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Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project
- krat0sprakhar 9y agoWakatime's HN launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227
- rabidonrails 9y agoI love how so many of the top comments are people telling him to make changes and that this isn't what they want. 100k users later...
- iopuy 9y agoOh Ycombinator, such a bastion of encouragement you can be. Check out the top comment dropbox received when it debut on Ycombinator. "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- petercooper 9y agoDon't forget the Slashdot response to the iPod - https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i... : No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
- oblio 9y agoIt's nothing new, that's how we get cute quotes, such as: * the one misattributed to Bill Gates, about 640k of RAM being enough for everyone * the one by Thomas Watson about the worldwide computer market needing only 5 computers * or more recently, the Commander Taco quote about the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Hindsight is funny :) Edit: Oh, and I have to tell BrandonM, if he's still around: in no way is your solution trivial for non-developers, even 10+ years after your comment :)
- mullen 9y agoMark Twain's thoughts on the telephone when Alexander Graham Bell asked him for an investment to start AT&T. Twain thought he, his lawyer and couple of rich people would be the only ones to need such a device and he passed on being an early investor.
- samfriedman 9y agoI think a big part of taking product criticism is understanding if the critic is commenting on the product for them, or for everyone. If the former, you can ask yourself if you're really building the product for that person, or if you can look elsewhere for more targeted feedback.
- chriswarbo 9y ago> * the one by Thomas Watson about the worldwide computer market needing only 5 computers The interesting thing is, the context of that quote is building-sized computers being accessed by terminals over the phone network. Fast forward to 2017 and we have terminals (smartphones) accessing building-sized computers (datacentres) over the (wireless) phone network. We can be more charitable by treating all of a company's datacentres as one big, distributed computer. In which case, what's the world market? It's easy to pick 5 that cover a big chunk of it; e.g. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon :)
- curun1r 9y ago> Hindsight is funny :) So is survivorship bias. There's countless other times where the naysayers were spot on and their comments are long forgotten because the predicted failure happened. It's more a commentary on the wisdom of being a detractor. Unless it's going to be a truly spectacular failure, you're better off not saying anything since you'll either be right or remembered but not both.
- bsaul 9y agoThis should be pondered by the number of quotes of people believing their product is definitely the future. Well, if we ever find them, because nobody remember failed start up owners (until they become successful that is). We should however easily find quotes from demo of failed products, such as the Zune being the greatest thing ever...
- nawitus 9y agoSo you love that people give feedback? Just because the application is now popular doesn't make that feedback invalid.
- flanbiscuit 9y agoTop comment is asking for an unhosted (local) version. I'd be interested in something like that as well since I work with sensitive HIPAA related stuff that I can't send off to someone else's server.
- Trufa 9y agoCongrats on this, loved the quote. >> The best startup book is one you never open because you're too busy marketing and building your product
- khaledtaha 9y agoWhile that makes for a great anecdote, there are action-oriented people should not be heeding that advice. An appropriate balance between rational ignorance and analysis paralysis must be struck. Otherwise, it's left to others to deal with your predisposition towards an extreme.
- j45 9y agoIt can also be taken as you will read what you need to when you need to be solving it - instead of reading in advance.
- Jtsummers 9y agoLean learning. Just-in-time education.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoAgile learning.
- slilo 9y agoLazy learning. Information is getting as it needed
- j_s 9y agoSharing progress with mentor(s) who can point to resources at the right time makes this easier.
- j45 9y agoGreat idea.
- amelius 9y agoDoes this tool upload my code to a server to analyze?
- unixhero 9y agoWhat a great success story. All the best. Motivational for me personally as well.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoCongratulations. I'm not sure if the actual author is on this thread or this was posted by someone else but maybe someone can answer... One problem I have bootstrapping my SaaS is that I have no money to market. I can tweet and do direct marketing but that is slow and time consuming. Any recommendations from the crew on HN with how I can market to a large audience without needing a huge budget to spend on Adwords and things like that?
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoAffiliate marketing might work, depending on your SaaS. e.g. this is what drove convertkit to 600k MRR > Once we hit about $20,000 MRR (through direct sales and word-of-mouth) we added an affiliate program. That worked exceptionally well because bloggers — our target market — are used to using affiliate programs to generate revenue. Also, if a small business owner loves your product they might tell 2-3 friends. But if a blogger loves your product, they'll tell 20,000 readers! So we had a very natural distribution path built in. > We decided to pay a 30% recurring commission each month, rather than a large upfront commission, mainly because we didn't have any cash and couldn't cashflow anything up front. That turned out to be a great decision since many bloggers want a predictable, recurring income source. > Later on we started doing webinars with our affiliate partners as a way to help them drive more sales. This not only grew our email list significantly (up to 50,000 subscribers in a year), but also drove a ton of new revenue. Today we pay out just over 10% of our revenue each month to our affiliates."
