rex_gsd

Having 8 million people use your app I find pretty amazing, let alone classing >100M as super successful. I build SaaS web apps so for me, having > 100 paying customers I'd consider a project to be pretty successful.

The first commerical app I built myself was called Track My Ride, http://www.trackmyride.com.au. It earns me a fair slice of pie each month but nothing to retire on. Track My Ride was focused primarily on the local market that I could direct market to. My second app Rocket Mail Merge http://www.rocketmailmerge.com was actually born out of the need for easier invoice creation for my first business. It is targetted at the international market this time, primarily the US. I finished its coding at the end of last month. It's fully functional but I can't release it out of it's 'open beta' due to the abysmal lack of international credit card processing for Australian startups. It has taken so far 6 weeks to get approval from the bank, and that approval is still pending with no ETA in sight. I plan to write a topic on that in due course but not before getting my approval haha. Once I launch it I'll be writing a Show HN on it. It would be great if people found it as useful as I do.

that's odd, I'd thought I put it in there. I've updated it now in the profile. Thanks very much!

I remember seeing your original blog post when the iPad commercial featured a piano and heard about the extra traction you received from that.

One thing I've learnt over and over with launching new apps is there are always unexpected hurdles that you'd never have thought about when you first started writing the software.

What are some you've run into, perhaps like IP for the songs in the app? Is it a difficult legal process to get a melody for a popular song into the app?

Congratulations!

Move to Kansas :( (Queenslander)

I'd be very greatful if you could send one my way. Thanks !

Why is a manhole cover round? It's an oldie that tests logical thinking, I believe Microsoft used to use it back in the day :)

Working weekends for your own startup is definitely different than weekends for 'the man'.

When I was writing the software for my first startup I never really felt any resentment for working on weekends as it was a project I really enjoyed; I worked on it as much as I could and fit breaks in whenever I felt tired.

Write them all down, organise them on a basis of :

* Which do I need to fix a problem in my life

* which will be the easiest to sell if it was finished

* which is the easiest + least time consuming to create.

Begin working on the one that ranks highest, rinse repeat & attempt to get 1 full project done each year.

A poor coder blames his tools (or language). You can make a masterpiece in any programming language. For that matter though I love PHP, been using it for over 10 years. I've used other languages extensively too but for my own projects it usually falls back to good old PHP.

I definitely wouldn't say it's one of the poorest languages to have in the toolkit though; http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/01/31/php-just-grows-...

Most enjoyable for web : php,

Most enjoyable for apps : c

I'd say your bigger problem with the signups is the contrast on the email capture field and its placement. Size 10 font, below the massive heading? Don't do that - http://i.imgur.com/eEC0Awg.jpg

Also, bad title on this post as others mentioned. Don't do that as well.

If he could somehow work out the algorithm that the serial numbers follow.

The software or server only knows that a serial number is correct by either :

1) It matches an algorithm Ie, if your algorithm was 'all even numbers' are correct serials, then if your boxes had the numbers 100, 102, 104 then it may be obvious that 106 would be a correct serial number.

2) The software connects to the software creators server to verify a random serial number on the box is stored in their database and hasn't been activated before. To get around this, you could either hack the server and copy their database or intercept the response from the server to the application and emulate this response that indicates 'yes this is a valid serial'.

Though I think your character would sound cooler if he did #1 :)

I second this, you need metric!

Seems that someone has nuked your site?

I'm an Australian based startup founder, I even bank with ANZ and this is the first I've heard of this program...

Not knowing the industry your SaaS is targeting perhaps you could take the route that the original founders of Reddit did and lie to the first few businesses that come onboard. http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/

Get all your friends to sign up to the service and interact with the first 10 or so business customers as if they were real users. You don't have to go free open beta for the first 6 months to verify the MVP, you could even confirm the idea by visiting or cold calling some of the target businesses you're interested in poaching. Perhaps try to stick a high dollar price on the monthly rate and offer the service to the first 10 signups for free or generate interest with an awesome landing page and a big closed beta image to procure email addresses from both users and businesses..

Depends if you get rejected. Some of the apps we ship have been bounced back by apple 5+ times for very minor reasons taking up to 8 weeks to get approval in one very worst case.

Though the average is usually 2 weeks.

Don't feel too down. The first time I wrote a major software business project for myself I saved up $50k (To cover rent, living and utilities), resigned from work and spent a year developing it. I ran out of money and it never sold very well and I definitely am yet to recoup anywhere near the costs of development but eventually I realised while I'd not gained any financial benefits I had picked up some very good skills as a web developer which were in great demand on the local jobs market. I started that year knowing no javascript and very little html, css or other web technologies.

With the new skills I was able to land a great job as a web developer and am always working on side projects. Even if Apple have screwed you over, don't get disheartened ... they can't screw you out of the skills you've learnt; they're invaluable. Keep that in mind when you're feeling down.

(Australian here) I built http://www.trackmyride.com.au from scratch by myself. The system took about 10 months to build working on it daily after I saved up the initial capital. It has been tough work but recently with a change of marketing we've been gaining some good traction in both the private and business industries now. All our customers love the software itself so that's a big positive but I think I need to redesign the landing page again. I'll do that after the project below is completed.

Since June 2012 I've been working on a new project, solo again putting in a few hours here and there as I can which should be ready to launch hopefully in another week. That project is still in stealth mode until it's unveiled though. I was hoping it could have been completed much quicker but you know how these things turn out. Though the TMR business' hardware and software can work anywhere in the world the marketing for it has been aimed at Australians so hence all our customers are aussies. The new project will be aimed primarily at Americans so that should be an interesting learning curve.

As for bottlenecks, by far the biggest hurdle with Track My Ride has been the marketing. As a programmer by trade when I first started out I had no idea how to market the system and mostly it's been a case of throw a lot of $ and see what sticks. Having a co-founder with marketing know how would have helped a lot. That being said though revenues and sales are still increasing each month so as a solo venture it's turned out pretty well so far.

Added both of mine in; One we've launched already (but still recently) and the next one is almost finished development.

As a long time lurker I was in a prime position to answer that, so I made an account and did. Setting up USD processing as a non US citizen is a big PITA

Approaching this issue as an Australian startup the easiest solution I found was to use Chargebee and Worldpay. Great support from the team at Chargebee too.