51–60 of 72 posts
Congrats on your first deal, Dan. Sounds like you learned some valuable lessons along the way. They will serve you will in the future. Cheers. PS: Will be interesting to see what new owner does with the site.
$1000 to run something like that on EC2 seems like a lot. That type of site could probably be run off one or two micro instances, and if you bought reserved instances you can get your long term costs way down.
Care to go more in depth about the pricing strategy? It seems as backwards as it gets. Had you seen it work somewhere else?
Congrats, and thanks for sharing this. The most interesting part of this post is the guy who wanted to build a service that reviews you online dating profile. That seems like something that has real potential. In my experience, one of the most frustrating things about being on an online dating site is that it's really hard to get feedback from women about how your profile is perceived by them. You send messages to a…
Very interesting story and I love these low maintenance ideas. Congratulations on that sale! Can you elaborate a bit on how you drove customers to that site? I was looking at a similar idea just a few weeks ago but search engine competition on usability keywords is incredibly tough.
The only marketing I did was through my blog/Twitter. That spawned a fair amount of word of mouth and some other blog posts by people who had used the service. Beyond that I think it was just people talking to eachother because the product really does provide value if you're building a website.
I also have a hunch that the custom thank you videos played a part too but I can't prove it.
Dan, great article and congrats on the sale. Domainpolish is a great product. For the metrics did you ever set up Google Analytics? I typically tell everyone to just install that first thing, it can give you ballpark estimates for almost any basic metrics question with about 5 lines of JS on each page. For EC2, I agree with PaulHoule that it's possible to save money if tuned properly, but the learning curve is steep.…
Yea I definitely could have done the EC2 experiment much more cheaply. But Heroku is free if you're small scale like DomainPolish :) Thanks again for commenting!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the comment! Obviously 3 instances were too much. But the point remains that if you're running a low traffic Rails app it's a lot cheaper (free) to host on Heroku than it is on EC2. And if you're running at the scale that DomainPolish was that makes all the difference in terms of take home profit.
But, OTOH, you learned how to use EC2 while still making a profit. So not entirely bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the comment! Obviously 3 instances were too much. But the point remains that if you're running a low traffic Rails app it's a lot cheaper (free) to host on Heroku than it is on EC2. And if you're running at the scale that DomainPolish was that makes all the difference in terms of take home profit.
I was looking at Heroku as well for hosting some MVPs and I was wondering how good they are for hosting Python. Any ideas ? Naively, I'd hope they're as good as hosting Rails.
Ummmm, congrats, but it sold for $3,500 - that's not really an exit imo. It's like selling a decent domain name.
Congrats, and thanks for sharing this. The most interesting part of this post is the guy who wanted to build a service that reviews you online dating profile. That seems like something that has real potential. In my experience, one of the most frustrating things about being on an online dating site is that it's really hard to get feedback from women about how your profile is perceived by them. You send messages to a…
I really like the idea as well! From what I know the site didn't go anywhere because the minimum advertising commitment for dating websites is in the thousands. So I think he dropped the idea. But definitely it could work for someone with some marketing skills and/or cash to burn. It's something that can be built in a weekend as well. Feel free to reach out to me and I can try to help point you in the right direction…