require effort and perseverance.
4. Minimize the cost of infrastructure
This kind of passive income business makes sense financially because it requires little overhead to maintain an online presence. The cloud provider accounts for the largest monthly recurring expense, which is correlated with usage and traffic. Ad revenue less hosting costs can be the monthly net profit for a small web publishing company.
All of the major public cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure and AWS, have free tiers for the majority of their services and use a utility model for pricing. Your hosting expenses should be zero or very close to zero if you receive no visitors.
Everyone now has access to the same enterprise-grade products as the largest corporations thanks to the democratization of infrastructure, and you only pay for what you use. This frees you from fixed recurring overhead fees, enabling you to take chances and launch apps and websites.
My expenses have been further lowered by new technologies. My hosting expenses have decreased from several hundred dollars to approximately $100 per month since I made the switch from servers to a serverless architecture.
I would have probably ended the project after the first few months if I had to pay a large sum of money every month to keep the machines operating, and the company would never have been able to realize its full potential.
Reviewed by F415AL
on
October 26, 2023
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