61–70 of 88 posts
In general, developers are a terrible market because they think they can do whatever you did better / cheaper / faster, and they won't shut up about it.
Reasons why I would not pay for this (I'm a developer): - I already keep notes in markdown using nValt. It's fast. And it's free. - I sync these notes, which are just .markdown files in a directory on my machine, with Dropbox. Now I can edit these notes on my iDevices. - Your service costs me money to do what I do for free. - If I need more bells and whistles, I use Evernote. Evernote is also free for me. - Emailing…
> I would need a great incentive to switch how I take notes. I'm thinking a bunch of other developers thought the same thing. Just like the OP, you've generalized your personal experience to other developers. It is an easy trap to fall into. I agree with the takeaway called out in another comment: validate the idea as objectively as possible and as early as possible.
What you're echoing is also correct.
Interesting. I've been throwing around the idea of roughly the same thing for myself. I was keeping a TiddlyWiki, but that's stopped working. Developer solution ... write my own! In general, developers are a terrible market because they think they can do whatever you did better / cheaper / faster, and they won't shut up about it.
Most developers that I know have two common traits that make info products an easier sell. First, they're innately curious about their field. Second, they have access to a company credit card that will happily pay for training materials.
[1]: https://training.kalzumeus.com
[2]: http://egghead.io
[3]: https://peepcode.com
[4]: http://railscasts.com/pro
[5]: http://www.nathanbarry.com/authority
[6]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
[7]: http://www.jstorimer.com/products/working-with-ruby-threads
http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
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That's quite the sweeping dismissal of Kickstarter.
...I'd like to see this mysterious Kickstarter page that has had basically no work done in advance.
If you want to see lots of doomed Kickstarter campaigns, look at the local listings for your town. I live in San Diego and even for a big city there are tons of campaigns that maybe earn 1% of their goal and look thrown together with little planning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you've made is just a hobby then, not a business. (Not that there's anything wrong with programming being a hobby - it's more about managing expectations)
Don't be so dismissive. This could very easily transition into a business. The only real difference is that the author won't feel too much pain if it doesn't make a lot of money.
Get together a group of people -- pay them if you have to -- who are committed to using your product before you do a real public launch, and then new users will immediately be engaged and it will grow from there. Launching without this spells disaster.
If you are launching SaaS that doesn't depend on other parties' involvement, you should still gauge interest, but it's OK to start small.
its sort of silly, but one thing in the post that stood out for me was the $29/month for SSL and database. It was a significant amount of money for this dev - but it could have been done even cheaper with the aws free tier and getting an ssl cert from somewhere like positivessl / commodo.
It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert). You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be so dismissive. This could very easily transition into a business. The only real difference is that the author won't feel too much pain if it doesn't make a lot of money.
Agreed. The custom domain makes it pretty trivial to do initial scaling. This leaves only marketing as the big hurdle to go from small scale to something larger.