Three thing I'm most curious about - growth in user base, revenues & profitability over the years.
If you can share numbers, that would be fantastic.
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059965
It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years.
2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k
Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that!
This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io.
It's now a cost of living and city database with 1,000+ cities, and monetized with a 10,000+ people membership community of digital nomads, remote workers and general travelers. They pay $75/year to be a member (not everyone is recurring, I just started with that)
I haven't had a lot of costs as most of it I do myself. Although it's been very hard work, especially in the beginning before I automated everything. I do have to charge 21% sales tax, and Dutch tax is relatively high but I've just opened a Ltd. so it'll be less now.
The hardest part? I think early on capturing a new market quickly, keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better. And then hopefully don't get traction, haha. Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin.
It's mostly been an extremely fun experience though and I'm really happy and proud of what I made ^_^
P.S. I've been lurking on HN since 2010, that made me learn to code seriously and build stuff. I'd read patio11's posts and was super inspired. So I'm really thankful that HN existed and helped me get here.
Out of curiosity, was the fallout over the lack of security very bad? I was in Chiang Mai last fall and nomads at coworking spaces and meetups were all talking about it. Several downloaded the entire chat logs from Nomad List. I was horrified to be honest but hadn't really chatted about much of anything yet so I never complained.
I will say though that it was a bit grating to see you bragging on twitter about not bothering with frameworks or testing right after having seen discussions I'd thought were at least somewhat private downloaded and passed around online.
Lots of people asked for the chat logs (of public channels only) to be public and searchable. Like the forum. So I made them. Then lots of people didn't like that and wanted them to be private. It was never a security leak, I uploaded the logs myself. That was the whole point. I've never had any security breaches.
It was never a private chat, it's always been publicly accessible by anyone who paid the entrance fee and then scraped it. And they could (and probably) have already done that since the beginning.
(I guess misunderstandings are also difficult to catch as a solo team, too)
Found this the other day: nomads: people who have larger collections of coffee shop wifi passwords than clothes - @jongold
You've mentioned something about automating. Can you tell me more about it and which you've decided to not use?
As for competition, how do you specifically handle this?
I mostly try to ignore competition and stubbornly make what I would like to use myself. It helps that I am a "nomad" myself, so I know kinda what they need.
> keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better
My current project https://remotebase.io borrowed a lot from NomadList. While it's not successful yet, I can see what you mean.
Thank you.
So I added a MailChimp email box, then a chat group, a forum and kept making more for them. That's how people kept coming back and finally paying money.
Great work !
It's a myth you can just open a corp anywhere and benefit from low tax, a lot depends on where you live personally (as CEO), where your staff is, where your customers are and where you spend the "fruits of your labor". Why is it a myth? Because otherwise EVERY freelancer would offshore to a low-tax country. They can't. It's a loophole that doesn't exist.
About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly.
Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret.
Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, persistence, persistence. In a very crowded niche. Desktop software is definitely not dead - you can charge a whole lot more for it, and ongoing costs (other than people) is comparable to trendy web apps.
Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment.
It took me over five years in this business to fully internalize this. Programmers (me included) often complain about clueless entrepreneurs in this business, but even more rare than a good programmer is a good entrepreneur, who can sell/market and turn code into money.
Most importantly I don't know if you can even compare the two fairly. At scale marketing is basically a subset of programming (or I suppose statistics). B2B it's quite a different beast and mostly about understanding processes and being good with people.
I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in marketing (other than "people are complex"). In programming there are some problems that are extremely tough to solve.
I mean sure it's not that hard to hack together a webapp that scales to a reasonable number of daily users. Programming something more complex, keeping it secure and keeping it up and running...that's pretty tough overall.
Don't get me wrong, selling stuff and turning code into money is not trivial and also a very valuable skill, arguably a more valuable skill than raw programming power for a startup. I do however think programming is ultimately harder. If you start a company you need both. "Marketing" is more important I'd say (as you can live with acceptable programming for most web-based startups for example) but eventually the lack of programming power will haunt you.
