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Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I

421 points by mootothemax 16y ago

mootothemax 16y ago
Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's about time I started giving something back. None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;) Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part written and live by early next week.
- misterbwong 16y ago
  Thanks for writing this article. Looking at the timeline and the slowish traction really gives balance to the i-built-a-5000-a-day-app-in-three-days-in-my-PJs articles that tend to dominate the news. It's a good look at building an actual product that shows it's not all roses and hockey-stick adoptions.
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    Thanks for your thanks! :) That's why I wrote this - as I said, it's not a huge amount of money, but it's an enjoyable hobby, and great that it pays for a few meals out a month. The question on my mind is - can I do ten of these and make some real money? ;)
  - nhangen 16y ago
    I agree, and it's the dark hours that make the learning lessons explicit, rather than implicit or looking like luck. Looking forward to the rest.
  - dholowiski 16y ago
    Agreed, it was nice to see you speaking in terms of months, and not days-or hours.
- davidw 16y ago
  Thanks for writing it up. I enjoy reading "success stories for the rest of us" sorts of things by people who aren't already famous, backed by VC's, etc... Rob Walling's book, "Start Small, Stay Small" has some pretty good advice for those of us in that boat: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    I read that book by Rob Walling earlier on this year, excellent advice and, like you, I recommend it as well :)
  - pstack 16y ago
    Yeah, I was confused by his article, because he didn't seem to explain the part where he got $40,000,000,00 in investments and hired a team of fifty and deployed a massive server farm and leased the bottom half of an entire building in downtown SF, before actually launching the product. There must have been a second page that I didn't get the link to. I mean, surely you can't start anything these days without several million dollars and a fleet of expensive highly redundant servers, right?! :P
- rsoto 16y ago
  please don't split your articles. however, it was a good read. thanks.
  - jimktrains2 16y ago
    Splitting isn't a huge deal to me. It's hard to write sometimes, and getting a bit out there helps you get the rest out there. Now, paginating articles (you know, it's not like there isn't infinite vertical space). That is a different story.
  - TamDenholm 16y ago
    While i agree that it can be annoying, i think the point is to get users to subscribe to his blog, which i did, but only because i think the majority of the overall blog content will be interesting to me.
  - gcb 16y ago
    he did mention "part I"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- greyman 16y ago
  Thank you for sharing your experience. Btw, couldn't you earn more money by lowering the price? I personally find it too high.
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    Btw, couldn't you earn more money by lowering the price? I personally find it too high. I'll mention something about that in part II ;)
- raphar 16y ago
  Have a couple of questions for you (unrelated to twittemachine): Do freelancers sites bring enough jobs/money to work on it full time and make a living? Is it a positive experience?
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    Do freelancers sites bring enough jobs/money to work on it full time and make a living? I guess it depends on where you live, but for here in Poland, sure :) And whilst freelancing can be somewhat of a lonely business, I found it very satisfying :)
- rexreed 16y ago
  Awesome article - I'm looking forward to Part II. We're in a similar place!
dpcan 16y ago
I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)
  - patio11 16y ago
    Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.
    - mootothemax 16y ago
      Thanks, great advice :) Right now I'm taking backups of dumps - slow, but a tiny bit easier to deal with. At some point I'm thinking about replicating to a slave somewhere, although to be honest I need to do some more reading about best practises.
      - 2mur 16y ago
        Yes. Obviously, specifics will be dependent upon your exact situation, but it would be nice to have a small road-map for backups. I occasionally take my database dumps and fire up postgres on the home server and make sure I can restore the database. That's about as far as I take it usually. Probably not a robust failsafe, but it's what I do now.
    - sp4rki 16y ago
      I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.
ramynassar 16y ago
Will you continue this story?
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Absolutely! I'm hoping to have the next part up by next week :)
eggbrain 16y ago
Greatly written article, but I wish it hadn't been pulled apart into three separate posts.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Thanks! The reason why I've separated is time - I thought it would be better to release them as I write them, rather than make everyone wait several weeks :)
  - eggbrain 16y ago
    I can definitely see it from your perspective: not only does it take less time to write one article rather than three [and probably less pressure as well!], it gives you content for your website (not to mention a steady stream of visitors wanting to see your content, rather than just one big group of visitors then nothing). From my perspective though, it is unfortunate: I'm interested in the story, but I don't know if I will be interested enough to check back a few weeks from now to see the updates, perhaps because I forget the URL, perhaps because I don't see a post on HN about it, or perhaps because I just forget. I also think I'm spoiled by the internet: I want things now! :)
    - jpk 16y ago
      Solution: RSS! I'm a google reader user, and when I find things like this, I toss them in there. If it's not interesting enough going forward, I can always unsubscribe. Of course, if the author is using twitter/facebook/whateverelse to hype posts, you can use those to similar effect, too.
      - mootothemax 16y ago
        My solution is looking at integrating MailChimp's offering once the traffic's died down a bit. I should have done it before really, but am reluctant to further stress a server that's already getting a bit upset ;)
    - chopsueyar 16y ago
djb_hackernews 16y ago
It looks like what you are getting at is that the design is important. I don't think your original design is a bad starting point, much better than any designs I've come up with for my projects. It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. A reason I've avoided buying a theme, don't know what I'd do with it once I had it.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. Honestly, it's pretty simple: you have the HTML for each page that is demonstrated. Chop out the relevant bits for headers, footers, and then any tables etc. that you might need, copy across the various css, js and images directories and you're done! It really doesn't take long. Sometimes the themes come with PHP versions as well, but not always. If you want to test yourself, why not try downloading an open source theme (e.g. http://www.oswd.org/ http://www.oswd.org/) and take a look at what's in the HTML? I can't guarantee it'll be an identical process, but it should be fairly similar :)
