Awesome. And definitely don't be discouraged that you're only bringing in $100/month.
The product that I'm currently living comfortably off of made me less than half that much after its first month. Don't think of it as $100/month, think of it as $100/month/month. That's your current acceleration, and it extrapolates out quite nicely!
Here's a more carefully worded version of my take on products like this:
Thanks. I agree with your post. Sales for CupcakeWrapperCreator have gone like this:
March 0.02
April 38.85
May 64.75
June 76.75
July 122.60
August 99.80
September 129.75
October 109.75
November 199.60
December 119.75
January 149.70
February 249.45
March 369.25
So, for nearly a year I didn't have any motivation to do more work, but then I signed up for a free month of SEOMOZ, and just fixed the low hanging fruit from their suggestions, and traffic doubled for last Feb.
So now it's a little more interesting. I can make $369 in a month with 150 uniques per day. What can I do with 300-500 uniques per day? And I think I can get there easy because just one blog comment I made is responsible for 20 uniques per day and I know I can outrank that blog page with a little work.
You think seeding some of your designs on pinterest might pique interest further? If anything, it can be a "proving grounds" for your newest wrapper designs.
I'll admit that I chuckled a bit when I saw you announce your product on BoS the first time, to me it seemed equally hopeless as the first couple of products I released but then never had the balls to really push onto the market. I have to admit too though that you are the one having the last laugh, even if it doesn't (yet) bring in enough to live off, it's still a very respectable result after only a year.
Ditto what Jason said. I was similarly a little dissapointed with the early numbers on AR before I realized that $100 in one-off sales means $100 of booked revenue for the year but $100 of subscription revenue means ~$1,000 for this year and almost as much next year, too.
The graph for the first year of AR and BCC turned out to prove this out in a very dramatic fashion. Recurring revenue: the best kind of revenue.
P.S. Charge more. I just got a very uneventuful email about a particular customer hitting their 30 day mark w/o canceling including my system's guesstimate of their likelihood to stay a customer and their LTV. Probabilistically counting my chickens before they hatch, they're worth like a whole month of bingo cards and we've never even exchanged an email.
As encouragement to the poster, and evidence to back up what you are saying, here's the month-by-month subscription figures since launch for one of my SaaS projects:
Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/2012/3-years-of-bootstrapping-half-a-...
That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :)
NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due to trials not continuing etc).
Hi Amy, going to ask you the same questions that many have asked before: you developed products in a more or less saturated market, how do you come to the conclusion that the world needs your product? (considering that there are nice looking time-tracker and customer support out apps out there).
It's nice to see entrepreneurs like you, coming out openly with business figures. Helps newbies like me, to go on and keep focus only on the product. Unabated by tiny bubbles we see in funding side of story - aka "herd mentality".
I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable.
But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.
Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.
FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.
Amy publicly announces the prices and enrollment for each class, so you could have easily tested this hypothesis. Last year, the posted numbers would put 30x500 class revenues somewhere around $160k (give or take a few grand depending on how many used discounts) — so as Amy says, a supermajority of her income must come from other sources.
That story from Amy, is super awesome stuff. Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.
On the other hand, all this discussion seems more like a silver lining towards disruption in angel investing space too. Sublime for entrepreneurs, disastrous for others may be.
Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.
This is true, but there are only 2 reasons I see:
1. Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable." Something I teach against in my class, called Idea Quicksand. My philosophy about this is explained the first 3 free samples available on http://unicornfree.com/30x500
2. Barring "great ideas" which aren't businesses, people give up way too soon. They have no idea that it takes so long, and they don't prepare for it, and they think they've failed when they're really just normal. Which is a huge part of the reason why I blog & show up here.
> Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable."
I think about this a lot. Much like a writer, developers do the best work objectively when they "write what they know". What this means in practice is that the market is flooded with products that are at the union of common developer knowledge. That is why there are so many products for consultants out there. Basecamp, Freckle and Projector are all examples of this. Obviously there's always room for a new product, especially when you have used many of these products and decided exactly why you don't like them so you can come up with a uniquely better product.
But when I get outside of the tech bubble, I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money. Now obviously you will never be a Facebook or a Twitter in an established market, but if you can combine some domain knowledge with cutting edge tech skills, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit than fighting over early adopters for the latest tech toy.
I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money.
Careful. They may have more money in aggregate, but a lot of them don't buy tech solutions, don't want to change, aren't actually business-minded (e.g. always looking for improvements). This goes double for local biz like bars, restaurants, salons, and stores, and triple for education and nonprofit and NGOs.
