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Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

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Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#11

Post by throwaway60703 »

grecy wrote: post #10
throwaway60703 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never buy this app for more than $9 - there are free alternatives such as Rectangle. $9 is low enough I'd consider it if it has some extra features or polish, but definitely not $49 or $79.

Which means you are not a customer worth having. Good data point.

Sure. Though if it turns out that there are no customers worth having due to free/cheaper competition, your business has a problem.

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#12

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

throwaway60703 wrote: post #11
grecy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means you are not a customer worth having. Good data point.

Sure. Though if it turns out that there are no customers worth having due to free/cheaper competition, your business has a problem.

FWIW I paid roughly $25 USD for a lifetime license for BetterTouchTool about 5 years ago, and I still use that daily. Only going off the description, BetterTouchTool seems like mostly feature overlap (not fully) and more flexible version of OP’s app. With a free trial model like what BetterTouchTool uses I could easily see myself spending $49 USD on a tool like that today. It would obviously have to be as mature as BetterTouchTool and not brand new without as many features and polish like OP’s tool, but probably OP can start to increase the price over time to something more in that ballpark as more features are added without much chagrin.

Also FWIW, I tried the free/FOSS tools like Spectacle and Rectangle before eventually deciding on BetterTouchTool for its flexibility with key bindings and wide swath of api’s that they can be bound to.

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#13

Post by JanSt »

layer8 wrote: post #9
steemcb_irl wrote: post #6

Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue.

Software subscriptions are a plague.

They are also a way to make a living as a solo dev / small team

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#14

Post by rgrmrts »

Wins looks really good, and congratulations on having sold so many licenses! This is just my opinion, but I think you’ve priced too low. It’s an interesting balance and I don’t know the magic formula to pricing but before I looked at the price I looked at the features and my first guess was $30 and was surprised to see $6.99.

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#16

Post by _mlbt »

Congratulations on your success so far, I hope you have an even better 2024!

As an aspiring Apple ecosystem developer myself (I haven't released anything so far, but I am working on learning SwiftUI and the related Apple technologies), I have a couple questions...

How have you marketed this so far? Word of mouth, social media, ads?

What shopping platform powers your website and what are the other channels that you have used in addition to the official website?

How are you tracking the usage data for your software?

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#17

Post by _mlbt »

steemcb_irl wrote: post #6

Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue.

I'm not sure why there's so much hostility to this comment here.

SetApp is actually a pretty good deal for developers because it creates a recurring revenue stream for low effort, and if you use a lot of the apps available on SetApp, it's a decent deal for the users too.

Unfortunately, paying a low one time price for a lifetime license for software is completely unsustainable. It leaves developers with effectively 2 options if they want to continue to receive revenue: subscriptions or major version upgrades released periodically.

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#18

Post by GoToRO »

jefozabuss wrote: post #8

I kind of find it sad that you still need an app in 2023 for these features as most of these are built into Win10 for like 8 years now.

Only when I was issued a Mac did I understood why Windows is Windows and Mac is not. But what should we expect from an OS in which you have to manually enable right click?

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#19

Post by layer8 »

_mlbt wrote: post #17
steemcb_irl wrote: post #6

Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue.

I'm not sure why there's so much hostility to this comment here. SetApp is actually a pretty good deal for developers because it creates a recurring revenue stream for low effort, and if you use a lot of the apps available on SetApp, it's a decent deal for the users too. Unfortunately, paying a low one time price for a lifetime license for software is completely unsustainable. It leaves developers with effectively 2…

Major version upgrades released periodically is the standard model for pay-once software, and it is preferable for users, because it gives them a choice of if and when they want to upgrade.

Re: Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

#20

Post by serjester »

I would change your licensing to be something along the lines of 1 year of free updates, pay again for future updates (seems like the standard pricing model in the space if you're going to be adding more features). This small tweak can massively swing your total earnings over a couple years.

Other people have mentioned pricing and $12 doesn't seem unreasonably low. Especially early on when you're building word of mouth. Long term maybe you could double it.

Opinionated Technical Notes:

Shake to hide, I wish it only acted on one screen (or a setting to enable that).

I have my dock setup vertically, it'd be nice if the previews were also arranged vertically.

Love that this just exists in my settings instead of adding a millionth app to my top nav.

Overall great work, congrats on the progress. It's exciting to build something people actually find useful and more importantly pay for. You just got yourself another customer.

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