moe 16y ago
I like how you build the tension towards the cliffhanger. ;-)
karterk 16y ago
Thanks for posting this. What do you use for handling the recurring billing?
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Right now I use the most basic of PayPal business accounts. With IPN notifications, it's pretty simple to get up and running quickly.
delvan07 16y ago
This is interesting. In the next piece can I request you go into a bit more detail about how you increase in traffic flow to your site...basically what marketing did you do?
MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
Wow, it's like reading my own history, especially the beginning, the knowing that gazillions of people will be clamoring for what you build. It's tough when you find that 99% of reactions are "meh..."
revorad 16y ago
Hey I remember when you launched! I even gave you some "business" advice - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641. Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Me? Drama? Never! ;) Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D
  - goatforce5 16y ago
    Make sure you buy the guy who recommended themeforest a beer. He sounds very wise and probably is totally awesome.
    - mootothemax 16y ago
      Yeah, he has his moments ;-p It'd be ideal if suddenly it earned enough to buy a couple of tickets from Canada to Warsaw so that this guy and his +1 can collect a pint in person :)
    - nateberkopec 16y ago
      Same. Why haven't I thought of that?
davidmat 16y ago
Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?
- jh3 16y ago
  I have never tried getting work off of vWorker or similar sites, but today I looked through vWorker for the first time in a while and it still seems to be what it was: a bunch of people offering hardly anything for complex projects. I'd imagine you would need to go through hundreds of postings in order to find someone who is offering a fair amount of money for a decent sized project. That said, if you dedicate all of your time to doing that (sifting through all of the bad postings on multiple freelance work sites to find the gems) and build a reputation, it seems possible to make some good money.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it might not be that great in, say, London or New York.
  - yeahsure 16y ago
    I would certainly love an article about how to do that. In my limited experience, it's actually pretty hard to make decent money through these sites.
  - bobbin_cygna 16y ago
    > I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. A blog post about it would be nice.
dr_ 16y ago
This is great, look forward to reading the second part. At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs). I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer. Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?
  - dr_ 16y ago
    Two weeks seems fair. Long enough to get familiar with the system, but short enough to make it inconvenient to keep signing up for free trial periods repeatedly with different twitter accounts they can keep making up. FWIW, Basecamp offers a 30 day free trial for their services.
  - rhizome 16y ago
    You want it to be long enough for your customers to integrate it into their habits. If they tend to be slow to decide (low conversion for a given trial period length), then they might just need more time to depend on it.
  - oscardelben 16y ago
    you want to do some a/b testing ;)
zacharyz 16y ago
I absolutely love reading articles like this that are grounded in reality where the point of the app is to actually make money. The fact that you are making any money at all brings value to what you have to say that all of us can learn from. I think most entrepreneurs will agree that it is that first sale that is the hardest part. I look forward to your next article!
csomar 16y ago
Great read. However, I wanted to mention that this is actually a story and not a guide.
taylorbuley 16y ago
I'm happily surprised that the word "lifestyle" hasn't been dropped yet in this thread.
- mckoss 16y ago
  At $500/mo, this is more like a "weekend-style" business, providing some nice walking around money even if not enough to pay the bills.
myearwood 16y ago
The fact that this article is so popular is sort of sad.That shows that a lot of people on HN are not making $500 a month from their web apps .We should have higher goals than this.
- delano 16y ago
  Every great product starts out as a dream but only a few begin with great fanfare. OP is talking about the more common reality of launching something new. As a wise advertisement once said, it takes time to cook a chicken.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  I agree, kinda. I'm glad for the author's success so far (and, as another HNer said, that the word "lifestyle" has not yet reared its head in discussion). On the other hand,back in October, about how my products had brought in $216,000 in revenue in 2010 to date (from $0 in 2008), and I got maybe 30 votes on HN, barely made it onto the front page: http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/ http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/ Which leads to me to wonder: Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular, but nobody was interested in mine? For me, it's not just about getting the hits, but getting my message out there (I am all about making & SELLING paid products, not "startups"), so it's a question of effectiveness. I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between (which is where I fall -- now). But there's probably also something else going on, whether it's me, my essay, or the audience. If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them. Hi, original post author here! :) I think the main difference between our two posts is that mine goes into more detail about how I created the app and bought in revenue, whereas your posts lists only that you're already making serious dough (incidentally, congratulations! :)), and how your revenues have grown - not a lot about how to get there in the first place. Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular I'd like to take issue with this point, although please do correct me if I'm seeing criticism where none was intended :) This is obviously not a full-on startup - I don't work eight hours every evening on it; in fact I barely put in that many hours on it per month. Maybe I need to clarify this in my next blog post. Either way, I don't understand why you're knocking it for being 1.5 years old.
jamespacileo 16y ago
Hey guys, not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin panel... I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)
- pepsi_can 16y ago
  Can anyone elaborate on this? From the regular license description: The main thing you cannot do is offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part of a project. So you can use the item in a free game, but not in a game that is on sale. You can use the item in a website, but not in a web template that you sell. Here are the full legal terms: http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-terms/ http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-te... Specifically, I wonder if you are referring to this line: (d) Unless you have our prior written consent, you must not directly or indirectly license, sub-license, sell or resell or provide for free the Work or offer to do any of these things. All of these things are referred to as Resale. (g) You must not incorporate the Work in a work which is created for Resale by you or your client. I wonder what they mean by "indirectly selling" the Work. Does this apply to SaaS? What about Freemium products?
