Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank

Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by euroclydon on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:03PM (#3793461)

Thanks. I agree with your post. Sales for CupcakeWrapperCreator have gone like this:

  March	          0.02
  April	         38.85
  May	         64.75
  June	         76.75
  July	        122.60
  August	 99.80
  September	129.75
  October	109.75
  November	199.60
  December	119.75
  January	149.70
  February      249.45
  March	        369.25

So, for nearly a year I didn't have any motivation to do more work, but then I signed up for a free month of SEOMOZ, and just fixed the low hanging fruit from their suggestions, and traffic doubled for last Feb.

So now it's a little more interesting. I can make $369 in a month with 150 uniques per day. What can I do with 300-500 uniques per day? And I think I can get there easy because just one blog comment I made is responsible for 20 uniques per day and I know I can outrank that blog page with a little work.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by muhfuhkuh on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:58PM (#3794279)

You think seeding some of your designs on pinterest might pique interest further? If anything, it can be a "proving grounds" for your newest wrapper designs.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by edwinnathaniel on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @10:13PM (#3795878)

Oh oh oh, try it try it! Pin your designs!

Do. It. Now.

Pinterest is definitely a good place for these kind of products.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by edwinnathaniel on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:17PM (#3793530)

You sir, are a genius. I'm always surprised with these simple ideas (i.e.: Cupcake Wrapper Creator).

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by roel_v on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @04:47AM (#3796708)

I'll admit that I chuckled a bit when I saw you announce your product on BoS the first time, to me it seemed equally hopeless as the first couple of products I released but then never had the balls to really push onto the market. I have to admit too though that you are the one having the last laugh, even if it doesn't (yet) bring in enough to live off, it's still a very respectable result after only a year.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by follower on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @02:00AM (#3796372)

I suggest linking to http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com/ when you mention your site--makes it easier to find. :)

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by patio11 on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @05:40PM (#3794937)

Ditto what Jason said. I was similarly a little dissapointed with the early numbers on AR before I realized that $100 in one-off sales means $100 of booked revenue for the year but $100 of subscription revenue means ~$1,000 for this year and almost as much next year, too.

The graph for the first year of AR and BCC turned out to prove this out in a very dramatic fashion. Recurring revenue: the best kind of revenue.

P.S. Charge more. I just got a very uneventuful email about a particular customer hitting their 30 day mark w/o canceling including my system's guesstimate of their likelihood to stay a customer and their LTV. Probabilistically counting my chickens before they hatch, they're worth like a whole month of bingo cards and we've never even exchanged an email.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by bosie on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @06:11AM (#3796890)

"particular customer hitting their 30 day mark w/o canceling including my system's guesstimate of their likelihood to stay a customer and their LTV"

care to share how you calculate the likelihood, please?

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by alexkearns on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @12:20PM (#3793554)

As encouragement to the poster, and evidence to back up what you are saying, here's the month-by-month subscription figures since launch for one of my SaaS projects:

50 155 460 510 730 1200 1225 1645 2180 2185 3085 3310 3805

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by bdunn on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @11:47AM (#3793392)

Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/2012/3-years-of-bootstrapping-half-a-...

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by monsterix on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @01:52PM (#3794002)

That story from Amy, is super awesome stuff. Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.

On the other hand, all this discussion seems more like a silver lining towards disruption in angel investing space too. Sublime for entrepreneurs, disastrous for others may be.

It's threads like these that make my day at HN :)

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:43PM (#3794209)

Not many have made it to that point - 3 years - however.

This is true, but there are only 2 reasons I see:

1. Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable." Something I teach against in my class, called Idea Quicksand. My philosophy about this is explained the first 3 free samples available on http://unicornfree.com/30x500

2. Barring "great ideas" which aren't businesses, people give up way too soon. They have no idea that it takes so long, and they don't prepare for it, and they think they've failed when they're really just normal. Which is a huge part of the reason why I blog & show up here.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by dasil003 on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:37PM (#3794433)

> Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable."

