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Took me more than 2 years to get 200 paying customers for my Web App
- user24 16y agocongrats! It's always inspiring to see people having success doing what they love. 200 users seems almost laughably smalltime compared to some of the companies who get featured on here, but to me, and I'm sure much of the HN readership, it's a dream; if I can get 200 paying users of my business when I launch I'll be ecstatic! It's really good to see a success story which doesn't focus on "hey wow, I got a million users overnight through sheer luck". It reminds us that 99% of the time, companies are built slowly and surely, not astronomically.
- JarekS2 16y agoPeople have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers (not to mention 200!!). It's one thing to get people to say "I love your product - will buy premium plan for sure!" and the completely other thing to actually receive a payment ("I'm sorry I was busy", "Will buy, just waiting for my customer to place an order" etc.). Best of luck to everyone trying to persuade their customers to pay. I'm also one of you!
- patio11 16y agoPeople have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers I'm kind of conflicted on this. Yes, it is hard to get ten people to pay money, in that you have to have a mostly-functioning product, a website which markets it, and some way to charge their credit cards. But this is not really that hard. BCC 1.02 ("Like 1.00, but with less crash bugs and the brand new ability to print to non-default printers") got to ten customers in six weeks from 1.0's launch, entirely on the strength of organic search marketing on two pieces of content. That was when I was young and stupid. Y'all can do better. I think software (let's scope it to B2C software for the moment) is like lemonade stands. You know how you get ten customers with a lemonade stand? Your price? Doesn't really matter. Your stand's design? Doesn't really matter. Your taste? Doesn't really matter. Your location? Probably matters for getting hundreds or thousands of customers, but for 10, pretty much any street will do. The key hurdle you have to get over is charging money for lemonade. I am worried that people think it is really really hard to run a successful business, and that stops them from ever charging for lemonade.
- wlievens 16y agoBut how do you get over charging for something that competitors offer for free? Even if your product is better in different ways, that's a hard sell.
- patio11 16y agoStick a price tag on it. [Edit: I wanted to leave that line alone for impact, but it might be read as overly abrupt or insulting. That isn't my intention. I've always had free competitors. They were at the top of the three search terms I most wanted when I started, though I have since learned that I was mistaken about that. One thing I've learned over the years is that I am fairly well informed about the top twenty alternatives to my software and my customers are not. Relatedly, I was very sensitive to the notion of paying $25 for software and my customers were not. And I could put up with a little frustration and ease-of-use niggles to get a deal and my customers viscerally hate that. P.S. I can't decide which is worse, selling to price-sensitive customers or playing price-chicken with someone whose product is free.]
- patio11 16y agoMight as well show you, since it is semi-relevant: I started to make my product after an acquaintance of mine wanted a particular activity for class. I told her to Google it. She told me that this was the printed output from the #1 result. http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/free-competitors-rock.png http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/free-comp... Can you see a woman with a graduate degree feeling effing fantastic about herself for printing that out and giving it to a third grader? Just because it doesn't cost any money doesn't mean it is free. Postscript: that competitor is still in the top 3 for a few related search terms. They run AdSense ads. For me. And they perform the best anywhere on the Internet.
- newsisan 16y agoSorry just wondering if you could expand a little on this paragraph: They run AdSense ads. For me. And they perform the best anywhere on the Internet.
- barmstrong 16y agoYep that's a good point. Sites that have massive growth tend to crash quickly as well (Chatroulette, for example). There is nothing wrong with slow and steady growth, I think the hardest part is behind me.
- jasonkester 16y agoThis is actually a significant milestone for any entrepreneur. 200 * $10/mo == enough to pay your rent. $2k/month is the tipping point where you're no longer bleeding money and eating into savings. Sure, you're not getting richer and you might still need to take the odd freelance job for spending money, but it's a great place be, no longer watching your bank account on its slow & steady march toward zero. From here, it's all profit!
- etm117 16y agoRemember, not everyone lives in the Bay Area. ;-) Depending on where you live and if you have roommates, the $2k per month may be enough to pay rent, bills, college loans and leave some left over for spending money.
- patio11 16y agoWhen my business first made $2k profit two months in a row (late March 2009), I did some math in my project notebook and wrote down a thought I had literally never had before: "Could quit the day job!?!" It took almost twelve months to the day from there.
- jasonkester 16y agoDon't you mean "not everybody lives in Honduras"? There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in, and the Bay Area would be the last place I'd expect to do so. I meant "pays your rent" quite literally. As in, taking the biggest of your financial worries away and leaving you only needing to deal with the spending money part. So you still can't live on your income, but you can coast along for an entire year on $10k savings. Up to that point, $10k in the bank meant you'd better start scrambling to pick up a contract in the next couple months before you run out of money.
- dfischer 16y agoCongratulations. That's a great milestone.
- stretchwithme 16y agoCongratulations. A great idea and an important niche to serve. I just told two friends that do tutoring about it.
