Tell HN: I grew Visa List to $5k per month in a year
Visa List started out as a simple list of visa requirements for all countries with detailed visa process and documents for 50 countries so that travellers can go anywhere they want easily. This was a solution to visa issues I faced when I wanted to travel. Since then it's grown to 100+ countries and now features visa exemptions, dual passport requirements and many data points like flight prices, weather, distance, economy status and travel advice. I’m adding new countries every day so that you can use Visa List for all your visa requirements.<p>Visa List makes money mostly from ads and affiliates. Most of the site is freely usable but to use some filters, community chat and visa advice, you need to pay. Users pay monthly, annual or once for a lifetime membership. Revenue ranges from $5,000/m to $6,000/m. It became profitable after 2 months of launch.<p>But it didn't start making $5000 immediately, it started with $500 per month and grew slowly over the span of a year.<p>Initially I placed ads on visa list and was getting around 100K pageviews around a month. But the ads revenue was not that great at all. I tried to apply for skyscanner partnership because I knew that there would be good need after getting visa, but unfortunately I got rejected. I think the main reason was it was I was not getting a lot of traffic.<p>With a heavy heart I tried different ad networks like video ads, content ads but none of them improved the revenue. All this while, i never lost sight of my goal to increase the SEO and along the way get more users to Visa List.<p>Suddenly after a month I got an email from skyscanner from saying that they are interested in partnering with, this was another team. I was so happy and realised that things come around eventually. In a month I integrated skyscanner and it started a good stream of revenue from visa list.<p>After 5 month around june, people from iVisa contacted me. They provide visa service and visa assistance across the world which was perfect. I was very happy to partner with them as well and thus opened 3rd revenue stream.<p>Along the way I also learning AdOps so i could monetize the traffic I was getting and finally after 6 months things started working out. So my first channel also started contributing a good chunk to overall revenue.<p>After around 8 month i started an experiment with Visa List membership which i have been sitting on it for a long time. I was not really sure what was the most valuable information that travelers really need so they won't mind paying. Looking at Nomad list and starter story, i finally put in a set of features that i thought can be useful for Pro members. I'm happy that the experiment paid off adding to the 4th revenue stream.<p>So looking back, it was not a single thing but a lot of small things done right over a year.<p><a href="https://visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https://visalist.io</a>