Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
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Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#2Hi everyone,
Author of the blog post here, if you have any questions or feel that I've missed something out, please feel free to ask me :)
Previous discussion of part I is here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2471130
Cheers, Tom.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#3How much time do you spend supporting/interacting with your users? Have you had to sell any of them on your product directly?
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#4How much time do you spend supporting/interacting with your users? Have you had to sell any of them on your product directly?
How much time do you spend supporting/interacting with your users
Typically half an hour a week.
Have you had to sell any of them on your product directly?
Since running, I've had a handful of users contact me before purchasing. I discovered that some of them will try and get you to extend the free trial for a day, a week and then a month at a time, all in promise of an ever-elusive sale. I've also had some arguments with people trying to abuse the offer to bloggers of a free subscription in return for a review. Funnily enough, some of these arguments led to sales :)
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#5Congratulations. That's a nice milestone to hit, and I'm sure bigger and better things are in your future. Mind if I give some advice (take with a grain of salt)?
1) Welcome to TweetingMachine Discover the Twitter & Facebook tool that's packed with features and free for 10 days! Get More Customers With Less Work Manage your Twitter/Facebook campaigns faster. Try free for 10 days!
2) http://tweetingmachine.com/features/schedule_tweets needs more text on it to rank for [schedule tweets]. Ditto for all of your feature pages. Very important: put buttons on these pages leading directly into the free trial, because they will be large entrances into your site. Build links directly to them.
3) Customer personas: explain what this means for small business owners, marketing managers, and social media consultants. Bonus points for cutesy cartoon characters representing them. (It works!)
4) Quicky question: how many of your customers are ladies? Lots, right? If so: watch my presentation about selling to women, with particular regards to pushing emotional buttons and not using screenshots of software because software is boring.
5) "Try for free" should probably be orange (test test test) and you probably want the hero screenshot to link to that, too. If you installed CrazyEgg you would quickly see that it gets clicked more than anything on the page.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#6Congratulations. That's a nice milestone to hit, and I'm sure bigger and better things are in your future. Mind if I give some advice (take with a grain of salt)? 1) Welcome to TweetingMachine Discover the Twitter & Facebook tool that's packed with features and free for 10 days! Get More Customers With Less Work Manage your Twitter/Facebook campaigns faster. Try free for 10 days! 2) http://tweetingmachine.com/feature…
Awesome, awesome, awesome advice, thank you! I'm going to get cracking on these ASAP :-D
Oh, and you're quite right about number 4, I'll check out your presentation. One again, thank you for your advice, it's things like these that really make a difference :)
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#7Congratulations. That's a nice milestone to hit, and I'm sure bigger and better things are in your future. Mind if I give some advice (take with a grain of salt)? 1) Welcome to TweetingMachine Discover the Twitter & Facebook tool that's packed with features and free for 10 days! Get More Customers With Less Work Manage your Twitter/Facebook campaigns faster. Try free for 10 days! 2) http://tweetingmachine.com/feature…
Awesome, awesome, awesome advice, thank you! I'm going to get cracking on these ASAP :-D Oh, and you're quite right about number 4, I'll check out your presentation. One again, thank you for your advice, it's things like these that really make a difference :)
it's things like these that really make a difference :)
Hopefully! Depressingly frequently you can do everything right and not see the needle move. If it ends up working out for you, I'd love an email -- that always puts a smile on my face.
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome, awesome, awesome advice, thank you! I'm going to get cracking on these ASAP :-D Oh, and you're quite right about number 4, I'll check out your presentation. One again, thank you for your advice, it's things like these that really make a difference :)
it's things like these that really make a difference :) Hopefully! Depressingly frequently you can do everything right and not see the needle move. If it ends up working out for you, I'd love an email -- that always puts a smile on my face.
If it ends up working out for you, I'd love an email -- that always puts a smile on my face.
Honestly, if it ends up working out, that's the very least I can do, so absolutely :) Thanks once again!
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#9Congrats, and nice writeup. Thank you very much.
What's your most important sources of traffic?
Do you spend any money on getting users?
Re: Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
#10Congrats, and nice writeup. Thank you very much. What's your most important sources of traffic? Do you spend any money on getting users?
What's your most important sources of traffic?
Google and various Twitter application directories.
Do you spend any money on getting users?
None so far, but am looking to change that in the summer. I'm getting married in a couple of weeks, and then honeymoonining, so things are getting a bit hectic, but once those have calmed down I'm thinking of experimenting with Adwords :)