I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me.
Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two
Not sure about your customers, but if I was a customer of some product I'd be happy to know they're are doing well :)
And the couple of customers that know our size have indicated it's better to appear large. For example, you wouldn't switch a company from using Microsoft Exchange to something else if that something else was run by a couple of guys. Our company would be in very deep trouble if something happened to me. To balance that, customers get updates and fixes very fast because they work with such a small company.
Personally in this market having a business run by a single person is probably these risky than a small team since the chance of bankruptcy is less.
It is wise to hide his small size from companies he sells to. I have seen countless stories that large companies act like bullies and take advantage of small companies on a routine basis.
That may not be what he was thinking. But it is in his own best interest.
Question - Why would you care if they did?
If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design).
The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago. People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are static graphics.
Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.
The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.
OS has changed a lot in its look and features and the audience I target, but it is essentially the same concept.
I have some questions. Who puts content in your site? Who placed content in the site at the beginning, just yourself?
How did you learn how to host your own ads?
Btw, which office design do you like the most?
My favorite office is mine because it is well-suited to my needs :)
I think a year after I started the site was when my first major office design of Google's office in Stockholm was sent in by the architect. Before then the site was mostly candid tours from random people and random companies.
Edit: I think I have ~60 projects on the calendar to be published right now.
Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that.
Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then great!
1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)
2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).
3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.
Good luck!
Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.
I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.
Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!
They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.
I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans
Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?
P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.
P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :
[1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,
As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things.
I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products.
I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.
- Incorporating the company
- Terms of Service
- Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company
That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.
2) Hey you're TJ Holowaychuk. I know you've since (mostly) moved on from doing a ton of Node contributing, but as someone who uses projects you've started and maintained for a long time, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work in the open source community.
I'm also going to link your photography site (a) for those who haven't seen it. I know this it's slightly off topic, but everyone should see it.
Have you considered translating it to other languages?
If I could make a bet that adding, let's say, French, German and Chinese would cause... 700 more sales, I would probably bother, but I don't think this sort of feature 10 months after release would generate that.
I'm treating this more as a 'lesson learned', and approaching my next project with localisation in mind. Translating to a bunch of languages is one of my main goals.
A final thought; I love that in 2016 a lone developer can make a silly puzzle game about cats and sell it in 80+ countries. The internet!
I have another question: how much of a hassle was setting up a company in order to submit something to Steam?
Good luck with your next project!
EDIT: in the spirit of proper forum etiquette, I will add to the conversation.
Currently spent 4 months 'funemployed' and aggressively pursued my side project full time, a side-scrolling action platformer. I became rather quick to pick up the necessary art skillset and have demo-ed my alpha at local venues. It's received solid praise regarding fundamentals and playability - peoiple just want 'more polish' to give them a reason to buy it and play.
Subsequently networked and found an audio engineer who I've found to fit my needs. I cannot stress how hard it was to find one i liked, which kinda justified my decision to pay him a dec. amount.
Total nominal expenses thus far: 12k
considering I own vice renting, a good portion of that is tax deductible so really it's a net expense of 10K, plus the added benefit of flexibility and pursuing passion.
If I were to sell > 2k units, I would seriously consider a campaign of 1 game a year on the side, as I feel I have a grasp on the process. I still aim to be a moonlight dev vice full-time, for risk-mitigation and life reasons.
In this specific case, I used the Unity engine. I write in C#, and with Mono/OpenGL, Unity can build executables to various platforms, on (mostly) the same code.
http://electron.atom.io https://cordova.apache.org
This won't work for all apps, but (for example) a lot of simple mobile apps use Cordova with faux-native UI frameworks, and there are a lot of graphics-lite games out there using NW.js or Electron on desktop.
