131–140 of 399 posts
It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying. I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project), posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of this marketing work and moved on to other projects.
Just hit $1 million/year in sales :) About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly. Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret. Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, p…
Nice congrats! I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me. Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two
I run Are You Watching This?!, a B-to-B sports excitement analytics company that identifies exciting games in real time by analyzing live game data. Sports, media, and cable companies license that data for use on sites, in apps, and on cable boxes. A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding. We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clo…
Seems so unfair and unprofitable to me that a VC will spin up a competitor in this niche. Good luck!
I run Are You Watching This?!, a B-to-B sports excitement analytics company that identifies exciting games in real time by analyzing live game data. Sports, media, and cable companies license that data for use on sites, in apps, and on cable boxes. A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding. We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clo…
I always thought RUWT was strictly a consumer product; the b2b model is genius. Well done!
I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ . Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're…
1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)
2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).
3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.
Good luck!
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The reason people dislike it is it's a simple question of ROI - how much would it really help his funnel to work on support for users who intentionally break the web vs other aspects of his product?
The only thing that breaks the web is developers who do not care about compatibility and performance. If I would not be harrassed and slowed down on every second hipster page with 1000s of external resources I would consider going back to default-on javascript. The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke. Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the first page…
Ohhh I so hear you. Thanks for voicing reason in a sea of hipsterity.
Also I do agree with the sentiment, that data decisions should lead an entrepreneur. Non the less everyone should be able to at least grasp an idea of any site.
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> "Coding is easy, marketing is hard" It took me over five years in this business to fully internalize this. Programmers (me included) often complain about clueless entrepreneurs in this business, but even more rare than a good programmer is a good entrepreneur, who can sell/market and turn code into money.
I don't quite agree. With a small and somewhat trivial codebase sure I'd agree. Once you get into more complicated things, programming is the harder discipline. Most importantly I don't know if you can even compare the two fairly. At scale marketing is basically a subset of programming (or I suppose statistics). B2B it's quite a different beast and mostly about understanding processes and being good with people. I wo…
The reality is that for some people, programming is easy; marketing is hard. For some other people marketing is easy; programming is hard. That's really all it is. Delving into the details doesn't get us any closer to a more useful answer.
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How was your overall experience for the swich to self-hosted ads in terms of time and money you had to invest given that the main sellingpoint for Adsense is its ease of use?
I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much additional investment of time above what I was already doing. Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.
The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.
Just hit $1 million/year in sales :) About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly. Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret. Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, p…
I have been running https://scribie.com for over 8 years now. We have more than 11,000 freelancers and are closing in on 1.5 Million minutes of transcription. Growth has been fluctuating from 25% to 100% depending on the year. We never did much marketing except regularly updating the blog and some AdWords.