601–610 of 666 posts
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How can you afford to be full-time on $2239/month? O.o
One year I decided I wanted to save as much as I could. I went for the greater part of the year on under 2k per month. Saved a ton load of money, like 80% of my take home earnings.
I launched http://gardenate.com back in 2007 initially just for Australia/New Zealand and mainly for my own use (Perl with Amazon SES for sending out about 70,000 subscriber emails/month). Since then I've grown it to include UK/USA/CAN/ZA, and I wrote some related mobile apps for iOS (Objective-C) and Android. Brings in several hundred $$ per month in adwords and app sales. It used to bring in a lot more app revenue…
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Starting out with WordPress has made a lot of things, especially when it comes to marketing, very easy for me. There's a free version that is used on over 700.000 sites right now and it got there mostly organically. That said, if your plugin does anything visual, be ready for a lot of beginner questions. Some of your non-paying users will be the hardest to please, especially in WordPress land where you as a (real) de…
As stated, make sure you create a free version first and put it in the WordPress plugin directory. Most of your traffic will come from there. Make frequent updates, include good keywords, and if there's a need for it, people will find it. It's also a great way to start testing for premium features.
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Yes, "inbound marketing" (a blog) is probably the biggest accelerator to growth I can (and should) do. I'm holding off for now though, as I need to make the product more friendly to business users first. Right now PhantomJsCloud is focused on developers, so I need to make some non-dev friendly tooling first. That's my excuse at least. Regarding StackOverflow, yes, that's actually how I validated the free MVP (answeri…
Just to provide a single data point, I run JavaScript Weekly and Node Weekly (which have 140K subscribers altogether) and if you had the right content that would interest my readers, even if ultimately it promotes your service, I'd link to it :-)
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The request time is pretty much what you would expect running PhantomJs on a Amazon/Google/Msft VM, which is roughly 2x longer than running the same request in your desktop browser. Regarding your suggestion on dedicated workers, the main benefit (USP) of PhantomJsCloud is the scaleability to hundreds/thousands of requests, so I think dedicated workers is a bit counter to that. However if I can figure out a nice way…
I don't need the scaleability feature of PhantomJsCloud, for me the benefit is not dealing with setting up a PhantomJs and configuration and using your nice API instead, I will gladly pay a premium for a dedicated VM so you configure it for me. this way you open up the gate to lots of people that are frustrated configuring PhantomJs ;) either way I will be a customer. thank you for creating this. it will save me coup…
I'll add it to my feature todo list. if you sign up, i'll send an email when various new features are ready.
I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it. The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable. The biggest surprise…
I've often though the real hard core startup community should be in Chiang Mai living in 250$ per month condos. Pretty easy to get to Ramen profitable..
I don't know about Chiang Mai, but for a single expat I think anything less than $800/mo in bkk would be very enjoyable. I have a family though :P
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I read your post so you basically arbitrage from US retailers to amazon/ebay? It seems you are doing retail arbitrage? Like when there is a sale on Toy R Us, you list that same item on Amazon/Ebay. But don't you need to keep the stock you buy at some place first? How do you deal when AMZ just price matches it? I am currently reselling alibaba stuff but after amazon PPC and shipping, it seems it's just break even, not…
> you basically arbitrage from US retailers to amazon/ebay? Yes. >It seems you are doing retail arbitrage? Retail arbitrage has a technical meaning in the industry, it refers to physically going into stores to buy inventory. What I'm doing is referred to as drop shipping or "online arbitrage" (where you buy inventory online then take possession and sell it). >Like when there is a sale on Toy R Us, you list that same…
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> From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets I think this is what's changed from a few years ago. Expectations of usability, design, support, number of platforms, etc. have all gone up even from casual users. 37signals, probably the most-celebrated bootstrapper shop, grew up in the 90s. Imagine getting started today. You need a responsive,…
I'm not sure. It's pretty easy to build a Wordpress site, use various plugins, and outsource stuff you can't or don't want to do to upwork. Expectations are higher but buildout is much easier IMO.
I ended up giving the service away for free, but officially stated that the $10/mo tier was free during beta, and if you wanted more to subscribe at $50/mo. I got enough actual revenue out of that to justify continuing.
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> you basically arbitrage from US retailers to amazon/ebay? Yes. >It seems you are doing retail arbitrage? Retail arbitrage has a technical meaning in the industry, it refers to physically going into stores to buy inventory. What I'm doing is referred to as drop shipping or "online arbitrage" (where you buy inventory online then take possession and sell it). >Like when there is a sale on Toy R Us, you list that same…
Can i get your email so I can ask you some stuff if that's fine..