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Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

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Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#21

Post by fabiovirgi »

askinakhan wrote: post #16

Hi Matt, Great job you're doing. Would be really interested in seeing the Wordpress product when it's out. Haven't found anything for perfect conversions as of yet. You're currently using Paddle that takes 5%, in my opinion this is far too much, you could save 2.5% a year by going to Stripe or even more by going to GoCardless. Besides the clump sum you get at the end of each month, what is your motivation behind usin…

Wonderful story Matt, thanks for sharing it!

@askinakhan: While Stripe's base fees may be lower, Paddle is more of an all-in-one platform that simplifies the process of selling digital products.

As well as handling all of the VAT admin work for Pinegrow (which is a huge burden for sellers), Paddle also manages customer support and allows customers to pay via PayPal with a seamless checkout experience. We also offer analytics and developer tools that make it easy for devs to offer trial versions of their apps/games, in-app purchases and more.

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions! -- Fabio from Paddle.com

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#22

Post by GFischer »

Congratulations, the product looks very polished and powerful.

I just wanted to point out about the mythical "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies:

I work for one, but they won't buy your product at U$ 75 because you're not selling it to the people with purchasing power, you're getting sales from internal champions.

I think you should read Jason Cohen's articles on his A Smart Bear blog, your company sounds a lot like his - I'm trying to find a particularly relevant post where he talks about an internal champion for your product, but I can't find it, I did find

http://blog.asmartbear.com/pricing-business-model.html

Also, Joel Spolsky's famous article on pricing:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#23

Post by danielhunt »

mattront wrote: post #20
danielhunt wrote: post #19

I'd be very interested in a writeup on how you got to grips with node-webkit, if you were so inclined? This looks like a very polished application - well done!

Originally I planned to publish PG packaged as a Chrome app. I spent a lot of time working around Chrome App API security limitations and complicated way of accessing the file system. Then I found node-webkit. I had PG working in a couple of hours. Using Node.js fs module for file access is almost trivial. In general I try to keep core JS code not tied to Node.js or anything else. PG uses Node.js part of node-webkit…

That certainly does. I've been toying with the idea of creating a node-webkit app, but have been having serious problems on deciding what should be in node, and what should be in browser-js, from an architectural point of view.

From the sounds of things, you've worked around this by making it a web app that just so happens to be in a node-webkit container.

Cheers for the insight!

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#24

Post by mattront »

GFischer wrote: post #22

Congratulations, the product looks very polished and powerful. I just wanted to point out about the mythical "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies: I work for one, but they won't buy your product at U$ 75 because you're not selling it to the people with purchasing power, you're getting sales from internal champions. I think you should read Jason Cohen's articles on his A Smart Bear blog, your company sounds a…

Thanks, great articles!

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#25

Post by ux-app »

Congratulations Matjaz!

You're living the dream :) I've got my own product launch coming soon, and I hope things go even half as well for me as they have gone for you.

I'm interested to hear about your marketing efforts. You mentioned that you have 16000 mailing list subscribers and that this has been effective in terms of growing sales. How did you find these subscribers?

Are there any other marketing hints you might be able to give to a soon to be launching app?

Cheers, Eli

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#26

Post by mattront »

ux-app wrote: post #25

Congratulations Matjaz! You're living the dream :) I've got my own product launch coming soon, and I hope things go even half as well for me as they have gone for you. I'm interested to hear about your marketing efforts. You mentioned that you have 16000 mailing list subscribers and that this has been effective in terms of growing sales. How did you find these subscribers? Are there any other marketing hints you migh…

Thanks :)

Most of 16000 emails on the list are trial version signups. To activate the trial user needs to enter the email address and a simple activation code that we send to that address.

A lot of times trial users like your app but will forget to buy it because they don't need it immediately. About once or two times per month we send out news about product updates and occassional special offers ($10 off for Christmas, for example). That brings a lot of users back to the product.

Another thing that drowe early sales was giving lifetime free updates to early adpoters. So people bought PG even though they didn't need it yet or important features were missing. We did this for the first three months.

Wish you lots of success with your launch!

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#27

Post by LiweiZ »

"I don’t obsess over competitors. In practice that means that I don’t do any in-depth testing of their apps or services. I feel that would just obscure my vision for the product. Comparing yourself to others too much leads to losing the confidence and appreciation of your own unique identity."

100% agree. Measuring one thing has little to do with building it. Under building mode, there is only one path you could go. Under measuring mode, we only want to know the distance from the target to the place reached. In other words, building is a somewhat one-dimension activity while measuring is more often a multi-dimension activity.

Re: Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

#30

Post by bradleysmith »

Fantastic write-up and application.

I gave y'all my money a two or three months ago, and I've been very happy with your product. I had been flirting with a few other mostly-online solution for over a year (looking through book-marks they were layoutit.com and jetstrap), but always felt the features offered were half-hearted and clunky in a browser.

"You can’t come out to a saturated market with just a couple of useful features. Pinegrow had to have all the main features from the start: ability to open any HTML file, full range of configurable Bootstrap components, CSS editor with integrated LESS parser and the ability to edit multiple pages at the same time. After all, that is what distinguished Pinegrow from the rest."

You had me pretty well sold with stand-alone software, lifetime usage w/ 3 installations for commercial purposes, and element drag-and-drop combined with side-by-side page + code view. Access to edit CSS was a feature I didn't know I needed, but I definitely did. I was very impressed with the "Open From URL" feature when I found it, but it certainly wasn't a purchase point for me.

If the market was providing these things elsewhere, props for capturing my queries first.

Kudos for an impressive product that does the thing it's supposed to well.

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