5 ms·

Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions or comments. A little about this post: I was recently commenting on an excellent Show HN for a product called Du

Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions or comments. A little about this post: I was recently commenting on an excellent Show HN for a product called Duet and it was the most karma I have ever received on HN (17 votes in 4 hours), and another respondent said I should write it up as a blog post. So here it is.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago
Hey, thanks for writing this. What do you think of MNMN.io? That's one of my side projects.
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  From what I can gather on you page, you are offering a service that reads an article for a person then gives them a brief summary. This landing page is too busy with the animated backgrounds as you scroll. From my short look, I think you will have a hard time finding that person who has no time to read an article and instead wants to outsource that to you. You would do better if instead of having a human summarize the articles, utilize one of the many NLP Summarizers out there (they aren't great but they scale). More about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization You can charge users for credits, then base how much an article costs on its length. For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits. Buy 100 credits for $7 or 1000 for $25, etc. You will then want to explain WHY the person NEEDS this, and probably in autoplaying animated video with a professional voice over actor reading a script that is also close captioned in the video (test the autoplay though. some audiences convert like crazy on it, others bounce). Then have 3 product offerings, NLP, Human Written and a Voice Mail type MP3 recording of the summary. Most people will go for the NLP, but some will pay for written, and you can out source that to various crowd sourcing platforms for about $1. For the voice mail you will probably have to pay $1 for the summary then $3 for a person to read it. Credits should be purchased on a subscription plan for a discount over the one-time purchases, and you should offer a few sample outputs and get testimonials from people. That should get you started! If you have any other questions, let me know.
  - simonebrunozzi 10y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions. I want to try a human-powered summary first, and see results. I agree that credits might work better, but I love transparency and therefore I'll also stick with money :)
    - jermaustin1 10y ago
      For sure, and always do what works both for you and your customers. I know that credits have worked for me in the past when the pricing doesn't make much since in US$.
  - RandomOpinion 10y ago
    >For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits. With due respect to jermaustin1, please, people, do not take this bit of advice. Using credits or other pseudo-currency is a standard dark pattern used by casinos and free-to-play games to extract more revenue from customers by obscuring the amount of cash that a user is paying for a given action. See, for example, http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/ http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/. It signals that a business is willing to take advantage of human cognitive blind-spots to get additional revenue rather than being purely focused on delivering good value for money.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      For people who disagree with RandomOpinion, care to share why? I'm struggling to think of any valid reason for using credits.
      - mabcat 10y ago
        It does allow you more flexibility with pricing. As an example, iStock sell photos that cost 1 credit or 3 credits depending on how fancy they are. But the credits cost a variable amount depending on whether you bought a few credits or hundreds. So they can offer a tiered a la carte pricing structure that also has bulk discounts. Hard to tick all those boxes without credits.
- taprun 10y ago
  I'd like to see some examples of the summaries. If you've performed a few already, it's literally no additional work to post them. You might want the units you charge by the word summarized. A possible issue might be highly technical texts that require specialized knowledge. You could charge more for those. Your business model is basically what I call 1:1 - One person pays for a summary and you perform one summary. It might be more profitable to do a N:1 - A bunch of people pay for the same summary and you perform one summary. This is how SparkNotes and CliffNotes work. Imagine selling "The top ten daily Hacker News posts/comment threads summarized daily." Even better would be to offer summaries of things many people want that are relevant for longer periods of time (so you can sell to more people). A site that summarizes famous speeches would be one such example.
  - simonebrunozzi 10y ago
    Sure, you can see some summary examples here: https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/MNMN https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/MNMN
  - jermaustin1 10y ago
    Those are great suggestions, especially the speeches.
- daveguy 10y ago
  To add some bikeshedding... One more opinion: get rid of that swooping stuff from the sides. You are trying to sell "easy to read" -- don't make the summary of your services annoying to read. Edit: also, you mention transparency to prefer money to credits, but I don't see prices.
  - simonebrunozzi 10y ago
    Good point... Thanks!
quickben 10y ago
