well its a kind of good marketing
How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
#32A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and Rails, and it's amazing to see what they can do. Yes, prices go up when you need to scale out, but getting an idea out in front of people and seeing if people will use the product is so importan…
That's pretty darned neat.
Re: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
#33Maybe with a longer development time you could have built something that would incur lower overhead over the long term. Heroku and Chargify become quite expensive if your business grows to any significant degree. Instead, building directly on top of the Paypal API and deploying to a hosting provider that will not bankrupt you as you scale would be a more optimal approach -- you won't get your site up in 3 days but wi…
Can someone explain exactly how different it is to build on top of PayPal API vs Chargify API? - What are the fees I have to pay? - What are the features I get? I'm thinking of trying an idea of a paid service for a first time and just trying to figure it out.
I haven't implemented Chargify on my site yet, but I did sign up for the beta and have looked it over. Plus, I've been running subscriptions via Amazon FPS for about 2.5 years now.
By far, the #1 thing I like with Chargify is the ability to modify existing subscriptions. With Amazon (and PayPal too, I believe), once a user signs up with a rate and term, it's locked in. To change the rate they'd need to go through the workflow again. So, if you say $5/mo and want to move to $10/mo, you're screwed. Good luck getting them to go through the checkout again.
Not that this is something you'd want to do all the time, but perhaps you've been doing something for a couple years and want to raise your prices a little. Or, you want to add another tier of service and automatically bump some customers into it. It's easy with Chargify, and very hard with the others.
There's other stuff too, but it's hard to articulate. Believe me, having been there, I would highly suggest that anyone seriously evaluate Chargify over PayPal or Amazon SimplePay. Definitely DO NOT roll your own, like I chose to originally. It will be an unending source of pain.
Re: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always reduce overhead after you gain some traction.
The principle is good. But is it really painless to change payment API and hosting platform?
Hosting platform isn't too bad, but changing payment API is a real pain since it's basically impossible to move existing subscriptions to a new system without user interaction.
However, I think Chargify is probably the best route for anyone doing subscription based stuff. Managing billing for subscriptions is such a pain in the ass, and these guys seem to understand that at the core.
I'm on Amazon SimplePay right now and I'd switch to Chargify in a heartbeat...if I could move over my existing subscribers ;)
Re: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technical Debt is different. Technical Debt slows future velocity for feature development / changing to fit customer needs. That you are "leaving money on the table" with these choices does not impede feature progress at all.
Thanks. Can you please elaborate with an example? :)
patio11 gave a great example from his project, but I'll add one other thing.
I actually have an extra category for tickets that I file explicitly called "technical debt." Whenever I "screw my future self," as I heard someone call it once, I make sure to write it up, so that when I have some spare time, I can go back and fix it.
Most of these issues are fairly minor. "I know I have the same code here, here, and here, I should refactor it." Next time I'm touching that part of the codebase, I'll take care of it. But knowing is half the battle.
Re: How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
#36Nice copy on your site. It appears you are a good marketer :).
Thanks, but I actually consider myself to be a TERRIBLE marketer. However, I've been doing a lot of reading and learning around this and even tried to distill what I've learned into principles around effective landing pages: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/9-principles-behind-an-e...
Your positive feedback is encouraging, thanks!