adii

This exact same thing popped up in a discussion in the office today: exist team members were critiquing a potential new hire. Was so refreshing to get that input, instead of just having to rely on our (as founders) own judgement.

Yeah, I like that mentality. I've always tried to rather communicate the end goal of a certain strategy or campaign to the team and let them decide how to go about getting us there.

For me part of that methodology is saying that I'm good at strategy stuff, but I'm not a developer and I thus need to trust in the skills that I have hired!

Thanks for your initial work on this! :)

Hehe, I'm only reading the article now. My comment was based on the other comments here.

What about just having a passion, a vision and a way to potentially monetize that? Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we need to go out on a limb.

I actually found your blog via HN and have since too become a regular user of the network.

Wow, considering our very non-spammy business and revenue model, I'm surprised you find it this way.

Actually pretty funny, as we've never spent 1 minute or $1 actually SEO'ing our own website. I couldn't care less about supposed keywords.

We have tried our best! :)

Spot-on! The original post was geared towards promoting this philosophy and adding weight to the suggestions with a bit of quick math. I guess there's a whole bunch of strategies one can adopt to tap into this sales channel though, which is why we left that for a separate post.

This may be a chance missed.

What we've seen though is that our subscription-based business is growing faster, which means that the 3-old product that gets updated makes the subscription plans more lucrative. So we're seeing a bunch of existing users upgrade to a subscription and new users prefer a subscription over an individual product.

:)

Expect a follow-up to this post detailing some ideas & potential strategies for adding continuous value to existing users.

Only about 40% of WooThemes' revenue is subscription-based, yet that hasn't stopped us from adding continuous value to once-off purchasers / customers either. IMHO it's not just subscription-based businesses that has the opportunity of "never stopping to add value".

Another note is that when we release an update to a product, all existing users of that products gets the new version free of charge. That's immense value. We're updating products that are 3+ years old without asking our existing users for one extra dollar.

This is just personal opinion, but the kind of guys & girls that hang around on HN is pretty much perfectly the target audience for this project. I'm a regular reader of HN and not as much an active participant, but would love for the HN community to get behind this project!

Hehe, you can try. :)

I actually had one of these years in 2010; whilst my main business - WooThemes - continued to grow very nicely, I just kept adding to my list of new ideas, without executing on a single one of them.

Change it is for 2011 then.

Mostly just to scoure the first page (maybe the second) and grab some new content, which I then Instapaper for reading later.

Hell yeah... I don't have the benefit of having offices this close to Squarespace, but after spending just one (awesome) lunch with Anthony & Dane I too can attest that they are super cool & extremely clever. :)

I'd venture out to say that we just don't hear about the smaller web-based businesses that make good money, because they aren't making millions or have millions of users (mainstream tech media only covers businesses like these). Similarly, a big VC deal is a sure way to get noticed.

So yes - I truly believe that is possible to build small, sustainable web-based businesses selling a digital product or service of sorts. And if you're clever about running your idea as a business, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to quit your day job in favour of working for yourself.