I wish I could mod you up. As I do lots of hobby projects, I like your advice and will definitely try some of the pricing approaches. Keep up the good work!
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  Thanks! If you have any questions you can post them here or if you want to talk directly, you can twitter at me (is that the saying?) @jeremyboyd
bodiam 10y ago
Very interesting article. We are also working on a small side project, called https://www.MetaGrader.com https://www.MetaGrader.com We are aware of the aesthetics of the site, and working on that, but we have some discussions on how to monetise it; should we go for a credit system (with weekly reports about your site, historic information, automated improvement tips), should we go for selling expert advice, or should we focus on other things, like advertising, reselling services like pingdom/gtmetrix, etc? We would value your opinion in this!
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  This would be a lead in to a back end product. Your back end product could be something like "managed customized cloud hosting" (a.k.a. 3 $5 digitocean droplets) $85/mo. I did something like this with a wordpress hosting product we launched. $50+/mo. We just used a specialized hardened image on digitalocean. The lowest product was a single $5 droplet for the wordpress install and a $10 droplet for the MySQL box. Or hold back some of your recommendations, generate a report with contact information so they can get in touch with you and set up a service agreement giving them EXACT things to change. Try and set up a retainer for 5hrs/month @ $200/mo then tack on specialized hosting!
  - bodiam 10y ago
    Much appreciated for your feedback. I think we'll go for option 2, especially for the recommendations. Also, one of our services will be continuous monitoring of your ranking and performance, so that any changes done to your site are reflected in a timely fashion. This could match with a subscription service. At the moment, I think we don't want to recommend specialised hosting when we cannot prove it will benefit their site, but we might add a host comparison to get better data on this. Thanks again for the help, your feedback is much appreciated!
rlease 10y ago
In the payment processing section, you mention billing the customer back for the processing fees. I was under the impression that credit card companies do not allow you to pass surcharges onto the customer. Is that not the case when using Stripe, or is it considered a "convenience fee?"
- HappyTypist 10y ago
  He's billing the SaaS customer more, not the customer of th SaaS customer.
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  You aren't passing the fee on to the END customer, you are just acting as the payment processor for YOUR customer. You can charge them what ever you want. Apple, Amazon, Google all charge you 30% to use THEIR credit card processors. So the end customer buying a $20 product still only pays $20, but you charge the store/company they bought from $1. The company ends up with earning only $19, and you end up earning something like $0.50 after you pay the portion of the fee you were charged by stripe or paypal or whoever.
  - aquark 10y ago
    I think this is likely a really bad idea for 'side projects' ... by acting as the middle man here you are taking on a huge amount more liability than you would be if you are using the (non-managed) Stripe connect model where the your customer has their own processing account. Sure, there is money to be made here, but it isn't free and you need to manage the extra risk and liability that comes with it. What if someone discovers your platform hasn't got the same anti-fraud/verification processes that the larger players can afford by virtue of being a larger player, and decides to take advantage of it?
    - matheweis 10y ago
      This, this, this, this. Commented about this issue above but then found this comment here later. I've read about side-project startups that have gone under because they tried to do their own payment stack and lost at the fraud detection game. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 -------- Since pro accounts initially cost £6 for month, it turns out that this is low enough that it won't send red flags to stolen cards. ... If there's a dispute on Stripe, there's transaction fees for reversing charges. £15.34 in fact. Since I know I'll lose the dispute, it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility. --------
Jaruzel 10y ago
Bookmarked this, for later reference - I've got a few small webshops that are under performing - the email follow up plan seems like a really good tactic. Cheers!
nolite 10y ago
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this up! Could you tell me what tools or services you use to automate the emails, and detect which ones to send based on if users are using the service? Thanks
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  We used InfusionSoft and a inhouse email marketing tool when that one became too cumbersome. This can all be done now with ConvertKit and Intercom.io, but those tools were either in their infancy or not available at the time.
z3t4 10y ago
Déjà vu! I wish more people would communicate via blog posts ...
bodiam 10y ago
Actually, I have another project (in progress), which is a collection of curated blogposts. The name is http://www.bestprogrammingbooks.com http://www.bestprogrammingbooks.com It's mostly books I like, and books I've read, but it's current revenue comes from Amazon affiliates. I know affiliates are often frowned upon, but I do my best to not recommend anything crap ;)