I'm also finding hard to motivate myself to make something for people that are very different from me (I have a file sharing solution catered to small businesses in France). I imagine it's easier when you care naturally more about your end users.
When all my friends think this market is super-saturated, what I find out is that most of these small business people are just happy to use emails and the occasional FTP.
I don't mean selling to them, I mean disrupting them. You can steal a lot of people's business right out from under them simply by bringing the efficiency of technology. But you need the domain knowledge, that's the barrier to entry.
Do you think recurring billing makes more sense to web apps than desktop apps? I think users are entrenched with the idea of "buying" a desktop app and "subscribing" to a web app.
Quite a few "desktop" apps have hybrid models - Evernote, Dropbox, CRM software, iCloud, etc, no doubt there are more which I can't think of at the moment.
Nice post! Just a UI suggestion, you want to make it as easy as possible for readers of your blog to learn what your product is about. Currently, clicking on the big blue "Projector" text only brings you to the blog's home page, not the site's home page. There is a small link at the very top of the screen that says "Learn more about Projector," which does take you back to the home page, but you might want a more prominently placed button, image, or text link. The big blue "Projector" text really looks like it should take you back to the site's home page, and I actually thought for a moment that /blog was in fact the same page I'd get to from the root of your site.
This is a big pet peeve of mine. I can't count the number of times I've been to http://blog.companyname.com and no matter where on the page I looked or clicked, I couldn't find a link to http://companyname.com, and so I'm forced to manually edit the URL in the address bar. I really can't understand why a company would do such a thing.
Me too, exactly, and I'm only contributing a me too because a) it really bugs me too, and b) I think it's important for blog and site owners to understand this and fix it. I want to find your site; help me.
I think the disconnect is the top left logo usually returns to a "root", which in the case of a blog is the blog index. Frankly, it might be better to have that go to the home page.
Ah, but the only person who considers the "root" of your product blog to be the blog home is you.
Everybody else thinks they're reading a blog on your product site, and that clicking the logo will take you to the root of that. In other words, the homepage for your product. When it doesn't, they tend to simply hit the back button enough times to leave.
Yeah, it's almost always the home page unless the blog is styled to look like a completely separate part of the site. Here, it would be less confusing to go right to your home/about page. I do like that your about page is located at the root and that no clicks from there are required to learn about your product. As it happened, I just didn't get to your site from the root...
Glad to see all the "me toos" here. I've described this pet peeve of mine to others, and get an almost universal "meh" or "what are you talking about?"
Here at least there was a link to return to the home page, but it was titled as an about page, and the link that was titled as a home page was actually the blog home page. But yeah, I've definitely seen sites like that where they give you literally no way to get back without manually editing the URL.
Nice to see Projector on HN; I'm one of the paying users (well, my company's paying).
I've found it to be a much better fit for my workflow than Pivotal/Basecamp etc. Brennan's been great at looking for feedback and keeping in touch with everyone so far (even if I am lax at replying). There's some real speed behind updates and it's improving every day.
Aside: Didn't sign up just to big the project up; I do have another account on HN which has been around longer, I just try not to associate my real name and nickname.
Thanks Rob, I really appreciate your feedback - and for being one of the earliest users, and thus had to deal with a substantial amount of bugs in its infancy :-)
Fantastic product.
Just signed up with a throwaway and had a brief play.
It was all really intuitive. No real problems really.
You should also try and show that you aren't just for companies who might have multiple projects on the go. We only have a single product and could see the benefit of something like this as a very rudamentary issue tracker and feature suggestions between the team.
- What kind of a roadmap do you have (features primarily)?
Thanks! We tried being taking the opinionated route and not making a focused effort on having it be meant for internal product teams (I think Pivotal Tracker is probably still best for that.)
We're working on the following:
- Constant UI/UX improvements
- A better dashboard
- Metrics that will help you see how accurate your estimates were vs. reality. A lot of people are using Projector as a "living estimate" that they send to their clients. Since it's money focused, you can see in real time how adding and removing tasks affects the overall project budget.
- Better email integration
- A functioning mobile experience
It's taken about 3.5 months to get the product to where it is today.
Awesome! Must be such an amazing feeling to receive that first payment. I'm about a month away from my first launch and I'm terrified of launching and then hearing.... crickets. So congrats to you!
Had a look at the product. Looks v.solid. Just a couple of things:
- When I attach a file via /projects/project_name/stories/ it completes the upload then the files seems to disappear? What I mean is that the progress indicator goes to 100% and nothing else happens. Then if I go back to root and back to stories there is no file.