Market: Add-on tools/plugins/components for enterprise software platforms. Customers: ~30 Growth rate: Adding about 1 new customer per month Revenue: $550K ($300K product / $250K consulting) Gross profit margin: 80%
Costs are basically hosting, occasional marketing campaigns, some offshore development, and various SaaS subscriptions to operate the business.
The product often requires consulting services to customize, which can be lucrative. I bootstrapped the product development via consulting and am transitioning to a full-time focus on product dev/support... recruiting SI partners to do customizations.
Note: This is purely a lifestyle business. My true goals are digital nomad in nature.... traveling, writing code from a hammock in the Philippines, spending Winters in Mexico, work 6-9 months per year, etc...
The income is nice, but freedom and mobility are far more valuable.
My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)
It was nice to hear about this, as my wife also helps me out in running my business. Its ultra important to have the buy-in of your significant other for these kind of operations.
In my case I have other developers as well. That's why can't claim to be a single person company. Although, there have been phases in its journey, where it has been just a 1.5 person company.
I am not as mobile (got some dependents) but cheers to the digital-nomad/lifestyle-biz kind of company. Work hard, but at your own pace. See movies in week day afternoons. Or spend entire days on HN/Reddit/twitter. Then feel guilty about it, and spend some days coding, and making some progress, has been my modus operandi.
Edit: Just to add one random but key point in single-person companies, is that you end up doing automation, automation and then some more automation. Cron jobs, alerts, actions, automated test scripts, backup scripts, data refresh scripts and so on. So then even if you grow, its a positive to have in your culture.
Automation is certainly crucial for one-person shops. Leave nothing to chance or human error.
TDD for both front and back-end code, lint checks, version control, server-less DevOps.... embrace as much as possible.
Really any forecasting, CPQ, quote-to-order, or month end close app that saves users a few hours and clicks per month will demonstrate immediate value and sell itself.
There's always a risk that the platform vendor will fill the niche, so I keep iterating and addressing more edge cases to become the "premium" product with high touch support.
Also.... basically just be happy with 42 customers and let the whales have the other 98% of the market :-)
I want to know more.
Would you mind if we chat on a non-public channel (email/twitter DM/skype chat) where I can pick your brain ?
If you want, in return I could help you out with coding or marketing or even some mundane task that takes time. I'm a software developer.
You can reach out to me on my alias email that is in my profile or let me know the method of communication you prefer.
Launched on Product Hunt in January 2016 and we were #2 for the day. It’s generating revenue now, though not enough to give up my other gig yet. But I have customers that are giving me some great feedback.
Initially I did everything myself (including UI/UX) but last year I hired a designer to help with a redesign. Also even though I am a developer I hired another developer to help when I had some other things to look after in my consulting business.
LOOKING FOR COFOUNDER: Do you have the marketing and business development chops that will complement my technical and product experience? Drop me a PM or email to jordan @ my domain.
I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid, I keep expenses low so it doesn't take many paid users to be profitable. If I had more knowledge of how to market such a thing, I believe it could be a reliable revenue source. But I'm otherwise happy that its relative profitability motivates me to maintain it, as I find it supremely useful for my own personal use.
1. Identify leads (comapnies + the email of the person who would be in charge of server status)
2. Create alerts for their services
3. Your system sends an alert when their service goes down. They instantly recognize the value of your service.
I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.
Once you've talked to all your customers you should have a lot more info you can use to market to new customers.
It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups.
Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year.
User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rather than total new users. Active users increase around 15% year over year.
A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding.
We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clone. It'll be 10 years this Fall, and we've been profitable since 2013.
Price point is high enough where it's not likely a quick purchase but too low for an inside sales team. I'm working hard on content marketing to build trust in the market place to drive user growth while keeping my team small (just me so far)
My acquisition process right now is a "call me to sign up" after showing prospects a demo video. Not ideal. I'm working on making the app (filled with a model farm's data) live for users to test for a couple days (gated behind an email opt-in) and then allow them to sign up online. We'll see!