- throwaway2016a 9y agoThank you for the suggestion. > "Once we hit about $20,000 MRR" Interesting. I wonder why the $20k MRR... I have $50 MRR (dollars... not thousands). But I don't see anything about affiliate marketing that would prohibit starting early.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoI would postulate that it's just that they didn't think of the idea before. Affiliate marketing is nice because you are promising a share of revenue on conversion, so it just hits your margins a bit. It's not so nice because it can screw consumers over a bit (e.g. try and find a non-biased review of an affiliate marketed product such as convertkit)
- whymsicalburito 9y agoThis seems like it would really help solve my time tracking needs at work, but having this sending that data to their servers makes it a non starter. Time tracking is my #1 pain point at work right now and would signup today and pay if an offline version was made available.
- ejcx 9y agoThat's what people have said about passwords with password managers, private keys with keybase, their servers and legal documents with AWS and docusign, their banking with online banking, etc etc. The list goes on and on. This kind of thing doesn't stop people. I think it just means you end up with fewer good products to use.
- whymsicalburito 9y agoIt literally just did stop me from using this product... Just because some people choose to trust some companies with some of their data, doesn't mean that it isn't a valid issue.
- ejcx 9y ago> This kind of thing doesn't stop people. I think it just means you end up with fewer good products to use. To be more clear. This won't stop the vast majority of people. They want to use good products. If it's good, they will use it.
- azag0 9y agoHave a look at Qbserve.
- cale250 9y agoThere's also ManicTime, which has a Windows-based server component (optional) and tracking clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
- welder 9y agoTry it with file names hidden: https://wakatime.com/faq#exclude-paths https://wakatime.com/faq#exclude-paths
- ballenf 9y agoBe careful what you measure, because you will get more of it. I don't think # of seconds editing a file is a good proxy for measuring bug free and understandable code. But if you want more # of seconds with files open and being edit, this is your tool it seems. Am I missing something about this product in that it measures anything related to code quality? If a company relies heavily this tool to measure its devs productivity, that would be a red flag about what developer attributes the company rewards. I guess it could be combined with other measures, but the leaderboard and gamification will incentivize behavior not closely tied to getting things done, in my opinion. And, yes, the success is inspiring and despite my negativity I'd be curious to hear how the tool has been used to improve a team's productivity. I spent some time on the product's web page, but it doesn't really address how time spent in a file relates to productivity.
- startupdiscuss 9y agounless you reward people for spending less time in your files? Or time spent vs feature complexity? Or maybe it just shows you what is actually done. "Oh, we spend all out time in the file on data import - let's revisit the architecture"
- chrisan 9y ago> Am I missing something about this product in that it measures anything related to code quality? I think it is just a tool to be used as you desire. It can certainly be misused, like any tool or method, and promote bad results. If you have someone wanting to measure you by time alone you have bigger problems with that decision maker than just this specific tool being put in place. I was in a fitbit group challenge where one guy found himself in the hospital after going to extreme measures to "win". Yet, I don't feel fitbit is a bad entity. Used correctly it promotes good habits.
- Domenic_S 9y agoCan you think of any way to use this tool correctly?
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- TAForObvReasons 9y ago> I don't use paid advertising, because past Facebook ads resulted in mostly fake signups that never installed a plugin. Is this still generally true in 2017?
- p0nce 9y agoDon't know for the market in general, but the efficiency of Facebook ads seems to be slowing a lot for us.
- kasbah 9y agoIs it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.
- Linell 9y agoThe article mentions 100k users.
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- ryeguy_24 9y agoThat jumped out at me too.
- blaisio 9y agoYeah there's definitely some weird engineering decisions there. I think maybe we just don't have all the information. But I guess this is another example of why that stuff just doesn't matter when you're growing your business.
- cptaj 9y agoI don't think its a weird decision at all. They support almost 50 editors and are likely to add more. If you were to port the entire application to each editor's idiosyncratic plugin API, it would be a huge scaling issue for them. Instead, if you make your application standalone and multiplatform and then turn the plugins into thin controllers to connect the IDE and the application, you save yourself a whole lot of development time.
