As someone who isn't a software developer by trade, how did you decide on the software stack? I hadn't even heard of Phoenix (I am not a web dev by trade, so maybe that's why!), so I am a bit surprised to see something less mainstream as a 'goto'.
As a former business guy who wanted software, I’d recommend that you focus on finding someone you trust over picking a specific tech stack. What you’re looking for is someone who can talk to you about the problem you’re trying to solve, which could be recommending no software, along with the benefits & trade offs of the whatever tools they intend to use. If someone you trust wants to use Elixir & Vue, great. If someo…
Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#72Your product looks great. Just had a brief skim over your main page and have seen one grammar error... "We understand that every second counts when you're on the field." should be "...in the field.". I would recommend ensuring grammar etc is correct, as this could easily turn away potential customers, regardless of how great your product is.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#73Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#74Just out of curiosity, are you leveraging liveview at all? I also use Phoenix for my SaaS project (took me 5 years to hit $2.5k/mo so congrats!) but I went all-in on liveview. It's some solid tech and I'm pretty happy with it but I'm wondering what the limits are when there is a lot of interactivity which seems to be the case with your app.
Thank you! We are not leveraging LiveView at the moment, since we already have a full-blown Vue frontend. I have been watching it from the sidelines though, and I agree that it's both very solid and very promising. I'd be very interested to hear your experience with it, if you'd be willing to share (either here, or you can email me: ege@pricetable.io).
Generally, when I create an app I use the typical route of react front-end and the backend is the API. To me, this almost feels like writing/maintaining the app twice especially on solo projects.
With liveview this isn't the case at all. You still have your separations of concerns but you get the server-side rendering workflow with all the benefits of a highly interactive front-end.
I want to emphasize though that I've been using liveview for less than a year on a relatively small app so I am by no means an expert. I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone drop javascript-heavy workflows and switch to phoenix/liveview but I do feel comfortable enough suggesting that it is a serious candidate to be considered.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#75Here's some feedback:
1) The video isn't visible on mobile (at least in Chrome). Also, add more screenshots/videos to get a better idea of what it looks like. Move Privacy and T&C sections from top menu to the footer.
2) Your website doesn't show what the software does apart from the video and some descriptions. A lot of companies do the mistake by listing all the features their product can do, instead of listing solutions your software is solving. Generating quotes and proposals is the ultimate PITA in every single company and experienced by every single sales rep, so they'll relate pretty well to things like ' can create initial quote 70% faster compared to other methods', etc.
3) If you struggle to come up with new ideas/evaluate existing features, look into CPQ software, some solutions have demo versions, so you could play around with it. No matter what kind of feature you'll come up with, there's a good chance some of them already implemented it.
4) If you don't know where to look/how to hire sales people, or which type is needed at this stage- get ready for a rough ride, it's a bit wild out there.
5) Start thinking of the ways your product can be integrated with CRM systems(e.g. Salesforce). There's even more money in there + lots of sales teams already use CRM systems one way or another, so some integrations would be easier to sell.
6) Your revenue is too low right now to be able to hire sales/marketing people without pouring in additional capital, so here's what you can do:
a) start selling it yourself. Even though for both of you it's part time gig on top of the main jobs, diving into the sales side will be fascinating and eye opening. It doesn't need to be very hard. You are selling to sales directors/heads of sales/etc. Go on LinkedIn, search for those kind of roles and start contacting ( even if it's 1-5/day). This way you'll get an idea of what's missing and how it works and what kind of people you need to hire.
b) do some content marketing. Case studies are amazing. Speak to your existing clients, ask if they'd like to help you out and write how your product is helping them.
c) If you want to hire sales reps without huge upfront costs, look into the sites, where you can get people working on commission only. I don't remember any off top of my head but google would probably give some suggestions.
For those who are less familiar with this software sector: there's tons of money in this. There are quite a few large market players going all in on this. There's lots of market consolidation happening too in recent years. Having said this, there's still a lot of space for smaller products, like this one, as there's tons of companies that don't require all the bells and whistles of enterprise level quoting tool.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#76Just out of curiosity, are you leveraging liveview at all? I also use Phoenix for my SaaS project (took me 5 years to hit $2.5k/mo so congrats!) but I went all-in on liveview. It's some solid tech and I'm pretty happy with it but I'm wondering what the limits are when there is a lot of interactivity which seems to be the case with your app.
What's your SaaS project? Did you end up leveraging OTP or Phoenix channels much?
Regarding OTP I'm still learning, but I am utilizing GenServers and of course passing messages between processes via the actor model which has been very useful.
Once you realize that everything is a process and those processes can pass messages (including to one's self) it allows for some pretty interesting stuff.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#77Just out of curiosity, are you leveraging liveview at all? I also use Phoenix for my SaaS project (took me 5 years to hit $2.5k/mo so congrats!) but I went all-in on liveview. It's some solid tech and I'm pretty happy with it but I'm wondering what the limits are when there is a lot of interactivity which seems to be the case with your app.
I am building a property management software (PMS). It's a specialized form of CRM. I have dumped MVC entirely in favor of LiveView. handle_event and handle_info are a better programming model for high-level of interactivity in a page. It also gets you closer to the database, entirely bypassing GraphQL and client-side JavaScript. I had to expose a whole API endpoint to set a flag here, a preference there. No more of…
Every time I think "this is going to be tricky".. nope. Ecto seems to have thought of that.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#78Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great feedback, thank you! My day job is also at a small consulting firm, and we actually use PriceTable for time keeping and project management. It has been working great for us. I’d be happy to chat more, and give you a demo. You can email me at ege@pricetable.io!
Thanks - I actually missed that you have a small video on your homepage :) (I was on mobile before so maybe that's why!) At the moment to do a quote we have an excel document, which is basically a project plan which runs by week and we put the hours into each cell in the appropriate week (and on each row, specify the consultant). The output we get is a project plan which goes in our proposal document, and a fixed pri…
Once the customer accepts the proposal, you can create a project in PriceTable directly from the estimate, which carries over the title and description and automatically links it to the estimate. Then you plug in the total hours you quoted, and assign a cost code (your fixed rate). Then, as you log time against the project (similar to Clockify, which we used previously!), it counts those hours against the total, which is really nice because you can easily see how much billable time is remaining.
At any point in time, your admin assistant can run a report and pull up the billable time associated with any project or customer within a time range and generate an invoice from it. We currently do the invoicing outside PriceTable, but there is a "generate invoice from time entries" feature coming soon.
Re: Show HN: Side project passed $2.5k/mo revenue after 2 years (Phoenix and Vue)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks - I actually missed that you have a small video on your homepage :) (I was on mobile before so maybe that's why!) At the moment to do a quote we have an excel document, which is basically a project plan which runs by week and we put the hours into each cell in the appropriate week (and on each row, specify the consultant). The output we get is a project plan which goes in our proposal document, and a fixed pri…
I would need to see an example to say for sure, but it does sound like you might be able to replace the Excel document, yes. Each line item in the estimate would be the weekly hour numbers. Once you create the estimate, you can download it as a PDF, and include it in your proposal document as an addendum (this is what we do for larger projects — for smaller ones we send the estimate directly from within PriceTable to…
It looks like loads of work has gone into the product though so I wish you luck :)