It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but well on the path to become one. I've learnt a lot about product development, handling customers and had many choices along the way I was completely confused about. I hope to put it all in text one day but for now I am too busy adding features, developing new products and optimizing the code :)
I just don't like doing marketing and I don't like convincing people what they should or shouldn't buy. I realize that maybe we are leaving some money on the table but on the other hand we get great reputation, a lot of word of mouth referrals and very small refund rate (below 1%) so that's good for mental health :)
As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were:
-everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive)
-people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations
As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could).
It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).
- 10k first two years.
- Growing somewhat steadily to 250k around 2010
- Revenue (this is period when I was working 3 others) grew to 350k) by 2013
- Crashed to 40k in 2014, 2015 after cutting bunch of apps and going back to being just me as only employee.
- With luck foundation is back in place (http://www.taskpaper.com), hope to reach around 100k in 2016.
Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses besides my 5 eur/month webserver.
https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/
Any tips?
Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?
Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however. Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.
Are you a streamer ? I would love to have a quick chat with you over slack or skype or whatever to know more about the tool & your experience as a streamer.
You can reply here or to the alias email listed on my profile.
I'm running a booking system SaaS (https://zapla.co) which basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.
I must admit that marketing is my absolute weak side, but I've had the most success using organic SEO backed by some SEM campaigns. Since my product requires customers to have a website, I've created landing pages targeted at major WYSIWYG/DIY website builders. If they search for e.g. "booking system for <platform>" they'll have a chance to find a Zapla landing page for that platform :)
I have a bucketful of ideas, and I'm endlessly energetic in a team context, but trying to do solo projects wears me down quickly.
Maybe this is just a character difference, but if solo entrepreneurs have tricks or methods for keeping going and keeping focused, I'd love to hear them.
Internalize the idea that you don't have to be motivated to get stuff done. It's okay to admit, "I'm not motivated right now", and then get to work regardless!
Get into a routine for starting work, and try to never skip it, even when it feels unnecessary.
Find blog posts, videos, and articles that motivate you. Revisit them often, or work them into your routine. I like DHH's talk from Startup School '08 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY), for example.
It's a market data app with a custom technical indicator for a specific commodity. I've found an external commercial team specialised in this industry niche and they're going to start sales in the coming weeks (after the remaining regulatory hurdles are cleared). This is a top-notch sales team working for Fortune100 companies, so I'm doubling down on them for 15 to 50% of the revenue (depending on sales)....
We tested the tool internally for some customers and was an incredible success. People is literally waiting in line to get it... so I'm also arranging external accounting + support teams.
I hope (knocks on wood) it'll generate me x5 to x10 times the salary I was offered in management positions at 2 of the biggest spanish startups (tuenti and social point).
In the coming months I hope to automate everything for all the teams via Slack ChatOps so I can have more free time and start new projects before Christmas...
Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience.
My hopes are high for this product.
Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have a good build system.
Have you done any testing with real users ?
What exactly are your hopes for it ?
My aim is to first provide a complete web based music notation app. And ultimately a library of licks and phrases which users can utilize to aid in their compositions. Basically I've loads of ideas with this product. Build practice routines, i.e practice scales, maintain a practice schedule, etc. So yeah, lots of stuff I can build into this.
And btw, when I enabled it (Noscript) the page loaded forever and again did not show anything - but I guess you may get some more visits now that you've linked it here.
The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke.
Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the first page statically so it does not need to talk to a backend when the visitor is most likely going to close the page after looking at the landing page.
Further, 'Free' should be immediately visible above the fold on the landing page.
I previously ran http://amzshark.com with a friend, which was very profitable within a year (~360k ARR) and ramen profitable within 3 months.
choosejarvis, why did you think there was a market need for such a product ? How is it different from buffer.io ?
Working Solo on it and its not profitably, because there is no paid plan yet. More premium features will cost and will be integrated soon.
Growth? Very slowly with one to two user per week. Probably because I dont do marketing at all (only the blog).
