7 ms·

I'm a solo developer and I built the first version of this app a couple of years ago. This is the third major rewrite and I've added a ton of functionality sinc

I'm a solo developer and I built the first version of this app a couple of years ago. This is the third major rewrite and I've added a ton of functionality since then (i.e. recurring invoicing, kanban, reply by email, more flexible user roles, etc). I'd love to hear any feedback you guys have - about the actual app, the landing page, or anything else. Always looking to make it better and more appealing. I'll be completely honest, marketing has been...very challenging for this product, but occasionally there will be a huge boost in traffic and sales will go up pretty quick, I just haven't been able to make it sustainable. Here's the HN discussion from when I posted the first version a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698741 I already got approval from dang to post again since it's been so long and a lot has changed about the app.

jmnicolas 10y ago
I have absolutely no use for this app, however I'm glad there are still people that don't think storing important things in the cloud is no biggie. A few years ago I read somewhere that "privacy is dead" and I thought it was an exaggeration. Not anymore. Sorry for the rant and good luck with your app.
- andybak 10y ago
  Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups? It might sound flippant but I'm serious. There's no hard fast line between off-site backups and whatever you are claiming is the terrible idea of storing important things in the cloud. If all my 'important things' were stored locally I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
  - wott 10y ago
    > Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups? Yes, those are external hard-drives that are moved to a different location, and which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours. I won't put my stuff in a cloud backup the restoration of which will take several weeks (supposing it doesn't fail during the process)...
    - asdfa4sd 10y ago
      I'm busy enough, I'm glad I don't have to screw around with shuttling an external hard drive back and forth. I use Backblaze, and when my laptop was stolen, BackBlaze FedEx'd me a replica overnight for $200.
    - IANAD 10y ago
      > which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours. In theory. More realistically, most don't take DR very seriously and it would be more in the days to weeks range. For example- that backup you have- is it in any way hardware or base OS image dependent? Are you absolutely sure of that? Do you have unused backup hardware offsite with the OS on it and ready to go in case there is a fire in the rack at the server farm?
volent 10y ago
Your product looks really nice. If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.
- sleepychu 10y ago
  +1 should be at least 3 times the price, IMO. No.1 lesson from my dad was "think of a number, then double it, they'll always pay more"
- 23andwalnut 10y ago
  I raised prices for about 6 months. Total revenue and number of purchases went down dramatically during that time. I think I need to target a different type of user to charge more, just not entirely sure how to reach those users.
  - zbruhnke 10y ago
    I'd argue that the problem is not that you raised the prices but the user increments are set way too low ... to appeal to teams I'd have the cheapest plan be at least $99/year maybe the full $149 but also give them 5 users by default - then allow a monthly option which effectively forces people to pay a 10-15% ish premium over the yearly option. Then make a plan for say up to 15 or 25 users that is substantially more expensive and finally the unlimited user plan could be even higher. Because you're able to do so much inside of one application I could easily see companies paying $1k+ for parts of this on a yearly basis especially when they had 20+ users of something like the task management tool. Personally I'd also suggest modularizing your different pieces (so you can just buy the project management or just buy the invoicing etc.) As teams get larger they may want to do more or do less inside of one application, you dont want to have people feel like they're paying for things they don't need if they arent using them. Just my $.02 I know all this takes a lot of work, but the product looks great, I hope you can figure it all out! Best of Luck!
  - jermaustin1 10y ago
    There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly. Price Anchoring: Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag. Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users. Additional Revenue Streams: 1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money. 2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are) 3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo) 4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece. I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers. Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)
hemancuso 10y ago
This looks fantastic. I think there is an additional opportunity you might be able to capture by adding functionality for the indie software store. The number of software developers who are paying 8% to fastspring for some pretty basic functionality is incredible. If you're looking for next steps, I'd think about a simple ecommerce storefront for digital licenses.
huevosabio 10y ago
Pretty sweet! I have a feeling that self-hosting might make a come back Are your clients mostly tech companies? If not, how do you manage the setup for non-tech companies?
- 23andwalnut 10y ago
  Thanks! I did a survey of the users about a month ago. Most are small tech companies (i.e. web developers, designers, etc). I have some services companies (i.e. lawyers, construction). For non tech companies, I just do the setup for them. In most cases it only takes about 5 mins for me to do.