  - jasoon 16y ago
    Taken from http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-regular-and-extended-license-usage-examples/ http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-re... Regular License Examples - The Regular License could be used for any of the following: Single website (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single website for a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single intranet site project. Extended License Examples - The Extended License could be used for any of the following: Template for a web service such as WPMU. Part of a software package for sale. To me that reads like in this case, the Regular license would be fine. The extended license seems more about situations where your customers will be creating their own unique and publicly accessible content using the template (You start up a blogging service www.omgblogs.com and someone could create their blog at mahblog.omgblogs.com then pick from a template you got from ThemeForest)
- 16y ago
shazow 16y ago
I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident. Some feedback: * [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into. * Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them. Great work, I look forward to the second part!
- icedpulleys 16y ago
  > I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them. Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.
  - shazow 16y ago
    They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't "organically display" unfollows, you should not as well. > Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed on Twitter.
    - icedpulleys 16y ago
      Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing it, I appreciate it. It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.
bane 16y ago
Thanks for writing this up! We're currently going through a similar experience. The good news is that we went from 1 signup a month to quite a few per day (with a few days at over 100 new signups) -- mostly by following things that we've learned here on HN. A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do with. Exciting stuff!
- guynamedloren 16y ago
  Sounds like your hard work paid off indeed! Care to elaborate on how you gained users? Did you only email editors, or did you have other strategies as well? What were your pitches like? I'd love to hear!
  - bane 16y ago
    I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different details) but here's our story: Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively. Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors. We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in. We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc. One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is. On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing. About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-from-gmail-or-yahoo-accounts-in-the-future http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-f... I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile. So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike. Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting. It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story. In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).
sushumna 16y ago
Thats an inspiring story and informative tips..Iam on my way to build one small app. I am expect atleast half of your earnings. Thats also big for me... as pocket money. Waiting for your next part.
phlux 16y ago
Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that should certainly be shared out... I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly. Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall: The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X. he then turns and build the application to do X himself. This in and of itself is fine -- but it will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely. The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit. I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way this article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind) This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.
- jeromec 16y ago
  phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way. > why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing work That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best. Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are busy building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are many amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off. Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?
eurohacker 16y ago
it would be good if you also describe what kind of architexture you are using for the app and why - what frameworks , languages ( django, jquery ) also what other tools you are using for development/testing and why ( github, eclipse, firebug etc.)
nikcub 16y ago
Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page. Make the rules so that a blog post referral only requires a single click - that way you can verify that the blog post is from who they say they are Once you have that infrastructure, you can use it as a more generalized referral system for people that want to tweet out a link to your product, etc. For eg. every tweet referral signup gets you a free month There are hordes of freelancers out there who do nothing but affiliate marketing. For those types, you want to send them 30-50% of revenue. There are entire products to do this for you - cj.com et al. Their referrals made up over 50% of new users on a product I worked on previously.
- lsc 16y ago
  >Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page. this would solve the problem of people who don't produce clickthroughs getting paid, but it wouldn't solve the problem of looking scummy, and if you have a bunch of duplicated content all over the place, you look scummy, and the person who actually wrote the content is going to be cheesed. Reputation management (which is to say, wanting to not look scummy) is the primary reason why I don't have a referral system. Well, that and I'm not willing to put that much cash in to customer acquisition. But it's primarily about reputation; It's hard enough presenting a consistent message when you have two or three employees. Even if you only care about money, reputation is worth quite a lot. I'm sure there are ways to do affiliate marketing without looking scummy, but it's not obvious or easy.
josefresco 16y ago
Love how he cited the crappy design as the main reason why the app sucks ... Then proceeds to put the minimum effort into design to adress the problem. Give a designer a chance to work for you, you will end up with a result that is better but more importantly unique.
liamgooding 16y ago
Thanks, an interesting read that puts a lot of the other "I'm so amazing because my rails app makes me and my uni buddies £50k a month" into perspective. But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice to turn that $500 into $5k :)