- I think you need labels on the 4 symbols on the left hand side. The only one which is self evident is the '?'. The others I have to hover over to find out about and that is annoying from a UX pov.
To attach a file, you need to also comment (I realize now this might not always be ideal). But the workflow would be: Attach some files, enter text in the comment box, post. I'm working on redesigning the entire task detail page, which will hopefully make this less confusing.
I agree. I'm trying to figure out a good way to make this more evident without widening that left sidebar. This is the current UX problem that's keeping me up at night :-)
Well - I wouldn't go that far :-) But they have a great API (and a Rubygem to boot) that makes it simple to sync whatever data you want with them.
You can also setup tags. I have a "might pay" tag based on: 1) signs in often, 2) hasn't paid yet, 3) has added 5 or more tasks and features. These are people I like to keep an eye on and get to know :-)
Another huge vote for Intercom. I use them every day to get to know our customers at http://beanstalkapp.com and the product has saved me a TON of time and made my work much more easy to gain insights from.
I hope people don't get too hung up on the numbers thing to miss out on the great advice you give. With all the factors that contribute to a startups success, I think this post really nails some critical ones:
- Create a list of people interested before you launch
- Be proactive with support, consider it a sales tool
- Have a great first use experience, that's when people are deciding to use your system.
Thanks! The support thing is the reason I've had people pay me before they actually had to. I realize 2 minute response times isn't sustainable long term - but with the product in its infancy and still being battle tested, it's sort of necessary right now.
I don't see why 2 minute response times can't be sustainable, you just might need help with it down the track. I launched my SaaS product in June 2011, so am a bit further along than you and am still managing to maintain it.
I really hope people take your advice on board, I think those techniques made the difference for me.
Great post! Nice to see others are looking at the long term plays and building great products. The post was refreshing to read and validates much of what I experienced over the last year building my apps.
Congrats on your launch! Our first month, we had 9 paying customers, so very similar to you. But like the one commenter said, keep posting honest posts!
Marketing site or the app itself? The app is a Backbone app and uses pushState, which might be what you're experiencing. The marketing site... is just a normal site :-)
This is where some "celebrity" came into play. Since we weren't getting organic traffic (nothing to index but the sales letter) and didn't have a blog up (big mistake!), a few people with lots of Twitter followers RTed me. It's a lot easier to get signups to non-binding "I'll notify you once there's something build" than it is to get actual signups. Only about 20% of the announcement list ended up converting.
I am a big fan as well of not bothering to verify emails at the early stage. I figure that if I hit a problem with someone spamming my signup I can deal with that when it comes. Until then though having as little friction as possible is a great thing.
Congrats. I've been working on a SaaS web app for awhile now but I've become my own worst enemy when it comes to just finishing the damn thing. Thanks to your story I'll be getting back to work on it.
I searched through a few pages of your blog archives looking for your customer acquisition strategy, specifically search and ads. Can you tell us anything about that?
Write relevant content for your audience (educational content: how they can better their lives or work) and promote where possible. I'll sometimes to go message boards for freelancers, see what questions they're asking, spend some time on a post, and then cycle back to them.
Long term strategy is having a healthy amount of crawlable content that my audience might search for.
(I did throw away $100 on an ad on clientsfromhell.net and got virtually zero results)
My suspicion on this is that since Clients From Hell offers no reason to go to the site itself (no extra commentary, no user comments, etc.) it's easier to just read it from an RSS feed.
Edwin, I spent a lot of time reading freelancer forums and saw a lot of the same questions being asked: "How can I make invoice time less painful?", "I don't like being pestered with status update requests", and so on. Obviously, it's a very focused product - freelancers and consultants who want a tool aimed at bettering client relationships.
I didn't really do any market research, outside of having used other tools in the past. I think we have a very specific audience, and forum activity, etc. showed that there was a gap that had to be filled. We've already had quite a few users thanking us for building a tool that's making their clients happier (=== they make more money consulting!)
Congratulations on your product. It really sounds awesome.
Since this post on HN got a lot of attention do you have any stats on the number of sign-ups from here?
I probably could. In fact, I could probably charge more across the board - two of my paid users said that it's more valuable to them than they're being charged (remember: the underlying goal is to help these people get more repeat work + more money!)
The product that I'm currently living comfortably off of made me less than half that much after its first month. Don't think of it as $100/month, think of it as $100/month/month. That's your current acceleration, and it extrapolates out quite nicely!
Here's a more carefully worded version of my take on products like this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3052661