It's always nice to see a project succeed! How much time does it take you per week to manage this service?
Thank you :) Probably between my brother and myself less than 5 hours per week on average, mostly responding to support requests.
Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
191–200 of 217 posts
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for being an early user :) We're not going out of business, don't worry - 33mail is profitable even at our current surprisingly low monthly cost :) If you don't mind, what would you consider a fair price for the service? What features would we need to add to convert to a SaaS?
My friend is a SaaS pricing expert. She normally charges upwards of $578 USD per hour for her consulting services, but she was happy to take a look at your site for free. Here are some of her recommendations: * Lite should be called Free and it should be lower on the Pricing page compared to the paid plans. * Paid plans should segment customers by value. * Premium and Pro plans can be combined into one Premium plan f…
Thank you and your friend for the advice, we'll take a careful look at each of her recommendations.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#193I'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/
Interesting idea, we'll give it some thought, thank you :)
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#194I now saw the video, Great explaination! I registtergred and will you it for sure! seems like a great product!
Thank you!
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#195Congratulations! 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.…
Thank you!
> Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.
We did try it, IIRC we had a budget of around $2k - but nothing even came close to working.
It's very possible that our messaging or targeting was wrong, or perhaps we tried the wrong channels, but we did take a whack at it.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think we spent around $2k - so while it's possible we gave up too soon, we did give it a decent chance to succeed.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#197It’s not responsive and everything is too small to read on mobile.
Yes, optimizing the site for mobile is high on our todo list.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#198Focus on finding niche keywords/areas when advertising. The best ROI is going to come from there.
Like you said, the average person isn’t going to care enough to understand how a service like this might benefit them.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#199I created a similar service called SimpleLogin. [1] and hope to have a similar success some day! Using email aliases is an efficient way to protect our privacy and hopefully the concept becomes more mainstream in the future. I'd suggest removing the "disposable" mention as otherwise email aliases would be put in the same category as temporary email services, which increases the risk of having your domain blocked. [1]…
I really like your website, it's a simple and elegant design.
Agree re: "disposable", we're currently running an A/B test but once it's done I'm going to try new copy that doesn't include that.
Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friend is a SaaS pricing expert. She normally charges upwards of $578 USD per hour for her consulting services, but she was happy to take a look at your site for free. Here are some of her recommendations: * Lite should be called Free and it should be lower on the Pricing page compared to the paid plans. * Paid plans should segment customers by value. * Premium and Pro plans can be combined into one Premium plan f…
Thank you and your friend for the advice, we'll take a careful look at each of her recommendations.
I don't know what your conversion rate is from 'free' to 'premium' to 'pro', I'd definitely argue against these SaaS pricing 'expert' guidelines. $12/yr - $60/yr are what I like to call 'support the dev' pricing, hey I like your product and $12/yr is Now the approach I might suggest would be raise premium to $2/month, if you buy for the year pay $12. Premium, $6/month, $60/yr. enterprise really depends on how an enterprise uses the product, but $50/month might be a little cheap, but again I really don't see the use case for an enterprise (>500 employees) for something like this.