- jonas21 9y agoThat's the number of users who are paying. He mentions that he has over 100K total users. That raises an issue with this sort of model that I've never really understood: if only ~1% of users are paying, it seems like very small changes in conversion rate could make or break the business. Suppose the conversion rate goes down by just 0.3%. That would be a 30% reduction in revenue while you still have to run the infrastructure to support all the free users who didn't convert. Would the business still be financially viable? What's the best way to manage that risk?
- partycoder 9y agoProblem with productivity is that at some moment it becomes a zero sum game. e.g: let us say you code 18 hours a day. you are eating into your sleep, your physical well being and eventually you will end up producing less... if not in the short term, in the long term.
- calbear81 9y agoCongrats on the success Alan!
- TomVDB 9y agoFriendly suggestion: make the pricing easier to find. Right now, the only link is in small print at the very bottom of the home page.
- gondo 9y agothat is on purpose. first to hook you up = to sell you the product by letting it try it for free and to convince you that the product is worth to pay, then later ask you for money. nothing wrong with this, but personally i like to know the price upfront too. or at least a price range
- 333c 9y agoA lot of products with a free tier do this. The pricing is often in the footer though, so it's pretty standard (albeit hidden).
- joenot443 9y agoI've always hated this design choice. I understand the purpose, but it's always seemed a bit underhanded to me.
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- mivanchev 9y agoI must voice concerns regarding this product. Just took a look at the Notepad++ plugin (https://github.com/wakatime/notepadpp-wakatime https://github.com/wakatime/notepadpp-wakatime), because this is something I know a lot about. To begin with, it sends filenames to the mother ship instead of just the programming language. I would consider filenames to be sensitive information giving a very good idea of the project you are working on... Also problematic is the fact that plugin is doing almost nothing; instead it downloads Python from the official place, downloads a whole Python project (called CLI) and executes it. Also, there's an automatic update mechanism in place which updates the CLI every now and then. It sounds as a recipe for a disaster waiting to happen. Edit: I guess what I've said applies to every software with an auto-update function and that's of course quite the norm today. As ztratar pointed out, the usage of SSL provides a decent level of security. I still would wish for the user to be notified in some fashion. Also, from what I understand, the WakaTime CLI seems to have an option to hide filenames, it's just not changeable from the Notepad++ plugin.
- detaro 9y agoWhy do you think the second part specifically is "a recipe for a disaster waiting to happen"?
- mivanchev 9y agoWell, because it's a mechanism the user is not controlling and is potentially problematic if someone makes the plugin download an update package from another source. I'm a bit paranoid, but I would prefer all functionality to be within the plugin itself. There's a plugin manager for Notepad++ which notifies the user of plugin updates.
- tertius 9y agoI suggest you suggest this to the author.
- ztratar 9y agoDisagree. As a user, I want file-level or directory-level analytics. I want to know how much time I'm coding in the backend services vs the front-end react client. If you have concerns about this, do you also have problems with Github literally having access to all of your code? Or Google having access to your search history? I'd be more concerned if it wasn't using SSL. That would make sense, but it seems secure on that front.
- myth_drannon 9y agoAs a webdev, a significant portion of my time is spent in the browser's devtools - debugging or styling components. That would be a great addition to the product.
- azemetre 9y agoThere are extensions for chrome and I'm pretty sure you can whitelist sites, is that sufficient enough?
- tobltobs 9y agoDoes anybody has any experience with the mentioned nephoscale.com?
- welder 9y agoIt's great if you want a lot of VMs or a lot of network io. It's basically a cheaper ec2.
- GiovanniFrigo 9y agoBeen using your tool almost since day one. It's lightweight and simple enough to provide me with exactly the metrics I need. Keep up the good job!
- ivkustov 9y agoguy built absolutely awful tool to enslave and control fellow colleagues and make them miserable. and get only 10 grand/month in return.
- lynnetye 9y ago"Growing by word of mouth has worked great." <-- That's the dream right there.
- mokkol 9y agoInstalled the plugin after I saw the Indie Hacker interview. Really like the product so far! It integrates very smoothly and I like the fact that you don't have to login to use the product. Recommended!
- kirykl 9y agoWhat would be your conversion (for the 100k users) at $1 a month ?
- welder 9y agoProbably the same conversation rate because I increased the price from $5 to $9 and there was no change in conversion rate. So just less revenue.
- bg451 9y agoI thought Wakatime was originally a 2 person startup?
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- nathan_f77 9y agoOne thing missing from the post was when the founder quit their job to work on this full-time (or if they've even done that yet?) Also they didn't mention if they were still a solo founder and developer.
