Aren't Show HNs supposed to link to the actual product for people to play with, not a blog post about making money? There's nothing wrong with sharing wins here, or new products. But it feels 'off' to me to see a Show HN next to a braggy blog title (I'm used to seeing plenty of either on their own, though!).
In this case, I want to show the journey and the story more than the product, and want to let people know I'm available for any questions like other Show HN posts.
(I don't think the product itself is very interesting for the HN crowd)
IMHO, "Show HN" is to show your creations. You should put the title without "Show HN" when you're linking to a blog post, even if it is about a product that you've created.
There's [Tell HN] for posts like these. This post got engagement /despite/ the wrong tag, try not letting the unnecessarily negative tone of the original comment get to you (I'm sorry).
On the "Show HN" page that shows all the Show HNs, there is a link in the top to the rules for Show HN, in case you've missed it. It's pointing to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
TLDR is:
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
> Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead.
Post is interesting, I give you that. But why should we ignore categorization all of a sudden? "Show HN" is strictly about something people can use or play around with, not just read, this is defined in the rules/guidelines of HN itself. For the same reason good titles are enforced, so it gets easier to navigate everything.
I agree - this post is really interesting as I've been following Black Magic for a while and doesn't bother me that much but perhaps it doesn't belong in the Show HN section as it's not showing anything new technically
I see another post sharing their success micro startups today on HN so I thought I should share mine.
I started working on this browser extension for Twitter 8 months ago.
It took 3 months to reach $60/mo, 3 more to reach $400/mo, and 2 more to reach $3K/mo – where I am now.
When I start, I had 0 followers on Twitter. When it reaches $400/mo, I quit my job. I now live freely from corporate drama and travel as much as I can while building products I love.
I share my entire journey publicly on Twitter and my newsletter, including revenue, stats, product launch process, and marketing strategies, etc.
I just want to say that opportunities are everywhere, and it's never easier to start a profitable micro startup to sustain yourself and live an independent life.
Impressive output for a single person. How do you organize yourself to get so much done and prioritize the areas you focus on? I work mostly on frontend stuff so when I work on personal projects I tend to focus on that area and neglect other ones. What backend stack are you using?
Overall I think the aesthetic is very polished. Very well done!!!
Being familiar with every aspects of software development definitely gives an edge when creating your own product. Well done on your success, and I'm also looking forward to read your post about building your Twitter audience.
Good question!! - there is definitely a market for a product for automatically capturing UI screenshots and demos on every UI release, with a permalink usable in documentation that will always show the latest image / video. Could be driven by an existing automated test framework. I know this as a web UI product owner with several years experience in enterprise software doing documentation updates after new features are added.
I agree, I tend to avoid products without pricing page out of principle, but in this case I think the tax liability will force me to go with paddle for a product I'm working on.
Hate to be the party pooper, but the fact that you could talk about nothing but marketing and money and never spend a single word telling us what the software even does, speaks volumes on where your priorities lie. I am left with the impression that the software probably does nothing special, or even useful, and if I ever have any issues with it or suggestions for improvement, I will probably be completely ignored unless I come up with a way it would make you more money. I find it strange that this type of personality even calls themselves a hacker.
I do have some links in the post that link to the product, but yeah I agree the context is a bit vague for the HN crowd. I added a small notice to the post hopefully to fix it.
FYI, I'm not trying to promote the product, it's the story I want to share.
I really appreciate you taking your chances and building something for yourself and being able the live off of it is even better. I'd call it "hack your life" ;) and find Timwi's reaction overly negative.
I also share the feeling it could have been a Tell HN instead of a Show HN.
But let's be honest, of course you want to promote your product. It's not a bad thing to admit that.
I'm a little suspicious that this could be marketing by one of those guys that message extension authors to sell their user's data. Kind of a, hey look, you could be making money. Why don't you say yes the next time I message you.
Something I’ve noticed in many of these threads showcasing successful products is that they all focus on marketing. Advertising software, analytics software, etc. I rarely (never?) see any one post about their successful non marketing solution.