421 points by mootothemax 16y ago

Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's about time I started giving something back. None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;) Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part written and live by early next week.

misterbwong 16y ago
Thanks for writing this article. Looking at the timeline and the slowish traction really gives balance to the i-built-a-5000-a-day-app-in-three-days-in-my-PJs articles that tend to dominate the news. It's a good look at building an actual product that shows it's not all roses and hockey-stick adoptions.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Thanks for your thanks! :) That's why I wrote this - as I said, it's not a huge amount of money, but it's an enjoyable hobby, and great that it pays for a few meals out a month. The question on my mind is - can I do ten of these and make some real money? ;)
- nhangen 16y ago
  I agree, and it's the dark hours that make the learning lessons explicit, rather than implicit or looking like luck. Looking forward to the rest.
- dholowiski 16y ago
  Agreed, it was nice to see you speaking in terms of months, and not days-or hours.
davidw 16y ago
Thanks for writing it up. I enjoy reading "success stories for the rest of us" sorts of things by people who aren't already famous, backed by VC's, etc... Rob Walling's book, "Start Small, Stay Small" has some pretty good advice for those of us in that boat: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I read that book by Rob Walling earlier on this year, excellent advice and, like you, I recommend it as well :)
- pstack 16y ago
  Yeah, I was confused by his article, because he didn't seem to explain the part where he got $40,000,000,00 in investments and hired a team of fifty and deployed a massive server farm and leased the bottom half of an entire building in downtown SF, before actually launching the product. There must have been a second page that I didn't get the link to. I mean, surely you can't start anything these days without several million dollars and a fleet of expensive highly redundant servers, right?! :P
rsoto 16y ago
please don't split your articles. however, it was a good read. thanks.
- jimktrains2 16y ago
  Splitting isn't a huge deal to me. It's hard to write sometimes, and getting a bit out there helps you get the rest out there. Now, paginating articles (you know, it's not like there isn't infinite vertical space). That is a different story.
- TamDenholm 16y ago
  While i agree that it can be annoying, i think the point is to get users to subscribe to his blog, which i did, but only because i think the majority of the overall blog content will be interesting to me.
- gcb 16y ago
  he did mention "part I"
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
greyman 16y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. Btw, couldn't you earn more money by lowering the price? I personally find it too high.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Btw, couldn't you earn more money by lowering the price? I personally find it too high. I'll mention something about that in part II ;)
raphar 16y ago
Have a couple of questions for you (unrelated to twittemachine): Do freelancers sites bring enough jobs/money to work on it full time and make a living? Is it a positive experience?
- mootothemax 16y ago
  Do freelancers sites bring enough jobs/money to work on it full time and make a living? I guess it depends on where you live, but for here in Poland, sure :) And whilst freelancing can be somewhat of a lonely business, I found it very satisfying :)
rexreed 16y ago
Awesome article - I'm looking forward to Part II. We're in a similar place!