- welder 9y agoSorry, forgot to mention that. Im the sole founder and I didn't quit my job for it... So it's been a side project alongside my day job.
- nathan_f77 9y agoWhoa, that's surprising! Could I ask, what is your day job at the moment? There wasn't any current company listed in your LinkedIn profile. Just asking because it must be an awesome place to work if you're still there!
- welder 9y agoI built WakaTime when working as a dev at WhiteHat Security, and through the years I've worked at Prezi, contracting independently.
- SadWebDeveloper 9y agoInfrastructure cost is quite high, almost on the same level as Pied-Piper wonder how much time before something better or even free appears. Also if any dev is reading, a good addition will be able to run this on my own premises, this is some information valuable for project leads but its hard to justify monthly cost for something you usually take for granted.
- welder 9y ago> its hard to justify monthly cost for something you usually take for granted That's the hardest part about products for devs, we understand how things work and therefore obviously we shouldn't pay for something we could build ourselves.
- _nothing 9y agoHuh. I remember a couple years ago I was at a hackathon when some guy just came up to me and some friends, handed us stickers with this logo while mumbling a few words, and walked away. I don't remember that person actually pitching anything and I'm not sure if it was Alan or someone he hired to give out stickers.
- welder 9y agoThat was me o_O
- gormo2 9y agoTo waka or not to waka That is the question
- dang 9y agoA user emailed to tell us that the ownership of this project and this story of its founding are disputed and there's a legal process going on. A quick check shows a bit of supporting evidence for this, so I think it's best if we bury this post for now. We have no way to tell who's right, and it doesn't seem fair for HN to implicitly take a side by featuring one side of the story. Incidentally, we invited this submission as a repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546345. We do that when we run across a good submission that didn't get much attention the first time around, and we think the community might find it interesting. We wouldn't have done that if we'd known the story was disputed. The principle remains the same, though, so if any of you know of a good submission that fell through the cracks, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider putting it in the queue.
- welder 9y agoI've emailed about this, but can respond here too. I'm the sole-founder of WakaTime and there is no ongoing legal dispute. Priyanka Sharma and I worked on a massage on-demand startup which didn't take off. We decided to see if investors would be interested in my WakaTime project, and Priyanka asked to be listed on the WakaTime "About" page to build her confidence when talking to potential investors. I also agreed to pitch WakaTime on TechCrunch with her, although they listed her incorrectly as CEO! She was CEO of the massage startup, Kneady, but never WakaTime! It's unfortunate that Priyanka Sharma now uses the WakaTime TechCrunch article to charge early-stage startups for advice through Heavybit. It's also unfortunate if HN caves to her threats of ownership without asking for any proof. If she was a founder of WakaTime, she should be able to produce a stock purchase or other agreement, or even documentation about an "ongoing legal dispute". I've already reached out to HN via email offering proof of ownership, so hopefully HN unburies this post.
- beaugunderson 9y agoThis response is fishy as hell. I don't know what Priyanka's title was at WakaTime but I viewed her as the public face of the company, as judged by the dozens of emails I have from WakaTime that all came from her, her activity in the Slack, her blog posts which were removed from the WakaTime blog, etc. Here's one example of an email from Priyanka on behalf of WakaTime: https://i.imgur.com/PYHuc8s.png https://i.imgur.com/PYHuc8s.png And the removal of her blog posts: https://github.com/wakatime/wakatime-blog/commit/5d671e9aab64e712fed73c3c1a994b555539d663 https://github.com/wakatime/wakatime-blog/commit/5d671e9aab6... Edit: And an interesting Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/downey/status/861908826223759360 https://twitter.com/downey/status/861908826223759360 This makes me want to stop paying for WakaTime.
- otterpro 9y agoI've heard of Wakatime but never signed up for it until now, after reading the post. Vim plugin installed, and trying things out, but so far it's great. I really like the dashboard and the metrics.
- itimetrack 9y agoI love wakatime... I'm currently writing an integration (beta) that will take your wakatime history (heartbeats), and convert it into billable hours (15 minute chunks)... it is available for free at: http://itimetrack.com http://itimetrack.com Congrats to Alan!!!
- madarco 9y agoWhy this needs a lot of plugins, while RescueTime do that with a single app?
- pedrodelfino 9y agoIt is funny to see this post. I started to use this product three days ago. A friend told me about it (word of mouth). It is great. I use RescueTime since 2013, but the WakaTime product has complementary features.