41–50 of 83 posts
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Roaring racers sounds like a brilliant idea! Where can I play it??
It came out maybe a year after the App Store launched, and the 100 copies I sold never justified maintaining it. It's long gone. Only way to play it would be an old iPhone that still has it installed and I don't even have one of those.
In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each. That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money - extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to get a job". Today that sort of start loo…
A more spiritual approach to the decades is how I am hoping to live in the future - that and still plenty of coding.
I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experienc…
There are a lot, lot, LOT more people trying to get to dollar #1 than any other phase of the process. It feels good to read about someone else going through the same struggles as you, especially if they're willing to share behind-the-scenes information (i.e. how many hours they worked). Is this enough data to produce a valid scientific experiment? No, but that's a high bar that would disqualify pretty much every conv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot, lot, LOT more people trying to get to dollar #1 than any other phase of the process. It feels good to read about someone else going through the same struggles as you, especially if they're willing to share behind-the-scenes information (i.e. how many hours they worked). Is this enough data to produce a valid scientific experiment? No, but that's a high bar that would disqualify pretty much every conv…
Everyone keeps repeating that it's really hard to get to the first dollar and celebrating that as a common struggle. I rarely see SaaS products charging a dollar. And never for it to be a $1 one-time sale. That's why this makes no sense to me.
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If I understand you correctly: You whip up a bootstrap page that describes the product with a 'beta sign-up & pay' button, and if enough people sign up and pay, you build it? - What sort of demo do you have on the website? Or is it just a basic description of the product and a list of features? - Does this mean you get payment processing setup before development every time? - How do you manage returning money if you…
I usually just do believable screenshots and a call to action like, "Request a trial" or "Buy now" it depends on what it's for. I never take any money I just log the actions people took on the site. If it's a buy button, then you can just say, "Thanks for your interest. We are launching soon."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot, lot, LOT more people trying to get to dollar #1 than any other phase of the process. It feels good to read about someone else going through the same struggles as you, especially if they're willing to share behind-the-scenes information (i.e. how many hours they worked). Is this enough data to produce a valid scientific experiment? No, but that's a high bar that would disqualify pretty much every conv…
Everyone keeps repeating that it's really hard to get to the first dollar and celebrating that as a common struggle. I rarely see SaaS products charging a dollar. And never for it to be a $1 one-time sale. That's why this makes no sense to me.
- How do I come up with a decent idea? What should I work on?
- Where can I get the motivation to even start thinking of ideas? Are there inspirational stories of people like me doing this stuff?
- How do I validate my idea to ensure it's good?
- Do I need to learn how to code? If so, how can I do that?
- I have a full-time job, a family, etc. Is it possible for me to work around this? What are some tips?
- I keep starting but never finishing. What are other people doing that allow them to get to the finish line?
- Nobody is using what I've built. How to I get my first customers?
The list goes on and on. There are hundreds of questions like this, and millions of people asking them, and they're all pre-revenue. They come before the metaphorical first dollar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone keeps repeating that it's really hard to get to the first dollar and celebrating that as a common struggle. I rarely see SaaS products charging a dollar. And never for it to be a $1 one-time sale. That's why this makes no sense to me.
The first dollar is metaphorical. Substitute first sale/income if that makes it easier for you to think about. (As an aside, I've seen many businesses frame and display a single dollar representing their first sale. http://framebiz.com/index.php?products_id=187 )
In our case we're an infrastructure service that charges customers based on their usage level. This required collecting the right metrics, consolidating them durably, making the metrics visual somewhere so customers understand how they are being charged, implementing notions of billing cycles, syncing with the payment provider (in our case Stripe), UI elements to indicate if the account is paid or not, ability to cancel paid service, etc.
All in all it took us a good two months from when we wanted to charge people to when we could actually charge people. Of course every service will have different technical needs. Congrats on the first buck. :)
In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each. That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money - extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to get a job". Today that sort of start loo…
The internet is becoming a bigger and bigger playground. Even getting that first bit of attention is extremely meaningful now. There are so many different services and other attention-suckers out there at this point that everything really does matter. What type of software product did you make back then that warranted $100 sales?