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Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by kebsup on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @03:54PM (#31509702)
Good job! I know exactly the feeling. I'll once again shamelessly plug my project, since it's vaguely relevant.

I'm making about 200 USD/month by selling watermark removals on https://gifmemes.io. What I've learnt is that I'm very bad at marketing & design and will much rather spend hours programming useless features. For example I've spent like 10 hours getting an wasm ffmpeg converter of gifs to mp4s and webms, which was not used AT ALL, while most of my traffic still comes from cold-writing (is it even a term) for 1 hour random people to put links on their websites or subreddits.

The scene in the Sillicon Valley series, where Richards enhances the algorithm by 1 % is quite accurate.

On the other hand, being the solo developer and product owner is quite powerful. My implementation of billing into the app took around 2 hours, which is probably less than a meeting about it would take in a company.

Finally, I can run silly experiments. There is a button in the "Buy watermark removal" page that says "It's too expensive", which leads to 50 % discount. Around 70 % people still buy the full price.

Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by telchior on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:07PM (#31509840)
I love the "too expensive" button. I'm the sort of person who'd probably want to test a dozen variations of that, half of them being jokes, and try to figure out exactly why it works. Do you know how many of the full price buyers ever click the button and find out it has a discount?
Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by kebsup on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:12PM (#31509899)
Nope. I have some more ideas to try, but with my sale frequency once in 1-2 days, it's quite difficult to make any statistical conclusions. However, since it's a meme website, I don't think there are any limits on creativity of psychological experiments. :D
Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by OJFord on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @06:09PM (#31511321)
> Finally, I can run silly experiments. There is a button in the "Buy watermark removal" page that says "It's too expensive", which leads to 50 % discount. Around 70 % people still buy the full price.

I don't find that silly at all. At most it's a fun example of price discrimination. A fairly big online-only florist in the UK (Bloom & Wild) for example does something similar, if you enter a valid voucher code but it's only for new customers, it pops up telling you that 'but click here to apply 10% off instead' (where the voucher might've been for 25 or whatever). Clever I think - stops you thinking 'oh sod it' and shopping around.

Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by volsa_ on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @04:59PM (#31510469)
I love the "But internet stuff should be free!" button, got a chuckle out of me :P
Re:Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo by jbarberu on Thursday May 26, 2022 @09:16AM (#31517942)
For what it's worth, I'm the kind of person that would pay full price if I saw and clicked the "It's too expensive" button :)