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

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

#51

Post by dr_ »

mootothemax wrote: post #42
dr_ wrote: post #38

This is great, look forward to reading the second part. At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs…

I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer. Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?

Two weeks seems fair. Long enough to get familiar with the system, but short enough to make it inconvenient to keep signing up for free trial periods repeatedly with different twitter accounts they can keep making up.

FWIW, Basecamp offers a 30 day free trial for their services.

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

#54

Post by dpcan »

mootothemax wrote: post #4
dpcan wrote: post #3

I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.

Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not e…

I think you're drastically underestimating the cost of a crash and the need for a good backup.

If you go down, how many customers may you lose for life?

What do you tell those users if you happen to lose some of their scheduled tweets?

How many refunds will be requested?

Not to mention the time it will take you to bring everything back to life on a new server.

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

#55

Post by alexkearns »

sorenbs wrote: post #41
desigooner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you don't mind me asking, what package are you using on prgmr.com and the level of traffic it handles. I've been looking at some VPS options and I wanted to make sure I select the right one that is not oversold + performs well.

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/

Thanks. That is a really useful article. I may switch from slicehost to linode as a result, especially as my 1024MB slicehost slice has struggled badly under highish (30,000+ uniques a day) traffic.

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

#56

Post by goatforce5 »

mootothemax wrote: post #44
revorad wrote: post #33

Hey I remember when you launched! I even gave you some "business" advice - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641 . Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).

Me? Drama ? Never! ;) Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D

Make sure you buy the guy who recommended themeforest a beer. He sounds very wise and probably is totally awesome.

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

#57

Post by yeahsure »

mootothemax wrote: post #47
davidmat wrote: post #35

Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?

I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it might not be that great in, say, London or New York.

I would certainly love an article about how to do that. In my limited experience, it's actually pretty hard to make decent money through these sites.

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

#58

Post by dholowiski »

blhack wrote: post #21
dpcan wrote: post #3

I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.

I just looked at prgmr (I hate that name), and it looks like you can get a really really tiny VPS for $48 for a year . That's silly cheap. I'm teaching a couple of the users on thingist python, and I've been wanting to give them accounts on a box so that they could have a real-world sandbox to play in...$48/yr lets me afford that pretty freaking easily. prgmr sounds freakishly awesome. What was that site the other da…

An Amazon EC2 Micro instance is pretty close to that price, plus you don't have to pay for it while it's not running, and you get to learn AWS too.

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

#59

Post by rhizome »

mootothemax wrote: post #42
dr_ wrote: post #38

This is great, look forward to reading the second part. At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs…

I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer. Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?

You want it to be long enough for your customers to integrate it into their habits. If they tend to be slow to decide (low conversion for a given trial period length), then they might just need more time to depend on it.

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

#60

Post by mindcrime »

alexkearns wrote: post #55
sorenbs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison/

Thanks. That is a really useful article. I may switch from slicehost to linode as a result, especially as my 1024MB slicehost slice has struggled badly under highish (30,000+ uniques a day) traffic.

I may switch from slicehost to linode as a result

I'd heard rumblings in the past to the effect of "Linode has better performance than Slicehost," but I hadn't really seen such a detailed, quantified comparison until now. Now I'm thinking about switching as well.

My Slicehost slices have never impressed me from a performance standpoint, that's for sure. Their admin console and service have kept me in the fold so far, but I think it's time to at least spin up one Linode instance and do some re-evaluating.

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