This might sound a bit cliche but without the support of the readers and subscribers (especially when we started charging for digital edition), the help of contributors (most notably rdela in early issues), the authors and commenters who graciously granting permission to publish their work, and most of all the HN community, Hacker Monthly wouldn't be possible at all.
Thank you! I will continue to pump out great issue + free special issue (one coming up in May) for a long time to come.
I love it, fortunately at some point I was asked to contribute an article and I received a free electronic subscription. Then I purchased a Kindle. HM + Kindle = a very cool way to consume interesting articles in a relaxing way (the .mobi is one of the default formats you receive your electronic issues).
Also both the printed edition and the PDF are very well done from the point of view of graphic design IMHO.
I will be honest and admit I didn't think that this would take off from the beginning. Some rough calculations show this is now looking at $100,000+ a year in revenue. Pretty impressive and goes to show that there can be a large enough market for anything if you deliver a good product.
I haven't done enough research about available options, but most probably you could extend your subscriber base quite significantly offering a print edition to old europeans without ridiculously high shipping costs. would be awesome to receive it here on paper ...
Because I spend most of my days and half of my nights head down and working hard, I miss many insightful articles that blow through the front page. Hacker Monthly is the reason I feel that I can keep up.
Thanks and congrats to everyone that puts this together!
Hacker Monthly is great and sometimes it is just hard to beat the reading experience with paper. If you want another way to keep up you might check out my side project - the weekly Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com). Both projects compliment each other for people that are too busy to visit HN daily.
I keep forgetting to ask anyone about this, but I signed up as a student (which I am) awhile back and never received any issues or a confirmation. (This is one of those "meant to do" tasks.) Should I e-mail the general inquiries address? It looks like the original offer isn't present any more or I'd just try again.
If you're willing to talk about number of subscribers you're revealing the rough revenue. You might as well just talk about revenue directly. People love to hear about someone making money, so it's much better link bait.
Thats the exact reason I didn't expect it to work. Looking at the product though, while the content you can get for free, the presentation is excellent. The digital is somewhat lacking though and frankly I find instapaper + kindle works just as well and is free.
The back issue package and having it formatted for kindle is great. Hadn't looked into it much since the first issue but having the 10 of them on the kindle to read on the go or just away from the comp will be great.
Hacker Monthly is a great success story and should be more widely emulated. You don't have to start the next Google, Facebook, or recently acquired Company X to have success as an entrepreneur.
Thank you! I will continue to pump out great issue + free special issue (one coming up in May) for a long time to come.