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Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

projectorpm.com

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Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#61

Post by ahoyhere »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #52
rwillystyle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people are skeptical of these results. I wouldn't be surprised if you made most of your money from your get rich quick program.

I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable. But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.

Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.

FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#62

Post by chc »

rwillystyle wrote: post #51
ahoyhere wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link :) That graph is nice but this is the real graph you want to see: https://img.skitch.com/20120331-ft3faju2jpqseq3ucff1fgi31h.p... That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :) NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due…

I hope people are skeptical of these results. I wouldn't be surprised if you made most of your money from your get rich quick program.

Amy publicly announces the prices and enrollment for each class, so you could have easily tested this hypothesis. Last year, the posted numbers would put 30x500 class revenues somewhere around $160k (give or take a few grand depending on how many used discounts) — so as Amy says, a supermajority of her income must come from other sources.

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#64

Post by drumdance »

rwillystyle wrote: post #50
bdunn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/2012/3-years-of-bootstrapping-half-a-...

You had to take a course from another "how to get rich" type to realize the power of compounded growth?

Where did you learn it? At your father's knee? We all have to learn from somewhere.

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#65

Post by robotmay »

Nice to see Projector on HN; I'm one of the paying users (well, my company's paying).

I've found it to be a much better fit for my workflow than Pivotal/Basecamp etc. Brennan's been great at looking for feedback and keeping in touch with everyone so far (even if I am lax at replying). There's some real speed behind updates and it's improving every day.

Aside: Didn't sign up just to big the project up; I do have another account on HN which has been around longer, I just try not to associate my real name and nickname.

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#68

Post by bdunn »

robotmay wrote: post #65

Nice to see Projector on HN; I'm one of the paying users (well, my company's paying). I've found it to be a much better fit for my workflow than Pivotal/Basecamp etc. Brennan's been great at looking for feedback and keeping in touch with everyone so far (even if I am lax at replying). There's some real speed behind updates and it's improving every day. Aside: Didn't sign up just to big the project up; I do have anoth…

Thanks Rob, I really appreciate your feedback - and for being one of the earliest users, and thus had to deal with a substantial amount of bugs in its infancy :-)

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#69

Post by XLcommerce »

Awesome! Must be such an amazing feeling to receive that first payment. I'm about a month away from my first launch and I'm terrified of launching and then hearing.... crickets. So congrats to you!

Had a look at the product. Looks v.solid. Just a couple of things:

- When I attach a file via /projects/project_name/stories/ it completes the upload then the files seems to disappear? What I mean is that the progress indicator goes to 100% and nothing else happens. Then if I go back to root and back to stories there is no file.

- I think you need labels on the 4 symbols on the left hand side. The only one which is self evident is the '?'. The others I have to hover over to find out about and that is annoying from a UX pov.

Cheers and good luck :)

Re: Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

#70

Post by redguava »

I hope people don't get too hung up on the numbers thing to miss out on the great advice you give. With all the factors that contribute to a startups success, I think this post really nails some critical ones:

- Create a list of people interested before you launch

- Be proactive with support, consider it a sales tool

- Have a great first use experience, that's when people are deciding to use your system.

Great post and well done on your success so far.

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