Last week I've made available my latest web app (http://elements.flatangle.com/) but I also sell traditional astrology reports at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/.
The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing, my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing this fulltime, along with freelancing to have some cashflow..
When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have helped understand it immediately.
Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I could be way off.
Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc ? or am I wrong about the customer profile you are looking to target ?
Nice name, Btw.
Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight from the 90s: https://alabe.com/solargold.html
But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of flatangle.com, that is why my main site is still confusing on its offer.
> Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc?
I have an application which says the temperament of a person based on their birth data (think more extrovert or more introvert kind-of analysis). I though on creating a facebook app for this, but as a marketing tool for my other reports, so first I have to build them.
Some years ago I took a course and began practicing a very practical subset of the field called Horary. With an horary chart, you can theoretically infer yes/no kind-of answers to questions and I got interesting results to say the least. From that I've leaped into Traditional Natal Astrology (the one that tries to describe you personally), but always with a very practical mindset. I've also got very interesting results from that.
One day I decided to pursue doing serious research in it (I've created a library for it: https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib), and I've written a paper which was published in a publication in the field. Currently, I now have one or two preliminary results for other researches, but since there are no grants available for this and people in this area are usually not taken serious by academics, I've decided that I have to build one or two products to sustain me financially before I can pursue with my researches..
So, why I, a engineer/researches/entrepreneur with a PhD, am heavily bought-in to astrology? There's lots of low-hanging fruits in terms of pure research, the potential to make a difference in people's lives is enormous (the desire for men to understand themselves is as old as man himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself), and I couldn't bear my own existence trying to be "disruptive" with the next social app.
That above, or maybe I'm a fool! :)
Looking forward to a Show HN or something similar for this one.
How does one feed in the list of attendees? Will it work with Avery-labels and multiple printers?
two startups, both profitable
I built, support and run them all myself (though everything is automated)
This is the model I am biased towards. Mind giving out more information? What sectors do you operate? Do you currently have any employees? Any tips for a newbie?
I didn't start off hiring employees. In the beginning I did everything myself (programming, marketing, customer support, accounting, etc.). A year in I hired my first customer support employee and throughout the years employee count fluctuated from just a couple to 13 at most. Many of which were part-time and worked remote. I have also had offices throughout the years but now focus totally on remote. I don't like the burden of an office.
I think my #1 tip for a newbie would be to look for something niche that solves a pain point or allows your customer to make or save money. For example: if your customer can spend $10/mo on your software and make or save $30/mo from that, you will have no problem getting & keeping customers.
#2. Don't focus on becoming a unicorn. You can make some serious money and build a very comfortable life running a $300k to $1m dollar business, and your chances of succeeding at that are much greater.
#3. Look for things outside of tech. There are so many problems to solve in small businesses. Many will say there is no money to make with small businesses. My response to that is re-read #2.
#4. Learn everything you can about advertising. Get really good at it and be willing to spend money on advertising.
#5. Be willing to kill something off quickly if it doesn't make money. Test your market early to make sure people will pay for it. I have made the mistake of not doing this and I have lost a lot of money because of it. Now, I need to be able to see a positive ROI on my spend within 3 to 4 months. So if I spent $100 to acquire a customer, I want to be able to get that back + more within 3 to 4 months. I know this timeline is probably really short for a VC funded company, but I have always been bootstrapped so don't have the luxury of risking a longer time-frame for return.
#6. It is not easy! Prepare to put in long hours especially in the beginning. Prepare for it to take a mental toll at times. You will second guess yourself, feel insecure, be consumed oftentimes with your business.
You will now have thousands of bosses rather than just 1 or 2. Your customers are now your bosses and many of them will be requesting different things. You will have to learn how to filter through all of that noise and decide which to listen to and what to implement into your software. That is harder than you think.
I think a lot of people have un-realistic expectations on being your own boss. I am not saying the 4 hour work-week hasn't worked for some but it has never been a reality for me. Maybe someday ;)
I don't want to make it sound bad because it is not. It is just not as easy as many make it out to be either.
