Live data from Hacker News

A solo journey to $100k in sales

draculatheme.com

21–30 of 168 posts

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#21

I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie. I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.

I never thought people would pay for a color scheme too. That's why, I tried to position in a way where you'd not only get the actual themes, but also a bunch of other resources to make you more productive.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#22

Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .

Do you know that it is the same people holding these conflicting stances? Seems like HN is a big place, room enough for both cheap devs and more well-heeled devs.

Nope, just some good ol’ generalizin!

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#23

Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .

It illustrates what people are really willing to pay for.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#24

I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie. I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.

Wow, I created a color theme for VSCode some years ago (which actually got some attention by some people and there was one guy even adapting it to Google Chrome dev console) and not even one second I thought that this kind of stuff could be monetised in any way. Well done.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that it is the same people holding these conflicting stances? Seems like HN is a big place, room enough for both cheap devs and more well-heeled devs.

Nope, just some good ol’ generalizin!

Hahahha well, what do you think? Is this too pricey for what you get? Or do you feel it’s a unique buy that’s worth it?

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#26

Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .

That's just a lesson in promising things to your customers - if you never promise free nobody bitches; changing things you've already delivered is the simplest way to a marketing problem.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#28

Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .

I have nothing neither against LastPass, nor for Dracula, and I've never used either so I might be wrong, but here are a few differences that IMO matter a lot:

- Dracula is FOSS. LastPass has some FOSS projects, but the key ones aren't.

- Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the terrible trend where everything must be subscription based.

- You can use Dracula when the server is down. You can't use LastPass when the server is down. Yes, you can manually backup the vault somewhere, but (a) there's AFAIK no way to automate it, and (b) you should be updating the backup every time you edit the database, which turns into a PITA.

As a customer I really dislike LastPass' business model. I rather use KeePass, and pay a hundred bucks for some Vim rice.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#30

I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie. I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.

I have a heuristic for this. When something sounds stupidly simple, then try it if the upside might be huge (and you have free time on your hands, there's always an opportunity cost). The chance is higher that you're right, but in my personal experience, less high than I think.

Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1]

But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a trade-off :)

[1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many empiric experiments, especially with business/social things like this HN submission.

Post reply on HN