- barmstrong 16y agoAwesome, thanks!
- rubyrescue 16y agocongratulations! when barmstrong was down here in Buenos Aires, we talked a lot about universitytutor.com and it's cool to see him just make little tweaks to the site and let it grow slowly and steadily. very inspiring!
- barmstrong 16y agoYep - those were some good discussions, learned a lot from you down there!
- cinimod 16y agoThat's an AWESOME dating service.
- spencerfry 16y agoCongrats! With 200 paying customers, you now have more than enough information to start tracking churn, CPA, life time value, life time profit, etc. You can turn those 200 paying customers into a lot more by accurately tracking your metrics and building from them. I recommend reading: http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your-web-app/ http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metric...
- tnorthcutt 16y agoI may be assuming too much based on my reading of your post, but it sounds like you could really stand to implement some (or more) A/B testing. The fact that it took two years to reach 200 customers but in only a week or so you've added another 20 customers after making some changes makes me think you should have been making (and testing!) changes like that all along. Either way, congratulations, and best of luck in the future!
- barmstrong 16y agoYur right - I just didn't have the idea to do this test until recently :) Have done some split testing on price etc, but could def stand to do more.
- tnorthcutt 16y agoHopefully you'll continue to see a faster increase in signups. Good luck!
- JangoSteve 16y agoCongratulations on the 220 paying customers, that's certainly no small feat. I've been running RateMyStudentRental.com for about 3 years now (well, really I stopped actively working on it about a year ago), and it only reached about half that in revenue. Then, LeadNuke sprang forth as an internal sales tool for RMSR barely a year ago and it's approaching that level already. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't have this kind of success the first time around, because I have a much more realistic perspective now and I can appreciate it that much more. In summary, mad props and respect to you.
- steveklabnik 16y ago> In summary, mad props and respect to you. Totally off-topic, but some of my friends lately have started joking around about making a subgenre of Nerdcore devoted to startups. There's so many good names and parody opportunities... > I got 99 problems, but my pitch ain't one. > whatddup, founda? > An east vs west style rivalry between the 'Limited Liability Crew' and 'S-corp'. > Names: 'Series C', ... I forget the rest. There's others.
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- trafficlight 16y agoThat's awesome. Have any of them been so brave as to actually record a song?
- steveklabnik 16y agoNot yet, but this is pretty close: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the-solo-founder-startup-rap/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the-solo-founder-startup... Patrick doesn't know about what I'm talking about though, this is unrelated.
- adamt 16y agoCongrats. As other people have said - it's refreshing to see some stories like this rather than just the 'here's my web app I built in 48 hours'. Hopefully it will help people reliase the difference between building something and building a business. At 200, you are close to what I consider to be a major inflexion point. It's often as easier (big separate post that I won't go into the full reasons why) to go from 200-2000 then it is to go from 20-200. Well done and good luck!
- barmstrong 16y agoYep, I think you're right on that - the first 200 was just figuring out the right place for everything. Should get easier from here...
- mrbird 16y agoMaybe I missed this in the post, but are you working on this full time? If not, how many hours/week would you estimate you've invested, on average?
- colonelxc 16y agoread his about page: http://www.startbreakingfree.com/about/ http://www.startbreakingfree.com/about/ Shows he's started a few other sites, including working on a YC funded (stealth) startup.
- barmstrong 16y agoYep, I have a day job. Right now it takes very little time to run the site, maybe a few hours per week. But I definitely spent a lot of time building it up front, and occasionally still do when I add new features. As a strict hourly ROI I could have made way more at a job or doing consulting work, but it's an investment that may pay off long term (or not, but either way it was way more fun :)
- antidaily 16y agoThe site is beautiful. Nice work!!
- barmstrong 16y agoI did the programming, but hired this guy to design it: http://www.jackherbert.com/ http://www.jackherbert.com/ I'd recommend him, he was good and fairly priced. (Found him on 99designs).
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- ryanb 16y agoHow did you get 16,000+ tutors signed up? That's an impressive number.
- barmstrong 16y agoTried a bunch of ideas, but the most successful was posting jobs to university websites. Can email me if you want more details.
- senthil_rajasek 16y agoNot to nitpick but your about page shows that universitytutor.com was started in 2004 but your post shows that you started the site in 2008? Also the dashboard shows decreasing timeline which means you are either losing customers and below the 200 (can't guess the scale) subscribers or there is a simple error somewhere... What are we missing ?
- barmstrong 16y agoGood point - I actually first registerred and built a site back in 2004 but it was a different business (matching people manually in Houston only). 2008 was when I switched it over to a directory site that was open to anyone and let tutors and students contact each other directly (also rebuilt it in rails). Not sure what you mean on the graph though - it seems correct to me.
- senthil_rajasek 16y agoThe dashboard graph shows just a months worth of data and for some reason I thought the timeline was decreasing. Congratulations on your success.
- ohashi 16y agoCongrats :)
- qq66 16y agoNice job dude! -Amal