  - soneca 10y ago
    You should have two very different landing pages for tech and non-tech audiences (charging an extra to do the setup for them - like $20). Unless you want to focus on only one of them (I would choose non-tech for market size if I were to choose).
grennis 10y ago
I don't see a feature for time entry. Can I enter time and generate invoices from an hourly rate? That's 90% of what I use freshbooks for.
- 23andwalnut 10y ago
  Yes, you can enter time on the task panel using the timer, or you can enter time manually. You can also enter time directly on the invoices. Or you can drag a task that has time entries onto an invoice and the line items will be created automatically. Improving the docs is pretty high on my next steps list.
mortenjorck 10y ago
One important thing that seems to be missing from your marketing site are the technical requirements. What stack is Duet based on? This makes a huge difference to the moderately-technical small-business owner who is comfortable configuring Wordpress on their shared webhost but will have no idea where to start if you ask them to spin up a Node server.
- 23andwalnut 10y ago
  It's PHP and Javascript. I just added a small note in the 'Easy Installation' section on the front page. I'll try think of a better way to present it going forward.
  - sbarre 10y ago
    Can you expand on the requirements? What PHP modules are expected or needed? What's the minimum version of MySQL? For a self-hosted app, I would want more information about it before I considered buying it sight-unseen. Maybe consider providing a small PHP script that I could run on my server to validate all the requirements?
    - 23andwalnut 10y ago
      It's built for the lowest common denominator. Literally all you need is PHP 5.4+ and Mysql 5+, and curl. There aren't any required modules for basic usage but you may want smtp (if you don't want to use built in php mail function). Cron for recurring tasks, which isn't required for basic usage, but for things like recurring invoicing and reply by email. I'll add a new page in a couple of minutes that lists all the details. Also agree about a validator script. I'll work on that too.
      - sandGorgon 10y ago
        no orm .. i mean postgresql support ?
- ibizaman 10y ago
inputcoffee 10y ago
Add a hosted option with a monthly fee so people can try it out or even just have you host it. I know that then its just like the others, but really its not like the others. The small differences are huge to a user. A monthly fee will help stabilize the income. Also, at $10/mo you'll make the same revenue every year as selling the whole thing. For comparison, basecamp is $29 or $79 per month.
- choward 10y ago
  Having to both pay for it and being forced to host it yourself is the worst of both worlds.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    Hosting yourself is the best of any world. I don't see how this is a negative unless you don't have resources? Just slap it on Digital ocean and pay $5 a month.
- ddavidn 10y ago
  Definitely do this. I'd say even $15/month would be a good price point for a hosted version.
ProAm 10y ago
The landing page could do without the animated text or the chatbot that pops up and asks for my participation. Too busy, and a little irritating... I'd like to learn about the product first before Im bombarded with stuff like that. Good luck, seems like a solid offering.
pwenzel 10y ago
Might it ever be possible sign in to Duet via Google Apps login?
newbish 10y ago
I would like to see the ability to apply a rate to a person on a project and have that flow through to the invoice. I think there needs to be flexibility to edit the rate or write down hours but other than that its really nice.
coldshower 10y ago
I purchased Duet a few years ago and it was unworkable. When I asked for a refund you denied me. No hard feelings, but you didn't back your work (or even offer to troubleshoot the problem) so I won't be buying again.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Risky to deny refunds. A few chargebacks and he could lose his payment processor.
  - 23andwalnut 10y ago
    I offer refunds, but it's usually only if the actual product is defective and if it's something I'm unable to fix. It's a bit different than what people are used to with SaaS because the product can't be returned. And I can't 'turn off' access once they have downloaded it. I try to be fair though, and in cases where I can't offer a refund I always try to offer something else EDIT: I should add that if someone legitimately can't use the app, I would give a refund. I'm just pointing out that unlike SaaS apps that have a policies that provide refunds regardless of the reason, I would rather work with you to solve the problem, because 99.9% of issues are solvable.
    - sbarre 10y ago
      Some advice: you may want to re-consider this approach, even though it may feel like you risk being ripped off, your reputation and overall sentiment about your product are probably worth more than the 59$ you don't want to give back. If someone feels they can't use your product - for any reason - it's going to feel unfair to them that they can't get a refund, no matter who's fault it is. Note that the top reply to your thread is a dissatisfied ex-customer who felt obliged to post about his bad experience (fair or otherwise), and I bet that may have almost immediately cost you a few sales. I'm not saying give everyone a refund who asks for one, but just saying "it's not a SaaS product and I can't turn it off" might not be the best rationale (and certainly won't impress any customers who are legitimately unable to use your product). I would err on the side of trusting your customers, and accept that some might rip you off but most won't, and you'll partially salvage a bad product experience with some good customer service.
teyc 10y ago
What's your stack and how did you get to be so productive as a solo dev?

