This is a great idea for a poll, but I think it is self selecting away from reality. As of 4:19 EST there are 12 votes for items where someone reached "ramen profitability", 3 for "Never", and 11 for "Hopefully soon(also never)". So that means 12/26, or 46% of respondents have reached some level of profitability. This seems high to me.
I'm not sure whether to be annoyed or inspired as I'm still in the Never category, but will back in "Hopefully soon" before long.
I had a day job for the whole time so it was not exactly a pressing concern, but it took me about 16 months for the first seasonal spike leading to ramen profitable, a year after that until it was a consistent thing, and about 4ish months after that until I am more or less "day job profitable". (As in, "this could be my day job".)
If you want to see the actual numbers, see left hand sidebar here:
Four-and-a-half, but we were building awfully complex 3D game development technology without almost no funding (first revenue after four years, but founders couldn't take a wage for another half year). Doing incredibly well now, with 40 employees and growing (still no funding, but making one's own cash is much cooler :)
It took us two months due to AppStore's pay cycle to have operating cash, but we were ramen profitable a few days after our first product hit the store. Our costs are ramen too.
Now the objective is to stabilize sales, improve the products, find more revenue channels (working on a deal w/ a popular men's magazine), and get connected with big dev projects. The long looks good, but we've got a ways to go before it's serious revenue. We've bootstrapped the whole enchilada, and this is about the time when it would be nice to have $1-2m to work with and hire some full-time guys.
I'm still doing freelance work (usually 1 project at time) so I can maintain a comfortable lifestyle. The extra coin definitely gets put into the company from time to time too.
Also consider taking a look at: http://www.startuply.com/ which contains jobs at startups, and some of it at the bay area. Startuply is a YCombinator's startup. :)
http://esciencenews.com was profitable the second I decided to turn on some ads on the very darkest corners of the site - it could have been in 1 month, but I decided to turn them on only 6 months after.
http://biologynews.net was profitable after a year, but it was my first project and I didn't have much experience at the time (many years ago).
Quite frankly, I just don't see how one could live mainly on Ramen -- the little content wouldn't do it for me (and I'm merely 110 lbs.). What am I not seeing?
Just to clarify. Is this the number of days after launch? Or is there some magic I don't know of that is making people earn money they day they started up?
Anyway I am trying to look up what does "ramen" mean - though I found it's definetion but it did not make any sense to me when I combined it with the word "profitable".
What I found is: ramen means "A thin white noodle served in this dish."?
ramen noodles are traditionally the cheapest possible meal a person can eat. "ramen profitable" means that the business is barely profitable to scrap by on the cheapest living amenities.
I'm not sure whether to be annoyed or inspired as I'm still in the Never category, but will back in "Hopefully soon" before long.