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Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

tbbuck.com

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Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#11

Post by wbhart »

OK, here is my experience with the main page. I'm not a marketing expert, but maybe my comments might still be useful.

* Oh, nice professional looking website * First look to left middle "Tweeting machine" * Read the catch line about it being a FB/Twitter tool * Hmm, yeah, but what does it actually do? * Look to right pane. Bleh, looks like an FTP login shell. Oh wait, "Time to send", oh yeah, I think I remember this website popping up on an aggregator somewhere before. It's that one that lets you send out your tweets at a specified time. Not sure how I'd know that just looking at the screenshot though, unless I'd read about it before. * Look to top of page. "Twitter machine ". Wait, what's the star. Is there some fine print somewhere I'm missing. Look to bottom of page. * Schedule tweets. Yep it's that one I read about. That's the killer feature. * Auto follow. Hmm, suppose that could be useful. Would be nice if there were lots of interesting features like that. * Auto unfollow. Hmm, not useful. The Queen and Wikileaks are never gonna follow me. But I sure want to follow them. * Eventually spot the $19.99/month. Wait, didn't the blog say $19.99/year. Yeah it did. Oh wait. Looks like he changed that to $19.99/month. No WAY I'm gonna pay $19.99 per month. Do I pay for Twitter and Facebook? No, I don't think I do (checks credit card bill). * Hmm, what happens if FB and Twitter implement these features. This guy will be sunk. * Finally, after some minutes of puzzlement, thinks. Who is actually the market for this? Oh, I know, maybe people who want to send out tweets to thousands of people and who have thousands of friends on FB. Maybe people making money from being on social media. Advertisers. Spammers. People putting on concerts. Famous celebrities. * Hmm, so after all that, maybe this app is not aimed at me.

Anyhow, wishing you the best of luck with it. And again, I'm not an expert in any sense of the word. The above is just my honest reaction as I checked it out.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#12

Post by guynamedloren »

mootothemax - thanks so much for this series. I loved the first post and was anxiously awaiting this one. It met and exceeded my expectations, packed with great advice and insight. That being said - the language seemed a bit rushed at times. Please run through it and fix grammatical errors - just a nit-picky thing :)

Oh, and I have a few quick questions on gaining initial users. Other than mass-mailing bloggers and submitting to twitter directories, what have you done to bring traffic to your site? Also, I'm interested to know unique visitors vs. free users vs. paid users, as I'm sure many others here are wondering as well. Do all free trials end up converting to paid users? Also, how have you handled existing customers when experimenting with price changes? Do you keep them on the plan that they signed up with, or do you apply the price changes to ALL customers? Please share with us!

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#13

Post by balac »

mootothemax wrote: post #10
Hipchan wrote: post #9

Congrats, and nice writeup. Thank you very much. What's your most important sources of traffic? Do you spend any money on getting users?

What's your most important sources of traffic? Google and various Twitter application directories. Do you spend any money on getting users? None so far, but am looking to change that in the summer. I'm getting married in a couple of weeks, and then honeymoonining, so things are getting a bit hectic, but once those have calmed down I'm thinking of experimenting with Adwords :)

Congratulations, and thanks for the inspiring article. I have had an idea on the go on and off for a while now and this is inspiring me to get off my butt and finish it.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#14

Post by ohyes »

I have a comment about your site:

(full disclosure: I don't have any expertise about marketing, or entrepreneurship or anything at all really)

This may be my stupid showing through but on the front page, it looks like a piece of software that simply schedules tweets. That is a useful tool, but not something i'd pay $20 a month for considering I would probably just do it myself.

It would be good if there were a little user story or something about how this service will make my tweeting easier and save me a ton of time during my daily life on the world-wide-inter-tweets... Also, it would be good to have a price on the front page. I'm hesitant to click the 'try for free' button, because if I like it, it might be too expensive and then I would be sad.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#15

Post by kenjackson »

mootothemax wrote: post #2

Hi everyone, Author of the blog post here, if you have any questions or feel that I've missed something out, please feel free to ask me :) Previous discussion of part I is here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2471130 Cheers, Tom.

Tom, great series. Quick question -- how do you manage the subscription/billing? You currently have 3 different rates going (the current, and two legacy rates), correct?

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#16

Post by jxcole »

I love these articles. As much as I respect people who quit their jobs and start wonderful and vast new companies, I don't feel this path is for everyone. It's nice to hear about a success story from someone who has a side project; something that actually does generate small amounts of revenue but doesn't consume the author's life.

I would like to have a project like this. Keep the articles coming, I'd love to hear more.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#17

Post by mootothemax »

jxcole wrote: post #16

I love these articles. As much as I respect people who quit their jobs and start wonderful and vast new companies, I don't feel this path is for everyone. It's nice to hear about a success story from someone who has a side project; something that actually does generate small amounts of revenue but doesn't consume the author's life. I would like to have a project like this. Keep the articles coming, I'd love to hear m…

Thanks! I'll see what I can come up with over the upcoming weeks that'll be of interest as well :)

My other projects aren't as well developed or as old, but I guess it might be interesting to hear how they're progressing at a few months old each.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#18

Post by mootothemax »

wbhart wrote: post #11

OK, here is my experience with the main page. I'm not a marketing expert, but maybe my comments might still be useful. * Oh, nice professional looking website * First look to left middle "Tweeting machine" * Read the catch line about it being a FB/Twitter tool * Hmm, yeah, but what does it actually do? * Look to right pane. Bleh, looks like an FTP login shell. Oh wait, "Time to send", oh yeah, I think I remember this…

Anyhow, wishing you the best of luck with it. And again, I'm not an expert in any sense of the word. The above is just my honest reaction as I checked it out.

Hehe, it's fair and honest opinion so fair enough really :)

Regarding spammers, honestly you'd be surprised about the spread of customers that use TweetingMachine legitimately. This year though - I guess a sign of success - I've had quite a few problems with proper spammers on the system (and I have motivation to not support spammers - e.g. Twitter could turn off access otherwise), and have recently written quite a few automated systems to try and detect the buggers before they ruin it for everyone.

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#19

Post by mootothemax »

ohyes wrote: post #14

I have a comment about your site: (full disclosure: I don't have any expertise about marketing, or entrepreneurship or anything at all really) This may be my stupid showing through but on the front page, it looks like a piece of software that simply schedules tweets. That is a useful tool, but not something i'd pay $20 a month for considering I would probably just do it myself. It would be good if there were a little…

This may be my stupid showing through but on the front page, it looks like a piece of software that simply schedules tweets.

Fair enough, that shows that I seriously need to work on the wording of the site, as it has several features more than that.

Great point on the pricing call-out as well, I'm going to work soon to give that its own dedicated page to try and make it a bit more obvious :)

Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II

#20

Post by mootothemax »

kenjackson wrote: post #15
mootothemax wrote: post #2

Hi everyone, Author of the blog post here, if you have any questions or feel that I've missed something out, please feel free to ask me :) Previous discussion of part I is here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2471130 Cheers, Tom.

Tom, great series. Quick question -- how do you manage the subscription/billing? You currently have 3 different rates going (the current, and two legacy rates), correct?

Quick question -- how do you manage the subscription/billing

A combination of PayPal and luck :) I originally coded the system to support pricing tiers, so the legacy code supports people being billed at different rates. The only nasty bit is a hack that checks whether the user is on an annual or monthly subscription, and updates their expiry date accordingly.

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