Selling more sales (aka marketing) is the ultimate value proposition. Google and FB print money because they call up business and say “Pay us $$ and we’ll give you $$$”.
I wonder how much of it is a zero sum game. Some amount of advertising would induce impulse purchase but surely some of it like marketing for a plumber just causes sales to be redirected to the one who spent the most on marketing rather than actually creating new sales.
Google's business model for the last decade has been to pitch people who want advertising against each other, bidding ever higher for top placements.
It's up to you to decide whether that's a zero-sum game (personally I don't think it is by a strict definition), but Google is certainly responsible for more and more companies allocating an ever growing part of their budget to advertising.
It isn't immediately obvious whether that results in more business. Some of these companies may be spending more and more just to keep the same amount of sales due to bid prices increasing.
This effect is somewhat masked in a vibrant and growing economy, so it's not that easy to distill.
I suppose in theory people only have so much to spend but on the other hand growing the economy grows that disposable income.
What I found was indirect competitors with deep VC funded pockets were bidding rates high enough that it wasn't viable for me. I say indirect as they didn't compete against my product but did bid on the same keywords.
I wonder if there is some upper limit on how much advertisers can extract from the economy before they start to weaken it.
If your plumber's marketing is 'hey I'm plumber mcplungerface, call me' then yes. If your marketing is 'Hey <local high school football team mascot>s, protect your family from black mold! For $249 we'll inspect and treat your sump pump and water conditioning system and guarantee the work for ten years' you'll generate demand.
Maybe people who think about marketing problems, tend to have more marketing knowledge and are better at marketing their own products and are people more likely to post on websites like this promoting their products.
I know I have folders and folders of unmarketed products.
I don't think it's about marketing. I think it's because it solves an immediate problem or gives people something that they want and as it happens, the opportunities for the folks at HN or Producthunt are in that area because it's not a solved problem unlike things like developer tools, messaging or e-mail.
Think about it, what makes you funny inside? Knowing more about people or sending messages through slightly different UI?
Maybe a wild guess, but anything thats not related to ads/marketing/analytics etc., are too difficult to monetize by a solo founder ? Or maybe the other areas too difficult to get into not just in terms of software complexity, but in terms of support requirement , availability SLAs etc ?
It's an interesting platform approach - create a browser extension aimed at enhancing / integrating into a single page - there must be a large number of individual targets - every enterprise saas?
What a great story! Congrats to your success!
Actually, I am considrring developing useful browser extension, but I am from a different field(finance, actually) so i am a bit loss where to start.
So, if possible, could you please tell me how you started your journey? i.e. how you gain your knowledge and started developing extension etc.
Assuming, web extension development is just like web app development, then becoming web developer is the best way... obviously.
> it's more rewarding to double my revenue instead of halving my server cost.
How about cutting that cost to 1/10 of what you’re paying AWS, for a much better server? Since you’re running EC2, I assume you’re able to manage a server. Get a Heztner server and run your db locally:
You do awesome and I love you devUtils App. Just installed it.
But my personal guessing is, that your 25k Followers on Twitter make things a lot easier. :)
Is the "one year of updates and then renew" pricing model for DevUtils.app common? Upgrading a license for new OS support seems somewhat reasonable (eg Little Snitch selling a new license for Catalina -> Big Sur) but I wouldn't want to pay for anything that isn't a major version update
Your product page (https://blackmagic.so/) is very well-done. My first impression is that it is even one of the best I have ever seen. What tools/frameworks did you use for building the frontend ?
Where have you learned about design? Your apps look awesome. My look like command prompt. Is there any course, book, tutorial, blog that you would recommend?
How do you market your extension and how do you fee your users are to an extension itself? I’m building an extension right now and curious as to what normal browser users think of extensions.
Looks good - you're an inspiration to other aspiring Indie developers. I'm not interested in Twitter, but DevUtils looks like something I would actually use.
How long have you been making $3K/month? How much time (man-hours) did you invest in developing the product and were other costs involved? How much time/money does it currently cost to keep things running (e.g. updates, support, hosting)?
A decent developer can easily make $100K/yr, which is quite a lot of months of making $3000