This is gold. This is an end result I can see a path to, which gives me clear goals to work towards.
I'm also working on a book on email marketing for SaaS products that details what I've learned from marketing my own products: http://saasemailmarketing.net
Contacts with these high flyer publishers would make or break the business.
If you are up for it on slack or skype or just email, let me know here or on the alias email listed on my profile.
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The Shopify App is growing about ~100$ each month without me doing much.
Revenues per user are increasing slightly with each product version, but we haven't released a big game-changer yet.
So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when I added the form) or revenue yet. I'm hoping to launch in a couple of weeks and then immediately begin testing different monetization ideas (I have 3 and I don't think I should do all of them; would like to focus on one maybe two at the most so I need to do some testing).
The A.I. / assistant space is becoming quickly crowded but I think I have a bit of a unique niche in that it'll handle tasks asynchronously (starting with meeting organization and overall asking a group of people a question and aggregating the results much like a map reduce over people (okay that sounds hyperbolic but I like the symbolism)).
The site design needs to be professional.
> I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI
Yeah boiling the ocean would be amazing but at least initially I want to concentrate on a similar use case to that of x.ai where you're essentially using it as you would a personal assistant to schedule and gather information, likely in a corporate environment.
I'd like to keep to a niche of asynchronous task handling but that's way too big to be considered a "niche" but more of a philosophy with how it should work. Hoping I can phone it in initially with scheduling and information gathering then others can use the SDK to do whatever they want with it.
> The site design needs to be professional.
Yeah it could use some more love; trying to balance working on the website and working on the actual product. Though currently I think it's decent enough.
After the closed beta I started out with about $140 / month in profits, which has grown to $330 / month over time. The growth rate has been pretty steady, but nothing so large that I could go full time on it.
Do you market it on the WP plugin market ? What is a common user profile of your average user ?
Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripled in size every year. $27k in 2014, $80k in 2015, and we're projecting to do $250k+ in revenue this year. Hoping to do $1m in 2017.
For marketing: affiliate programs, paid SEO, organic SEO, Facebook, Twitter, cold calling, sponsoring events with writers
How can you create a 5 page, detailed report for just $65 ?
How are you different from a brick-mortar service with a website ?
5 pages of notes takes a reader roughly 3 hours, and there are plenty of people in Hollywood happy to make $15/hr working from home during their downtime.
I'm not sure I follow your last question - it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a script coverage company to have a brick and mortar store.
NEGATIVE:
* It is very difficult to attract investments because of some formal requirements like "no one-man teams" or "no marriged couples"
* You need to choose a product and business model where it is enough to focus on one or two major activites at least before the scaling phase.
POSITIVE:
* it is much easier to change strategy (pivot) for any reason (say, you fell in love and want to suspend the project)
* It is much easier to make strategic decisions like partnering or relocating
Way too complex for an introductory line. I had to read it multiple times to get a faint idea of what you might be doing.
Screenshots and illustrations might work even better.
The design does not look professional. You might want to look at other SaaS sites and themes from themeforest or somewhere to get ideas on the page design.
The tools is interesting. What is your target market ? Who are your users ? What are some use cases ? How do you plan on marketing the application ?
1. Windows (WPF) application targeting approximately the same users as Excel, PowerBI, Tableau, Qlikview but providing self-service data wrangling functionatliy (rather than visual analytics). Problem: after finishing 90% of work I understood that I have to do the next 90% - UI development ate all my time.
2. Java framework for complex analytical data transformations targeted as the same users and tasks as, for example, Apache Spark, but providing higher performance at run time and development time (in-memory column-oriented approach). Problem: again, difficulty to attract attention which is necessary to get critical mass of users. Probably the market of classical big data technologies is too tough nowdays.