I think about this a lot. Much like a writer, developers do the best work objectively when they "write what they know". What this means in practice is that the market is flooded with products that are at the union of common developer knowledge. That is why there are so many products for consultants out there. Basecamp, Freckle and Projector are all examples of this. Obviously there's always room for a new product, especially when you have used many of these products and decided exactly why you don't like them so you can come up with a uniquely better product.

But when I get outside of the tech bubble, I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money. Now obviously you will never be a Facebook or a Twitter in an established market, but if you can combine some domain knowledge with cutting edge tech skills, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit than fighting over early adopters for the latest tech toy.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:56PM (#3794528)

I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money.

Careful. They may have more money in aggregate, but a lot of them don't buy tech solutions, don't want to change, aren't actually business-minded (e.g. always looking for improvements). This goes double for local biz like bars, restaurants, salons, and stores, and triple for education and nonprofit and NGOs.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by toumhi on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @05:47PM (#3794963)

I'm actually realizing that now.

I'm also finding hard to motivate myself to make something for people that are very different from me (I have a file sharing solution catered to small businesses in France). I imagine it's easier when you care naturally more about your end users.

When all my friends think this market is super-saturated, what I find out is that most of these small business people are just happy to use emails and the occasional FTP.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by dasil003 on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @03:17PM (#3799323)

I don't mean selling to them, I mean disrupting them. You can steal a lot of people's business right out from under them simply by bringing the efficiency of technology. But you need the domain knowledge, that's the barrier to entry.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @01:23PM (#3793866)

Thanks for the link :)

That graph is nice but this is the real graph you want to see:

https://img.skitch.com/20120331-ft3faju2jpqseq3ucff1fgi31h.p...

That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :)

NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due to trials not continuing etc).

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by monsterix on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:00PM (#3794036)

Uh oh! Didn't know you were here too.

It's nice to see entrepreneurs like you, coming out openly with business figures. Helps newbies like me, to go on and keep focus only on the product. Unabated by tiny bubbles we see in funding side of story - aka "herd mentality".

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:46PM (#3794222)

Hi. That's what I'm here for.

Why "Uh oh"? I'm not the boogeyman ;)

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by monsterix on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @04:16PM (#3794619)

Hi, yep. It's just that I wasn't aware of your presence before I wrote that compliment on your work. :)

Is it possible for me to connect over email with you?

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by edwinnathaniel on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @12:58PM (#3798492)

Hi Amy, going to ask you the same questions that many have asked before: you developed products in a more or less saturated market, how do you come to the conclusion that the world needs your product? (considering that there are nice looking time-tracker and customer support out apps out there).

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by rwillystyle on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:02PM (#3794293)

I hope people are skeptical of these results. I wouldn't be surprised if you made most of your money from your get rich quick program.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by muhfuhkuh on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:23PM (#3794372)

I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable.

But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @05:50PM (#3794972)

Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.

FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by chc on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @06:09PM (#3795052)

Amy publicly announces the prices and enrollment for each class, so you could have easily tested this hypothesis. Last year, the posted numbers would put 30x500 class revenues somewhere around $160k (give or take a few grand depending on how many used discounts) — so as Amy says, a supermajority of her income must come from other sources.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by rwillystyle on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:01PM (#3794286)

You had to take a course from another "how to get rich" type to realize the power of compounded growth?

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by drumdance on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @07:03PM (#3795247)

Where did you learn it? At your father's knee? We all have to learn from somewhere.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by whileonebegin on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:01PM (#3794038)

Do you think recurring billing makes more sense to web apps than desktop apps? I think users are entrenched with the idea of "buying" a desktop app and "subscribing" to a web app.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by davidedicillo on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @03:33PM (#3794409)

The upcoming Adobe Creative Suite will be offered also as subscription.

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Re:Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank by ahoyhere on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @02:44PM (#3794216)

Quite a few "desktop" apps have hybrid models - Evernote, Dropbox, CRM software, iCloud, etc, no doubt there are more which I can't think of at the moment.

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