jmnicolas 10y ago

I have absolutely no use for this app, however I'm glad there are still people that don't think storing important things in the cloud is no biggie. A few years ago I read somewhere that "privacy is dead" and I thought it was an exaggeration. Not anymore. Sorry for the rant and good luck with your app.

andybak 10y ago
Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups? It might sound flippant but I'm serious. There's no hard fast line between off-site backups and whatever you are claiming is the terrible idea of storing important things in the cloud. If all my 'important things' were stored locally I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
- wott 10y ago
  > Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups? Yes, those are external hard-drives that are moved to a different location, and which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours. I won't put my stuff in a cloud backup the restoration of which will take several weeks (supposing it doesn't fail during the process)...
  - asdfa4sd 10y ago
    I'm busy enough, I'm glad I don't have to screw around with shuttling an external hard drive back and forth. I use Backblaze, and when my laptop was stolen, BackBlaze FedEx'd me a replica overnight for $200.
  - IANAD 10y ago
    > which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours. In theory. More realistically, most don't take DR very seriously and it would be more in the days to weeks range. For example- that backup you have- is it in any way hardware or base OS image dependent? Are you absolutely sure of that? Do you have unused backup hardware offsite with the OS on it and ready to go in case there is a fire in the rack at the server farm?

volent 10y ago

Your product looks really nice. If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.

sleepychu 10y ago
+1 should be at least 3 times the price, IMO. No.1 lesson from my dad was "think of a number, then double it, they'll always pay more"
23andwalnut 10y ago
I raised prices for about 6 months. Total revenue and number of purchases went down dramatically during that time. I think I need to target a different type of user to charge more, just not entirely sure how to reach those users.
- zbruhnke 10y ago
  I'd argue that the problem is not that you raised the prices but the user increments are set way too low ... to appeal to teams I'd have the cheapest plan be at least $99/year maybe the full $149 but also give them 5 users by default - then allow a monthly option which effectively forces people to pay a 10-15% ish premium over the yearly option. Then make a plan for say up to 15 or 25 users that is substantially more expensive and finally the unlimited user plan could be even higher. Because you're able to do so much inside of one application I could easily see companies paying $1k+ for parts of this on a yearly basis especially when they had 20+ users of something like the task management tool. Personally I'd also suggest modularizing your different pieces (so you can just buy the project management or just buy the invoicing etc.) As teams get larger they may want to do more or do less inside of one application, you dont want to have people feel like they're paying for things they don't need if they arent using them. Just my $.02 I know all this takes a lot of work, but the product looks great, I hope you can figure it all out! Best of Luck!
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal. You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly. Price Anchoring: Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag. Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users. Additional Revenue Streams: 1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money. 2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are) 3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo) 4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece. I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers. Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)

hemancuso 10y ago

This looks fantastic. I think there is an additional opportunity you might be able to capture by adding functionality for the indie software store. The number of software developers who are paying 8% to fastspring for some pretty basic functionality is incredible. If you're looking for next steps, I'd think about a simple ecommerce storefront for digital licenses.

huevosabio 10y ago

Pretty sweet! I have a feeling that self-hosting might make a come back Are your clients mostly tech companies? If not, how do you manage the setup for non-tech companies?

23andwalnut 10y ago
Thanks! I did a survey of the users about a month ago. Most are small tech companies (i.e. web developers, designers, etc). I have some services companies (i.e. lawyers, construction). For non tech companies, I just do the setup for them. In most cases it only takes about 5 mins for me to do.
- soneca 10y ago
  You should have two very different landing pages for tech and non-tech audiences (charging an extra to do the setup for them - like $20). Unless you want to focus on only one of them (I would choose non-tech for market size if I were to choose).

grennis 10y ago

I don't see a feature for time entry. Can I enter time and generate invoices from an hourly rate? That's 90% of what I use freshbooks for.