3. StreamCommandr. Same as previous but focused on in-stream analytics (instead of batch analytics) and IoT. This market seems to be empty (very rare event) and I want to provde the technology as a cloud service (PaaS), say, in IBM Bluemix, GE Predix or AWS. The users of the in-stream analytics service are supposed to be solution/application developers who want to analyze their data (e.g., from devices) in real time. So I am working on this third hypothesis by taking into account my previous mistakes and collected experience. In particular, I am going to maximally simplify everthing even if I sacrify significant pieces of functionality. Time is more important than quality.
I remember them saying that the various integrations to data sources that databricks provides was convenient.
With Azure BI (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/) & Amazon QuickSight (https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/) the market or such tools is getting competitive. I think your tool might be useful for small and medium businesses.
I would love to chat with you just to understand what you are up to. If you want, you can contact me using the alias email from my HN profile.
What would be interesting is to understand how many of them are active each week/day.
Installed it btw :)
In 2013 I also started another SaaS - monitoring service (Piltek - http://www.piltek.com/), but it doesn't have a lot of customers as the only thing I did was developing it an put it online. I didn't do any marketing (only 1 week at the beginning) as I focus on my first SaaS. It takes a lot of time to build and grow a company (if you are alone and bootstrapped).
What all did you change? What worked?
The idea for the app comes from growing up with garageband and missing the hours spent messing around and making silly songs with friends and family. Trying to bring that fun to mobile in a social way (think smashing garageband into snapchat).
The hardest thing has got to be soliciting feedback and hearing criticism. I have the tendency of turtle response- stay safe, stay inside. Actively working on getting out of my safe zone :)
If anyone is interested feel free to email me at brendon at doyt dot io.
Even though I'm a full-stack developer, during the previous year I had to build several Bootstrap UI Kits. I think I became pretty good at it so a week ago I started http://www.bootstrapuikits.com (worked on it for a couple of months before launching). Currently I run it as a store where I sell my own Bootstrap UI Kits (OK, one kit for now, but two more nice ones are in the works!) but the idea is to expand into a marketplace so that others could sell their own quality UI Kits. Besides that, the idea is for each UI kit to cover at least 10 cases (in at least one version) through example pages (store, social network, portfolio...).
Of course, it's not profitable yet, but I plan to offer great support(!) and great Bootstrap UI Kits (each with 10+ themes) so we'll see. My analysis tells me that I could probably earn $600-800 per UI Kit (created by me) per month. I'm thinking about publishing the results in 3-4 months on Bootstrap UI Kits blog (soon to be created) so stay tuned.
Hopefully that would be enough for me to provide for my family so that, as some people mentioned, I could work on some other things I'm interested in like A LOT (like mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics...).
Wish me luck! Nah, kidding... I don't believe in luck, just in hard work.
Your site design needs to be improved. It's confusing right now and some of the menu items do not work.
I am thinking about publishing something on themeforest BUT: 1. I don't think there is a section with UI Kits. I think that there is a section with HTML themes and I might (but just might) test that eventually; 2. it is very hard to differentiate yourself in a place where you have a lot of people doing something similar; 3. there isn't a lot of places on Internet where you could sell a UI Kit so I might try to create one by myself;
What is the thing (or things) that you think should be changed? It's true that I've left some links unset (I've fixed that, like an hour ago, to a certain level - but it will be much better soon). The thing I noticed is that people didn't get that the image (on the card with premium Kit) is a part of a carousel, so I set that to autoplay, for now. The part where you have a card with a premium UI Kit and the card with the free UI Kit should be straightforward, and all buttons work as they are supposed to. Is there something you think should be changed, or if something is unclear...and if there is - what exactly?
Once again, thanks for the feedback. It means a world to me, especially now when I'm still at the beginning of this business!
Mladen
p.s. Sorry if there is a lot of grammatical errors. I'm too tired currently and English is not my first language.
Solo or 2-founder is fun. You can not go bankrupt
Looking for a co-founder.
So the user checks out online and presents the QR code to the merchant ?