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

Hey, thanks for writing this. What do you think of MNMN.io? That's one of my side projects.

jermaustin1 10y ago
From what I can gather on you page, you are offering a service that reads an article for a person then gives them a brief summary. This landing page is too busy with the animated backgrounds as you scroll. From my short look, I think you will have a hard time finding that person who has no time to read an article and instead wants to outsource that to you. You would do better if instead of having a human summarize the articles, utilize one of the many NLP Summarizers out there (they aren't great but they scale). More about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization You can charge users for credits, then base how much an article costs on its length. For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits. Buy 100 credits for $7 or 1000 for $25, etc. You will then want to explain WHY the person NEEDS this, and probably in autoplaying animated video with a professional voice over actor reading a script that is also close captioned in the video (test the autoplay though. some audiences convert like crazy on it, others bounce). Then have 3 product offerings, NLP, Human Written and a Voice Mail type MP3 recording of the summary. Most people will go for the NLP, but some will pay for written, and you can out source that to various crowd sourcing platforms for about $1. For the voice mail you will probably have to pay $1 for the summary then $3 for a person to read it. Credits should be purchased on a subscription plan for a discount over the one-time purchases, and you should offer a few sample outputs and get testimonials from people. That should get you started! If you have any other questions, let me know.
- simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions. I want to try a human-powered summary first, and see results. I agree that credits might work better, but I love transparency and therefore I'll also stick with money :)
  - jermaustin1 10y ago
    For sure, and always do what works both for you and your customers. I know that credits have worked for me in the past when the pricing doesn't make much since in US$.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  >For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits. With due respect to jermaustin1, please, people, do not take this bit of advice. Using credits or other pseudo-currency is a standard dark pattern used by casinos and free-to-play games to extract more revenue from customers by obscuring the amount of cash that a user is paying for a given action. See, for example, http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/ http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/. It signals that a business is willing to take advantage of human cognitive blind-spots to get additional revenue rather than being purely focused on delivering good value for money.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    For people who disagree with RandomOpinion, care to share why? I'm struggling to think of any valid reason for using credits.
    - mabcat 10y ago
      It does allow you more flexibility with pricing. As an example, iStock sell photos that cost 1 credit or 3 credits depending on how fancy they are. But the credits cost a variable amount depending on whether you bought a few credits or hundreds. So they can offer a tiered a la carte pricing structure that also has bulk discounts. Hard to tick all those boxes without credits.
taprun 10y ago
I'd like to see some examples of the summaries. If you've performed a few already, it's literally no additional work to post them. You might want the units you charge by the word summarized. A possible issue might be highly technical texts that require specialized knowledge. You could charge more for those. Your business model is basically what I call 1:1 - One person pays for a summary and you perform one summary. It might be more profitable to do a N:1 - A bunch of people pay for the same summary and you perform one summary. This is how SparkNotes and CliffNotes work. Imagine selling "The top ten daily Hacker News posts/comment threads summarized daily." Even better would be to offer summaries of things many people want that are relevant for longer periods of time (so you can sell to more people). A site that summarizes famous speeches would be one such example.
- simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  Sure, you can see some summary examples here: https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/MNMN https://github.com/simonebrunozzi/MNMN
- jermaustin1 10y ago
  Those are great suggestions, especially the speeches.
daveguy 10y ago
To add some bikeshedding... One more opinion: get rid of that swooping stuff from the sides. You are trying to sell "easy to read" -- don't make the summary of your services annoying to read. Edit: also, you mention transparency to prefer money to credits, but I don't see prices.
- simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  Good point... Thanks!

quickben 10y ago

I wish I could mod you up. As I do lots of hobby projects, I like your advice and will definitely try some of the pricing approaches. Keep up the good work!

