71–80 of 123 posts
This post resonates a lot with me! I've got a side project that's current bringing in around ~2-3K MRR ( https://buttondown.email ). I spent a long time daydreaming about having it hit four-digits in recurring revenue — it felt like such an accomplishment that if I were able to crack it, it'd be a dream come true. It's certainly not enough to live off of (especially living in Seattle), but it's a non-trivial amount o…
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Can I ask - how do you send emails programmatically? Every time I've done this for personal projects, I run into issues. Whether it's auth blocking from GMail or whatever. Seriously would appreciate even just a nudge in the right direction.
Not OP but I've spent a lot of time setting up email sending for SaaS apps. It shouldn't be too difficult, just use a third party provider like sendgrid and make sure your DKIM and SPF records are setup properly and you should be good to go. I've also used stuff like Amazon SES and it's not worth the trouble for side projects (or even medium sized, real businesses, honestly). If you have specific questions feel free…
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Not OP but I've spent a lot of time setting up email sending for SaaS apps. It shouldn't be too difficult, just use a third party provider like sendgrid and make sure your DKIM and SPF records are setup properly and you should be good to go. I've also used stuff like Amazon SES and it's not worth the trouble for side projects (or even medium sized, real businesses, honestly). If you have specific questions feel free…
(Email noob here) I'm writing a very low traffic web app, and I was thinking about SES, mostly because it's free for small volumes. What's wrong with it? Would you recommend sendgrid (or something else) instead?
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I agree, it's ridiculous! Not to mention that many app developers (as mentioned in the post) can't grind along on a single app for 10 years, so you most likely are not getting $5/mo (or more!) of value out of the product for 10 years. Sublime did it best, IMO. Charge a non-negligable amount ($70) for an individual, but pennies to a company. That's how many of us got our licenses. That $ should be enough to run their…
The flip side of the story is that Sublime died. I know they have had some updates recently, but for years it was completely stagnant. The hole that was left by Sublime was filled by VS Code. Maybe Sublime would've survived with a subscription model? When you're paying a subscription you are paying for the maintainer's continued interest in the product over time, which is not to be underestimated. Software rots quick…
ST2 has been out for over 6 years and ST1 was initially released 11 years ago (based on the wiki). I have to imagine he made really good money. Possibly even so much that he lost interest after hitting a financial goal.
Back in 2017 MS said more than 2.6 million people use VSCode on a monthly basis. That's not downloads, but monthly users. It could maybe be double that by now (who knows).
But if you're talking about millions of active users, I don't think it's unreasonable to think 3-4 million people used Sublime in its life time -- especially before VSCode existed.
If only 1% of users bought it (40,000 sales) at $70 = $2,800,000 dollars in a business where practically all of that is profit. That doesn't even account for the $30 price to upgrade from ST2 to ST3. Even if he only sold half of that amount, that's still crushing it over a 10 year period of time.
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Have you experimented with removing your free plan? Curious to know what your support-time is in relation free:paid plans. Just from my anecdotal experience free-plans attracted the wrong type of customer for me, switching to paid with a free trial worked much better. When you have a large team and can built fancy funnels to make freemium work it seems like a great idea from a marketing perspective but for small(ish)…
I think this is one of things where my Business Brain 100% agrees with you (the majority of my customer support burden comes from free plans, though it's worth pointing out something like two-thirds of my paid cohort converted from free) but my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.
But perhaps the real tradeoff you're making, is to do more support work in order to allow the free tier?
I had a similar experience growing my company (funnily enough, also a note taking app). When I reached the point where I had everything I needed, I had to ask myself, why keep going? The answer for me was a custom-fitted realization that building a company is to be treated no different than a game. A factory building simulation game, like Factorio. The goal isn't to achieve operational bliss, because that goal is wic…
I follow the same philosophy, but my side-project got out of my control and its monthly profits now cover 12x my expenses. Of course, maintaining it became a lot more stressful than when the MRR was at $10k and I had to hire a small team to help. I still try to keep things under control by spending most of our time on product and customer support, and zero time/dollars on marketing/ads. This keeps our growth rate man…
What's your project?
One of the things I have observed over the years is that some people are motivated to build technology because they like building things, and some are motivated by the fact that builders of technology make money. People who like the 'art' of building this stuff, are (again in my experience, not an exhaustive study or anything) generally much better programmers and engineers that the purely financially motivated folks…
Congrats to authors and good luck. Have a question. I do pay for few things (netflix, amazon prime and couple of others). Their services are natural candidate in my opinion for being billed monthly. Now everyone my cats included are trying to sell their wares however small they are as a service. If I've paid monthly fee for every notepad sized program I use I'd be out of commission. How does this business model manag…
Subscription model fits better. There are ongoing costs to maintaining the service indefinitely. One off cost only really makes sense when you can sell a piece of software as being done essentially and move onto the next piece of software to charge a one off cost for. Having a one off cost to find ongoing costs probably isn’t going to end well as soon as a product is no longer growing.