Sorry if that is obvious, I haven't used this flow before, nor do I use an iPhone.
btw, launchkit redirects to : communautic. com ... looks like they were hacked.
Quick Tip : The 'Free' part should be highlighted above the fold. The screenshots way down the page should also be above the fold. (storeshots.net get's this correct)
Also, from this: "By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues"
Nowhere it says "only startups" or "with a product", so I'm just asking if it's a question specifically for one person startups or for one person companies.
I think the biggest hurdle of doing something alone is keeping yourself emotionally stable. If there are more people, when you are down the others can balance it out.
Has anyone experienced this?
Started only couple of months ago. Small number of users so far.
I work as a single man company at the moment :)
* How did you get your first users ?
* What is your marketing plan ?
* How do you do sales ?
It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying. I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project), posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of this marketing work and moved on to other projects.
You do not seem to have a mobile app too. A mobile app would be most ideal as I could revise while travelling.
You could gauge market acceptance by advertising/promoting on school and college (SAT/GRE/IELTS) blogs and sites. Also language learning sites and forums.
If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to show the user a demo of how the product works.
As for SEO, I just got a couple of backlinks by posting about Omnimemory on some websites. I considered content marketing but I haven't actually written anything yet.
It's been running for a little over a year, growing every month, but still very small.
It's hard to get users hooked into a consumer app.
Have you tried advertising on Amazon ? in the kindle category ?
Looking for people to participate in a pilot project now
I want to work on projects but I can't find any ideas that could potentially become a business. Where do you look? Who do you talk to?
How do you approach ideation right now ?
While I won't say I have implemented any ideas recently, my approach is very straightforward. Look at what is working (on threads like these), understand why it is working, and assimilate those points while ideating.
One simple way: Keep a sharp lookout for any difficulty you face while doing/using something - everything. The moment you hit a problem, think if you can find a way to improve it. Bingo!!
pg has said it's a negative, and it really is. The likelihood of a single founder company growing huge is smaller than if there's small team at the start, for all sorts of reasons (which pg and others have written about). But, if you've built something awesome, YC isn't going to say no just because you're a solo founder.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=single+founder+y+combinator+compan...
Again, it's definitely a strike against you in the selection process (as it probably should be...I've started a company solo and I've started a company with a co-founder...the latter is clearly better), but it's not a deal-breaker.
We did $15,000 in 2011 (our first year in business). $55,000 in 2012. $96,000 in 2013. $157,000 in 2014. Dropped to $133,000 in 2015, our first year of negative growth.
From 2011 to mid-2014, I worked constantly to improve our basic product. But in 2014 I realized we'd never compete with the big guys in our industry, who do $10MM to $30MM / year. So I started attending summits with those guys to pick their brains, and hired a marketing coach. And I stopped working on improving our core product, just maintaining it.
Spent ~$35,000 on marketing training since late 2014, and I've spent $20,000 (and about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week) on new product development this year. But in about 2 months we should have a product that can put us up there with the big guys and get us out of the middle-of-the-pack revenues we've been stuck in for a few years.
The hardest part of being a single founder, at least in my business, is the need to maintain your current business to keep the income flowing and the customers around while you build the product that the business needs to leap forward. At that point, you're basically running two companies, the old one and the new one. And you can't just throw money at it because you're bootstrapped and only have revenues + credit to play with (assuming you haven't taken funding).
- Build a real, big product, after doing some customer interviews,
- (but get revenue from month #1, obviously, as any competent startup),
- If you go for a Cloud add-on, maybe think of doing software that can be used independently,
- and there is the Codegeist competition currently running on, until something like October! It's designed to get newcomers. Think about it, winning is a great way to launch! (And it's every year)
For others reading - we have hundreds of examples like this - single person companies that have grown inside the Atlassian ecosystem.
From people like Bob Swift, who grew his company and was then acquired, to companies like Gliffy and Balsamiq Mockups who built multi-dozen person companies on the back of the Atlassian ecosystem.
Get started here: https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html