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

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

#81

Post by sanity31415 »

MzHN wrote: post #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-bi…

Thank you for the feedback.

Yes, I agree that it can be a disadvantage to be grouped with disposable email addresses, we have aliases that are a decade old that are still forwarding emails.

With respect to the longevity of the company, it makes a healthy profit and due to my brother's great sysops work it is fairly low maintenance except when we're making improvements.

Also, our friends and family all use it, they'd disown us if we shut it down or sold it to anyone that wouldn't respect its users :)

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

#83

Post by sanity31415 »

dwd wrote: 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…

Thank you for the suggestions.

We do have a referral program, free upgrade if you refer two people - however referrals only account for 2% of our signups which doesn't really move the needle.

We are thinking about trying affiliate marketing through something like Commission Junction, where we would pay affiliates directly for conversions.

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

#84

Post by sanity31415 »

vezycash wrote: post #71
dwd wrote: 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.

Could you elaborate?

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

#87

Post by samdung »

sanity31415 wrote: post #75
samdung wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Done. I'm now on the $12 plan.

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

#89

Post by jeswin »

graderjs wrote: post #80
jeswin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Sorry I misread.

Most Show HN products are in the pre-alpha, pre-revenue stage. For them the feedback as well as the eyeballs are of great value. Though there are outliers, the value is usually tilted towards the creator rather than the readers (who are mostly just helping out).

OTOH, products with revenue in Show HN provide at least an equal value to the readers by way of lessons and execution strategies. So I agree that it's a separate class of "Show HN". However, if you put "Show HN: xxx generating $xK/month" it's very likely to bubble up to the top without needing a separate category. In fact, it might be better to not have a separate category since you might get more eyeballs if the links aren't split.

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

#90

Post by mithron »

I'm not really sure but maybe it will be useful for the users to have your service integrated with HIBP[1] to check if their mail aliases are in any security breach? IMHO, biggest threat is giving up mail alias but keeping some registrations on it so if some abandoned mail alias is in the breach it seems good to inform customer about it.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/

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