23andwalnut 10y ago
Yes, you can enter time on the task panel using the timer, or you can enter time manually. You can also enter time directly on the invoices. Or you can drag a task that has time entries onto an invoice and the line items will be created automatically. Improving the docs is pretty high on my next steps list.

mortenjorck 10y ago

One important thing that seems to be missing from your marketing site are the technical requirements. What stack is Duet based on? This makes a huge difference to the moderately-technical small-business owner who is comfortable configuring Wordpress on their shared webhost but will have no idea where to start if you ask them to spin up a Node server.

23andwalnut 10y ago
It's PHP and Javascript. I just added a small note in the 'Easy Installation' section on the front page. I'll try think of a better way to present it going forward.
- sbarre 10y ago
  Can you expand on the requirements? What PHP modules are expected or needed? What's the minimum version of MySQL? For a self-hosted app, I would want more information about it before I considered buying it sight-unseen. Maybe consider providing a small PHP script that I could run on my server to validate all the requirements?
  - 23andwalnut 10y ago
    It's built for the lowest common denominator. Literally all you need is PHP 5.4+ and Mysql 5+, and curl. There aren't any required modules for basic usage but you may want smtp (if you don't want to use built in php mail function). Cron for recurring tasks, which isn't required for basic usage, but for things like recurring invoicing and reply by email. I'll add a new page in a couple of minutes that lists all the details. Also agree about a validator script. I'll work on that too.
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      no orm .. i mean postgresql support ?
ibizaman 10y ago

inputcoffee 10y ago

Add a hosted option with a monthly fee so people can try it out or even just have you host it. I know that then its just like the others, but really its not like the others. The small differences are huge to a user. A monthly fee will help stabilize the income. Also, at $10/mo you'll make the same revenue every year as selling the whole thing. For comparison, basecamp is $29 or $79 per month.

choward 10y ago
Having to both pay for it and being forced to host it yourself is the worst of both worlds.
- baldfat 10y ago
  Hosting yourself is the best of any world. I don't see how this is a negative unless you don't have resources? Just slap it on Digital ocean and pay $5 a month.
ddavidn 10y ago
Definitely do this. I'd say even $15/month would be a good price point for a hosted version.

ProAm 10y ago

The landing page could do without the animated text or the chatbot that pops up and asks for my participation. Too busy, and a little irritating... I'd like to learn about the product first before Im bombarded with stuff like that. Good luck, seems like a solid offering.

pwenzel 10y ago

Might it ever be possible sign in to Duet via Google Apps login?

newbish 10y ago

I would like to see the ability to apply a rate to a person on a project and have that flow through to the invoice. I think there needs to be flexibility to edit the rate or write down hours but other than that its really nice.

coldshower 10y ago

I purchased Duet a few years ago and it was unworkable. When I asked for a refund you denied me. No hard feelings, but you didn't back your work (or even offer to troubleshoot the problem) so I won't be buying again.

brianwawok 10y ago
Risky to deny refunds. A few chargebacks and he could lose his payment processor.
- 23andwalnut 10y ago
  I offer refunds, but it's usually only if the actual product is defective and if it's something I'm unable to fix. It's a bit different than what people are used to with SaaS because the product can't be returned. And I can't 'turn off' access once they have downloaded it. I try to be fair though, and in cases where I can't offer a refund I always try to offer something else EDIT: I should add that if someone legitimately can't use the app, I would give a refund. I'm just pointing out that unlike SaaS apps that have a policies that provide refunds regardless of the reason, I would rather work with you to solve the problem, because 99.9% of issues are solvable.
  - sbarre 10y ago
    Some advice: you may want to re-consider this approach, even though it may feel like you risk being ripped off, your reputation and overall sentiment about your product are probably worth more than the 59$ you don't want to give back. If someone feels they can't use your product - for any reason - it's going to feel unfair to them that they can't get a refund, no matter who's fault it is. Note that the top reply to your thread is a dissatisfied ex-customer who felt obliged to post about his bad experience (fair or otherwise), and I bet that may have almost immediately cost you a few sales. I'm not saying give everyone a refund who asks for one, but just saying "it's not a SaaS product and I can't turn it off" might not be the best rationale (and certainly won't impress any customers who are legitimately unable to use your product). I would err on the side of trusting your customers, and accept that some might rip you off but most won't, and you'll partially salvage a bad product experience with some good customer service.

teyc 10y ago

What's your stack and how did you get to be so productive as a solo dev?