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Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

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71–80 of 217 posts

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#71
post #46

Your best marketing people are your current users. Reach out to your fans and consider offering some incentive for them to sign-up their friends and family if they are not doing that already. Something like get 6 months free for each new account that you refer when they sign up for a year. All it would cost to implement is a carefully worded email and messaging in the user's dashboard and the time to build in how you…

Additionally, they could take advantage of email signature - the hotmail growth hack method.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#73

The comments can be so funny on HN sometimes. You built something and committed to it for a decade. That’s so freaking cool! Take all feedback with a grain of salt. You’ve been around longer than most apps that launch on Show HN. Keep it up!

Thank you :)

I signed up over 8 years ago and never gave a second thought about this. It still works. This is wonderful. Am still in the free plan. I'm going to upgrade even though i very rarely use it.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#74
Congrats! That is really cool. I recently built something very similar out of annoyance with spam that I was actually interested in: https://pobox.host/ The difference is you don't need an email to register. I am happy to see that the idea is validate and people actually pay for the service.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#75
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you :)

I signed up over 8 years ago and never gave a second thought about this. It still works. This is wonderful. Am still in the free plan. I'm going to upgrade even though i very rarely use it.

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#76
As said in the tagline, your service is grouped with others that serve _disposable_ emails.

Safe use cases for services providing disposable emails are somewhat slim. If you sign up using a disposable email, and later the account ends up being less disposable than you thought, for example because it contains some personal data from you, then you're taking a huge risk in not either using an email service that's too-big-to-fail, or your own domain.

It's easy to forget this, and use disposable emails for everything, so the users' biggest risk is you exiting or the service going out of business with the domain hijacked.

If you could somehow reduce the risk of using 33Mail to lower than it is to mess with big email services or custom domains - yes, I saw you can use custom domains with 33mail, but you still have to keep it renewed yourself I assume - then I'd be happy to pay whatever you ask for the service.

For how to guarantee to users that you will outlast the services they sign up for, I have no answers.

As we've learned many, many times, even recently with things like Oculus, promises mean nothing.

Other than that, I'd love to see a feature for having the option to generate anonymous aliases. That is, aliases in the format of @ for cases where you don't want to give your username to everyone.

Actually, having those two, a guarantee that your service is safe to use and unlimited anonymous aliases, would make 33Mail unique and something I'd actually use instead of custom domains. Because with custom domains the domain still links all my accounts together, becoming both a privacy and a security issue.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#77
post #74

Congrats! That is really cool. I recently built something very similar out of annoyance with spam that I was actually interested in: https://pobox.host/ The difference is you don't need an email to register. I am happy to see that the idea is validate and people actually pay for the service.

Thank you. pobox.host is very nice, I like the simplicity of it.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, agreed - making it mobile friendly is fairly high on the todo list.

Are you taking portfolios/examples/resumes for help with this?

Not with $8k/month revenue they aren’t

They will just go to a contracting firm for a few hours of work, or not

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#80
post #59

This is inspiring. Thanks for sharing. I think HN having a "Show HN for revenue making products" would be cool...Like "Indie Hackers" but doesn't necessarily have to be "indie", but both would be good. Could be like founders share "Hey, my VC-backed startup is making 2K a month and growing at 800% yoy, here's some info about the journey so far..." I think current show hn captures a good set of new things, but a secti…

Show HN is where many products (by HNers) start, at which point they'll be making nothing. There aren't many places to launch a product unless you have a big enough marketing budget.

Oh i wasn't suggesting we overtake the existing HN show function, just that i think an additional one for products making money is a good idea.. much like this product!
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