jermaustin1 10y ago
Thanks! If you have any questions you can post them here or if you want to talk directly, you can twitter at me (is that the saying?) @jeremyboyd

bodiam 10y ago

Very interesting article. We are also working on a small side project, called https://www.MetaGrader.com https://www.MetaGrader.com We are aware of the aesthetics of the site, and working on that, but we have some discussions on how to monetise it; should we go for a credit system (with weekly reports about your site, historic information, automated improvement tips), should we go for selling expert advice, or should we focus on other things, like advertising, reselling services like pingdom/gtmetrix, etc? We would value your opinion in this!

jermaustin1 10y ago
This would be a lead in to a back end product. Your back end product could be something like "managed customized cloud hosting" (a.k.a. 3 $5 digitocean droplets) $85/mo. I did something like this with a wordpress hosting product we launched. $50+/mo. We just used a specialized hardened image on digitalocean. The lowest product was a single $5 droplet for the wordpress install and a $10 droplet for the MySQL box. Or hold back some of your recommendations, generate a report with contact information so they can get in touch with you and set up a service agreement giving them EXACT things to change. Try and set up a retainer for 5hrs/month @ $200/mo then tack on specialized hosting!
- bodiam 10y ago
  Much appreciated for your feedback. I think we'll go for option 2, especially for the recommendations. Also, one of our services will be continuous monitoring of your ranking and performance, so that any changes done to your site are reflected in a timely fashion. This could match with a subscription service. At the moment, I think we don't want to recommend specialised hosting when we cannot prove it will benefit their site, but we might add a host comparison to get better data on this. Thanks again for the help, your feedback is much appreciated!

rlease 10y ago

In the payment processing section, you mention billing the customer back for the processing fees. I was under the impression that credit card companies do not allow you to pass surcharges onto the customer. Is that not the case when using Stripe, or is it considered a "convenience fee?"

HappyTypist 10y ago
He's billing the SaaS customer more, not the customer of th SaaS customer.
jermaustin1 10y ago
You aren't passing the fee on to the END customer, you are just acting as the payment processor for YOUR customer. You can charge them what ever you want. Apple, Amazon, Google all charge you 30% to use THEIR credit card processors. So the end customer buying a $20 product still only pays $20, but you charge the store/company they bought from $1. The company ends up with earning only $19, and you end up earning something like $0.50 after you pay the portion of the fee you were charged by stripe or paypal or whoever.
- aquark 10y ago
  I think this is likely a really bad idea for 'side projects' ... by acting as the middle man here you are taking on a huge amount more liability than you would be if you are using the (non-managed) Stripe connect model where the your customer has their own processing account. Sure, there is money to be made here, but it isn't free and you need to manage the extra risk and liability that comes with it. What if someone discovers your platform hasn't got the same anti-fraud/verification processes that the larger players can afford by virtue of being a larger player, and decides to take advantage of it?
  - matheweis 10y ago
    This, this, this, this. Commented about this issue above but then found this comment here later. I've read about side-project startups that have gone under because they tried to do their own payment stack and lost at the fraud detection game. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 -------- Since pro accounts initially cost £6 for month, it turns out that this is low enough that it won't send red flags to stolen cards. ... If there's a dispute on Stripe, there's transaction fees for reversing charges. £15.34 in fact. Since I know I'll lose the dispute, it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility. --------

Jaruzel 10y ago

Bookmarked this, for later reference - I've got a few small webshops that are under performing - the email follow up plan seems like a really good tactic. Cheers!

nolite 10y ago

Thanks so much for taking the time to write this up! Could you tell me what tools or services you use to automate the emails, and detect which ones to send based on if users are using the service? Thanks

jermaustin1 10y ago
We used InfusionSoft and a inhouse email marketing tool when that one became too cumbersome. This can all be done now with ConvertKit and Intercom.io, but those tools were either in their infancy or not available at the time.

z3t4 10y ago

Déjà vu! I wish more people would communicate via blog posts ...

bodiam 10y ago

Actually, I have another project (in progress), which is a collection of curated blogposts. The name is http://www.bestprogrammingbooks.com http://www.bestprogrammingbooks.com It's mostly books I like, and books I've read, but it's current revenue comes from Amazon affiliates. I know affiliates are often frowned upon, but I do my best to not recommend anything crap ;)