Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

Love how he cited the crappy design as the main reason why the app sucks ... Then proceeds to put the minimum effort into design to adress the problem. Give a designer a chance to work for you, you will end up with a result that is better but more importantly unique.

I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different details) but here's our story:

Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively.

Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.

We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in.

We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc.

One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.

On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing.

About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-f...

I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.

So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.

Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting.

It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story.

In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).

Thanks, an interesting read that puts a lot of the other "I'm so amazing because my rails app makes me and my uni buddies £50k a month" into perspective.

But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice to turn that $500 into $5k :)

For me, I prefer the OP's article as it's very much from the perspective of someone still "in the trenches", whereas your artcle seems to be approaching it from the angle of already being through the trenches and reflecting on how awesome it went.

I suppose it's like comparing watching Rocky to watching 2 hours of Lennox Lewis in his prime, you want to see the progression happening, not necessarily look back.

That would be the main point from my perspective and it's simply a matter of preference.

You're welcome.

The way I read it is "don't do things we don't already do" which is a really bad constraint, effectively forbidding any kind of innovation. I can understand the spirit of their selective desire to address this specific violation, but I'm not convinced it's as much of a problem as they're making it to be.

Oh well.