61–70 of 666 posts
Developer of Mac apps, selling via the Mac App Store. Started several years ago as a "let's see if I can make this work" project.
Have you also tried selling outside the Mac App Store? (The old Fastspring / Paddle / Stripe route?)
I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now. Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex. The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster. Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k) I guess they fit the definition o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the businesses in the list are very easy to copy. There are neither rocket science, neither patents to protect them, neither big money to pay lawyers to protect their work. Knowing how well the product sells, you can copy it piece-by-piece by saving a lot of time trying different approaches. Author of original product already did all the hard work guessing what will work the best. You just come, copy and prof…
This is not true. People who copy will mostly do it for money. Finally the passion for the idea trumps the desire to chase money and your product will eventually suck. On the other hand if you think you can make a better product from existing solution, then there is a good chance of you succeeding. You can try copying any one of those of ideas for money and see for yourself.
Transcript:
Last March, in my little darky flat somewhere in the middle of France, I had this idea to launch a little chat bot in a platform called Discord. I was coding all day long to deliver a functional and satisfying version of what I had in mind. These were the most profitable 3 days of my life…
Discord is a slack-like application. The main difference between slack and discord is that discord is made for gamers. It’s free, easy to use and has gamers oriented features like a great and reliable voice communication feature. The platform was crowed with a lot of chat bots. But those were very rigide, and kind of complex to setup. They were generally made from a programmer perspective. The user experience was meh…
My goal was to make the ultimate bot. I wanted to bundle all the popular functionalities that people use. Instead of using 10 bots in your team, you’ll just have to use mine. But for that to work, I also had to make the bot fully customizable. So that you could enable/disable any feature easily.
And the coding started… After 3 days of hard work, It was time for me to find users. The first thing I did to gain some traction was to go to some big Teams and convince the owners to use the bot. I spammed a dozen of big team owners. The kick worked, the engine started and never stopped since.
Developer of Mac apps, selling via the Mac App Store. Started several years ago as a "let's see if I can make this work" project.
Can I ask you what kind of apps are you doing, and what are your prospects about the future of Mac development? I'm asking this mostly because I would really like to get back to desktop application development, but now I'm not really sure that I should target Mac natively, mostly because of all the buzz with Apple's bad decisions, etc..
I think it's getting harder, now the world is getting more developers and more fully funded startups.
Small software shops don't meaningfully compete with funded startups, because funded startups have to have some plausible path to growing massive, and the types of things small software shops ship just have to have a plausible path to generating $1k to $25k MRR. "A spreadsheet software better than MS Excel" is a fundable startup; a single program better than a single Excel spreadsheet is, very plausibly, a piece of software that can be sold in a manner successful for a small shop.
I'm personally and professionally involved in the small-software-shop community, and my anecdotal impression is that it's the best time ever. The same sources of leverage which make starting a startup attractive help out small shops, too. You can achieve global distribution on the App Store, Google, Facebook, etc. You can charge businesses tens of thousands of dollars on the SaaS model for software which is plausibly within the reach of a single developer. You can take advantage of infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, etc to get your product to market at a fraction of the complexity and expense of doing a print run of 1,000 CDs. You can take advantage of frameworks which make producing business value far, far easier than it was with more archaic tools. Your customers are disproportionately likely to consume software already (a plus!), including software which you can integrate with or expand, giving you a built-in market with levered upside to your own coding efforts.
Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides.
It's definitely work, but once you're up and running, it's a lot nicer than having a day job.
I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now. Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex. The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster. Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k) I guess they fit the definition o…
Add me to slack please! moura (at oko.ai).
I've read these posts for a while on HN, it's nice to be able to reply to one finally :)
What we do is aim to provide small local business with enterprise grade software and tools in order to leverage this power to grow their businesses.