Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…
Do you have a way to track call metrics? We'd like to be able to track conversions from a Google Voice number.
Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer ( http://pinegrow.com ) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects. Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app…
Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…
Do you have a way to track call metrics? We'd like to be able to track conversions from a Google Voice number.
Nope. Call tracking is difficult and expensive, both in terms of money and complexity; I'd have to 10x my prices before even touching it. You also wouldn't be using a Google Voice number -- call tracking services work by renting huge numbers of phone numbers, and assigning a unique number to each visitor to your site for some time. Each person sees a different number, and their calls get routed to whatever your real number is after being logged for analytics. Improvely only tracks stuff that happens on your website.
Hi David! Great to hear that you are doing well with LiberWriter. That definitely is a pain point for people. I like that you kept the layout simple using only bootstrap. that's a lot faster & cheaper than doing a full blown design.
Our customers could not care less about the design stuff as long as it looks decent, so it is not something I have bothered with even now that I have some money I could spend on it.
Interesting, considering that you actually DESIGN their products. :)
Our customers could not care less about the design stuff as long as it looks decent, so it is not something I have bothered with even now that I have some money I could spend on it.
Interesting, considering that you actually DESIGN their products. :)
eBooks don't actually allow for a lot of fancy design if you want them to work well on a variety of platforms.
To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here. That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There w…
I have two daughters, a niece and a nephew who might be moving from Spanish Immersion this fall to classes that are more rigorous in math, science, etc. Maybe I'm your target audience., maybe not. When I look at your website, the last blog post and tweet are from 2010. It makes things look dead. We're not homeschooling but http://homeschoolspanishacademy.com/ looks a lot more active. Also, "fair trade" often seems to…
Thanks for that. Hey, your email's not in your profile so I can't contact you directly, but if you'd like some free lessons, I'd love to have you, the kids, and the nieces as beta testers when we relaunch this spring.
Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested!
Since you didn't specify the type of business ( http://www.dot-com-it.com ) ; I run a consulting business as a programmer that is just me. In the 'early' days (I started in 1999) I sort of fell into it. I was burnt out and walked out of a job. Networking got me 2 consulting client, and things just ballooned from there. I fell into it accidentally and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. In the early days I di…
Sounds like we are in the same boat, er, treadmill. I always want to develop more products because I don't scale.
Yep, exactly. Product Businesses are tricky these days.
Gosh pinegrow is a cool project, but the massive deal breaker for me is a lack of a Linux client :( any chance of that at all? For distribution (cause packaging is a bitch, to be honest) you can use something like Ermine to compile twice (i386 and x64) and then convert to a single static binary. For now, I'll continue playing with it on my Mac, but Linux support would be the best.
Actually, I have an experimental Linux build. Didn't really have a chance to test it. Here it is, if you would like to try it out: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gyzegb9sae3jlwh/Bv9NtDF96z (select ... and Download as zip). Please let me know how it works out.
Giving it a try now, will send you an email with how I go :)
I've worked goffconcepts.com full time since 2003 entirely alone (the "we" is my wife). My new product FileSearchEX is highly pirated so I'll probably be moving on to other things. I only recommend SaaS, forget about fat client software. The search engines enable a very toxic landscape otherwise.
Interesting. I always thought that illegal downloads are negligible. Maybe your security is non-existent?