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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

#101

Post by puranjay »

sjtindell wrote: post #65
puranjay wrote: post #44

Congratulations! I admire your tenacity and commitment. However, > We have not spent much on paid user acquisition Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10. I see so many great products on HN that take years to takeoff simply because the founders refuse to market it. Good products deserve to be more widely known so more people can use them.…

> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results.

That's the key - you can't just "experiment" with paid acquisition. You have to spend a little to gather enough data on what actually works for your audience.

It might take $1000 in failed ads before you "get" your audience, but you might quit after spending $100. But the $900 in supposedly "wasted" ad spend will help you understand enough that you can make 10x higher revenue.

If you approach software development as an iterative activity, you should approach marketing the same way too. Expecting great results at first try is akin to expecting completely bug free software at first go without any tests.

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

#102

Post by maitrik »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #4

Nice simple forwarding service. I need something slightly more complex --- I want store and forward/routing/hub mailbox with API control. I need API access to obtain sender and destination address of mailbox item and then decide how to dispense with it, either delete, retrieve or forward to a different destination. "Destination" may involve dozens of addresses. Reply address may be changed. To minimize storage and co…

Hey we may have something like this. Can you please email me at maitrikvk [at] newtonhq [].com . Would love to have a chat.

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

#103

Post by svacko »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #99

I created a similar service, https://idbloc.co However I’m probably going to pivot away to email infrastructure because: A) The market for paid users is tiny (when we had free users we had 1000s of sign ups, but they were mostly setting up spam accounts and would never convert) B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless It’s frustrating as it’s a great id…

> B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless

This is valid point, I see both 33mail.com and users.idbloc.co are already on disposable blocklists (e.g. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains/blob/maste...)

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

#104

Post by andomar »

I've been using unique emails since 2000. It's been fun, for example when I got marketing e-mails for Viagra on the mail I use for my bank. At the time, I was surprised a bank would sell your e-mail!

Right now Apple ID includes this very concept. They give each site a unique email instead of your actual Apple e-mail.

Seems to me there's good value in bringing this to many people. Good luck!

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

#105

Post by albertgoeswoof »

svacko wrote: post #103
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #99

I created a similar service, https://idbloc.co However I’m probably going to pivot away to email infrastructure because: A) The market for paid users is tiny (when we had free users we had 1000s of sign ups, but they were mostly setting up spam accounts and would never convert) B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless It’s frustrating as it’s a great id…

> B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless This is valid point, I see both 33mail.com and users.idbloc.co are already on disposable blocklists (e.g. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains/blob/maste... )

The frustrating thing is that 33mail and idbloc are not disposable or temporary email addresses. They don’t expire or run out, they continue to forward until the user turns them off.

But then again, email spam prevention is very much a block everything and see who complains hard enough game.

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

#106

Post by svacko »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #105
svacko wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless This is valid point, I see both 33mail.com and users.idbloc.co are already on disposable blocklists (e.g. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains/blob/maste... )

The frustrating thing is that 33mail and idbloc are not disposable or temporary email addresses. They don’t expire or run out, they continue to forward until the user turns them off. But then again, email spam prevention is very much a block everything and see who complains hard enough game.

I understand your point. Though, being too rigorous, 33mail.com tagline is "Unlimited free disposable email addresses" so it somehow fits disposable-email-blocklist

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

#108

Post by hencq »

siwatanejo wrote: post #58
bskinny129 wrote: post #49

Definitely double the prices right now. Since there is a free version that is generous, it won’t be “selling out”. I’m sure it felt right back years ago, but think of how much the product has improved since then. You can grandfather all current customers in (or just a year) if it makes it feel better. I am impressed by that video from 99designs. How much did you spend? Do you have a link to their profile?

Disagree, he's taking advantage of the freemium model which is probably giving him more chances of getting real users.

They're not suggesting getting rid of the freemium model, but to raise prices of the paid plan.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #94
sanity31415 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll definitely give pricing some thought, you're right that it's probably time to revisit. Re: the video, actually now that I look back we used a company called xp-studios.com - we just provided the script. I believe it was around $3k but this was back in 2013.

I came to suggest the same. The prices feel way too low. If you haven't experimented a lot with these, I'd recommend trying it. If you have paying customers now, I suspect you could increase new monthly revenue by several multiples. You mentioned wanting to play with paid ads. I think you'll quickly find that your current LTV is way too low to justify any campaigns (unless your enterprise plan is converting like craz…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by vxNsr »

sanity31415 wrote: post #98
vxNsr wrote: post #97

Love the idea, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's thought about this pain point and somehow didn't come up with the elegant solution you did. Right now I have an O365 account that lets me create unlimited (I think) aliases, the issue is how annoying it is to create them and then manage them. Yahoo has a similar service, but again you need to create the alias first, your solution of accept all, deny later is much…

Thank you for the kind words :) Most people don't hit the bandwidth limit unless they're really using 33mail a lot. I've been using 33mail heavily for a decade and my monthly usage is 40MB which puts me in the premium tier, but I'm near the top percentile of bandwidth usage. The premium tier also has a lot of other benefits, like custom domains and anonymous replies - so lots of users upgrade to it without being clos…

Cool, thanks I signed up and set up a custom domain so hopefully I won't get caught by the disposable email blacklist that other commenters were talking about.

the only other issue I'm seeing is that the website isn't really great on mobile, my wife mostly does stuff on her phone (despite us having like 10 computers lol) and that might be a small barrier, though after sending a test email I see that it can be managed inside w/e email client you use, so that shouldn't be too much of an impediment for her.

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