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A solo journey to $100k in sales

draculatheme.com

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Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#141

Post by debo_ »

zenorocha wrote: post #2

Hello HN friends! Today is a special day. My solo side project has hit 100K in sales, which is absolutely insane. When I started this thing, I never thought this would happen. Monetizing an open-source project is very difficult, so I decided to share my personal journey and lessons learned. This is a visual timeline showing all the lessons learned from $0 to $100k in one year. I hope this can be helpful and inspire y…

This is very cool. Do you have any insight into how many people are spending their own money to buy this theme vs. spending out of a budget their employer might give them? I could see a product like this being a no-brainer purchase for folks who might have, say, $500+ in productivity/gadgetry spend as a perk. I wonder if you could market directly to folks like that.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#142

Post by zenorocha »

matwood wrote: post #32
brtkdotse wrote: post #15

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 .

For me, it's one-time purchase vs. subscription. For example, I was happily paying 1Password every couple of years for a long time, and left when they made it clear subscriptions were the future.

This is a SUPER important topic. I don't think Dracula Pro would be as successful if it was a subscription. There's definitely a subscription fatigue going on, and people who invest on one-time purchase models will be able to benefit from that

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#143

Post by zenorocha »

kylegalbraith wrote: post #91
zenorocha wrote: post #2

Hello HN friends! Today is a special day. My solo side project has hit 100K in sales, which is absolutely insane. When I started this thing, I never thought this would happen. Monetizing an open-source project is very difficult, so I decided to share my personal journey and lessons learned. This is a visual timeline showing all the lessons learned from $0 to $100k in one year. I hope this can be helpful and inspire y…

Just wanted to say congrats on the success and that I really enjoyed the post. The timeline outline of it all was a lot easier to read and follow than similar posts I have read around these types of things.

I'm glad to hear that. Thanks!

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#144

Post by rubyist5eva »

Just want to say I am a very happy customer! Used the regular free versions for a long time and bought Pro the day I heard about it, in order to "give something back" both the free and pro versions are wonderful products that makes my work so much more pleasant so thank you.

I like to consider myself a bit of an amateur asthete, and I see tangible value in this kind of stuff so I have no problem spending a little bit of money to make my work day more pleasant. It's just as important to me to enjoy what I'm looking at, as much as it is to have a useful tool.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#145

Post by rubyist5eva »

zenorocha wrote: post #10
verelo wrote: post #5

The refund part hits close to home. I've experience this too. What were some of the reasons for the refunds? I think theres so much to learn there. Some people are just jerks (they don't read what they're buying, and then blame you), but some people just didn't get what they expected due to some miscommunication, or product experience issue. I'd love to read more about this from this project!

It's definitely really hard to deal with refunds. You can make 10 sales in one day, but if there's only 1 refund, you might feel sad and disappointed. About the reasons for refunds - you're right, many people buy without reading and then ask for refund later. Others might feel buyer's remorse. In my case, the most common request was because of their personal taste. You see, I'm selling a theme for developers and they…

This is weird to me, because of all the free versions available...how could you not know what you are getting into when you decide to spend money on it?

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#146

Post by justusthane »

ggerganov wrote: post #120
pta2002 wrote: post #31

I checked out the theme itself, and immediately a message showed up saying that it detected my country and offered me a discount code to make sure that the theme is still affordable for my country. It's simple things like this that probably help a side project like this get to where it is, great job!

I wonder how does one put a price on a product like this. For example, if I am paying for a cloud VM instance, I could calculate the energy per CPU, hardware costs, etc. and ultimately come to a reasonable price. What would be the thought process for reaching a certain price for this specific product?

That's not really how pricing of anything works though. If you buy a cloud VM instance, you're not just paying for cost of energy and hardware costs—you're paying for the service and the R&D that goes into it. If you buy a $300 Japanese chef's knife, you're certainly not just paying for the cost of materials.

Everything is priced based on what people are willing to pay. Supply and demand.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#147

Post by hahajk »

Dracula is a treasure! I like light themes better but I’ve been using dracula since I can have a consistent theme across emacs, kitty, and firefox without having to figure out their individual configs. I’ve started to use Dracula themes as reference designs, it covers so many configs.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#149

Post by zenorocha »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #148

I remember my first refund. It actually mattered much more to me than the first sale. Congratulations on this. You’re doing a stellar job on all of this - your hard work is paying off.

It's super hard to deal with that first refund. Every time I receive a request I get a little bit sad, but it is what it is.

Thank you so much Steve for the kind words.

Re: A solo journey to $100k in sales

#150

Post by radicalriddler »

DrBazza wrote: post #65
laurent92 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar thought “Let’s sell an equivalent to the dozen of free open-source bugtrackers, but for a price.” Today Atlassian is worth about $60bn, they owned about 75%.

And it's ripe for a lightweight alternative that gets customers that want the fast, basic set of bug tracking features. Jira is horrific.

Especially now that Jira is removing it's self hosted option, someone should be able to come and fill that niche. It'd be surprising to me if that niche is unmaintainable these days.
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