coreymaass

I put in a prompt. I think he wrote a song. He told me about what he wrote. But play button was never enabled.

During the pandemic, I made an online version of the game Mexican Train ( mexicantrain.online ). It became popular in retirement communities during lockdown. Gameplay has dropped off significantly since, but I still have several regular players. It averages about 50 games/day and between $500 and $1000/month, all from donations.

It kind of depends on what the SaaS does. But I’ve had a lot of success with B2C apps on WordPress. It handles user management, routing, and dashboard out of the box with a few free or cheap plugins. Then depending on what the app is meant to do, I write code or manipulate plugins to do what I need.

I launched a new WordPress plugin a few months ago and we’re offering a Black Friday deal. OMGIMG ( http://omgimg.co/ ) is for editing featured images and generating Open Graph images inside WordPress. We’re offering 50% off forever!

Using the right words is only half the battle. The advantage of SEO WordPress plug-ins is they serve the words in meta-tags that are read by social networks when your post is shared and when search engines like Google return your post in search results.

In the 90s and 00s, we’d create “buy now” buttons on PayPal and drop them in the HTML. They still have “buy now” button builders, and people trust PayPal.

I use Mailgun for all of my WordPress installs. I have a couple dozen. Works great, and they have a generous free tier.

timer.express: tag-based, one-fee time tracking (in-progress, but online). React, php. Timerdoro: productivity timer. React, WordPress. My own recipe site, not public. WordPress. Daily email-based diary. Two php scripts and Mailgun's api.

Daily email I reply To to keep a diary: two php scripts and mailgun. My own recipe site: WordPress. Tag-based time tracking (in-progress) at timer.express: react, php api. Productively timer at timerdoro.com: react, WordPress. Configurable image cropper for client use at crop.express: vanilla JavaScript, html.

Timerdoro.com - It's been online for more than a decade. Hundreds of users every day. Hasn't made me dime. I suppose I could slap ads on it, but wouldn't anticipate it makes much...

mexicantrain.online - My pandemic project continues to bop along nicely. Donations are generous. It makes people happy.

Social Link Pages (sociallinkpages.com) - a WordPress plugin to add link-in-bio pages to a WordPress install.

I’m building and launching a new WordPress plugin with a new partner soon, and we’re planning on doing it live and in public. Weekly calls will be live streamed and archived. Some of it will not be pretty. :-) Sign up here if you want to follow along: https://express.us10.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9ee9c87b6b6...

During the pandemic I created an online, multiplayer version of the domino-based game, Mexican Train (https://mexicantrain.online). Ads didn't do much, so I switched to donations. It got quite popular during lockdowns. It's leveled off a bit now, but still generates more than beer money through donations every month. People are very generous.

I built a WordPress plugin and sold it after a few years. I'm currently promoting another. Th answer the original question "how did you come up with the idea?" - I find blue ocean apps that I like and rebuild them, customized for WordPress. My first plugin with a kanban board inspired by Trello. My current plugin is Social Link Pages ( https://sociallinkpages.com ), inspired by Lintree, Carrd, etc.

Not quite what you’re asking, I think, but I know a few developers who nailed a piece of software that they live off of and gently maintain over time. Most of the examples I’m thinking of lucked into one or two big clients who are 80% of the revenue.

During the pandemic, I built an online version of the dominos-based game, Mexican Train, for my wife’s family. They play it often at family gatherings. Her mom posted it to the Villages Facebook group (a huge retirement community here in the US). Mexican Train is very popular in retirement communities.

It blew up. It peaked at around 2600 concurrent players on Christmas. It’s slowed down, but still averages around 70 games/day.

The most amazing party was I run it by donation. I’ve received enough donations to keep it running, and dozens of cards, letters, and long emails thanking me profusely for building the game, and how it kept people connected across the miles and especially during lockdowns.

I'm absolutely loving ServeBolt for high traffic client sites.

For small client and friend sites, I'm using SpinupWP with Digital Ocean.

How does it handling formatting and styling? Specifically, is there an option to remove/replace all the div tags with css and replace them with p tags?

Not quite what you're asking, but I host all my own sites through spinupWP on Digital Ocean (easy, cheap), and my clients host with ServeBolt (unbelievably fast managed hosting).

I just put up the first simplest MVP version of crop.express. I have clients who need to crop images but are not technical.

There's still a huge market. I've done this for years with varying success. It's just a lot of work so might interfere with your full-time commitment to your PHD, and it's really all about marketing more than development. So be prepared for that. It's a lot of fun, tho. Any specific questions? Message me here or through gelform.com

Love microns. The newsletter is great.

You joke, but this is how I start most of my apps. Minutes to spin up a WordPress site which handles routing, user registration and accounts, and admin access. Add CPTUI and ACF Front-end and all you need is front-end display of the data. I use Beaver Builder, but there are a number of options.

For Chrome, I love tabsnooze and Toby.

https://Timerdoro.com - a productivity timer I build with a couple buddies 10 years ago. I've since rebuilt it with every new tech I've learned. It's used by a couple hundred people every day, but it's only ever received ~$20 in donations.

https://mexicantrain.online - an online version of the dominos-based game, Mexican Train. Made during the pandemic so my wife's family could keep playing. It averages 50 - 100 games played per day, mostly by older folks. Donations are generous, and I regularly receive heartwarming emails of thanks.

They can definitely help accomplish similar goals. I'm building a course about using WordPress to build SaaS web apps, similar to no code tools: https://gelform.com/saas.

You could spend a lot of time learning to build, and then building, the basic functionality a web app - user registration, sign in, sending transactional emails, etc. - before you even get to to the core functionality of your idea. If you want to launch a web app as quickly as possible, specifically to test the functionality that will make your app different, that's a different path. Either is fine. I just know that I've fallen into the trap before of not deciding on my own motivations before jumping in head first.

Assuming B2C, user-facing, and web-based.

- WordPress install which handles user account management - the theme my login plugin to style the login screens - ACF frontend for data collection from the user - Beaver builder to make it look like something

In fact this is how I built a new build-it-in-public web app over the weekend. Plug: LittleGoal.com

Happy to help! Email me through https://gelform.com

What do your music apps do?