dpcan 16y ago

I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.

mootothemax 16y ago
Because prgmr is cheap and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :) For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)
- patio11 16y ago
  Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    Thanks, great advice :) Right now I'm taking backups of dumps - slow, but a tiny bit easier to deal with. At some point I'm thinking about replicating to a slave somewhere, although to be honest I need to do some more reading about best practises.
    - 2mur 16y ago
      Yes. Obviously, specifics will be dependent upon your exact situation, but it would be nice to have a small road-map for backups. I occasionally take my database dumps and fire up postgres on the home server and make sure I can restore the database. That's about as far as I take it usually. Probably not a robust failsafe, but it's what I do now.
  - sp4rki 16y ago
    I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.

ramynassar 16y ago

Will you continue this story?

mootothemax 16y ago
Absolutely! I'm hoping to have the next part up by next week :)

eggbrain 16y ago

Greatly written article, but I wish it hadn't been pulled apart into three separate posts.

mootothemax 16y ago
Thanks! The reason why I've separated is time - I thought it would be better to release them as I write them, rather than make everyone wait several weeks :)
- eggbrain 16y ago
  I can definitely see it from your perspective: not only does it take less time to write one article rather than three [and probably less pressure as well!], it gives you content for your website (not to mention a steady stream of visitors wanting to see your content, rather than just one big group of visitors then nothing). From my perspective though, it is unfortunate: I'm interested in the story, but I don't know if I will be interested enough to check back a few weeks from now to see the updates, perhaps because I forget the URL, perhaps because I don't see a post on HN about it, or perhaps because I just forget. I also think I'm spoiled by the internet: I want things now! :)
  - jpk 16y ago
    Solution: RSS! I'm a google reader user, and when I find things like this, I toss them in there. If it's not interesting enough going forward, I can always unsubscribe. Of course, if the author is using twitter/facebook/whateverelse to hype posts, you can use those to similar effect, too.
    - mootothemax 16y ago
      My solution is looking at integrating MailChimp's offering once the traffic's died down a bit. I should have done it before really, but am reluctant to further stress a server that's already getting a bit upset ;)
  - chopsueyar 16y ago

djb_hackernews 16y ago

It looks like what you are getting at is that the design is important. I don't think your original design is a bad starting point, much better than any designs I've come up with for my projects. It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. A reason I've avoided buying a theme, don't know what I'd do with it once I had it.

mootothemax 16y ago
It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. Honestly, it's pretty simple: you have the HTML for each page that is demonstrated. Chop out the relevant bits for headers, footers, and then any tables etc. that you might need, copy across the various css, js and images directories and you're done! It really doesn't take long. Sometimes the themes come with PHP versions as well, but not always. If you want to test yourself, why not try downloading an open source theme (e.g. http://www.oswd.org/ http://www.oswd.org/) and take a look at what's in the HTML? I can't guarantee it'll be an identical process, but it should be fairly similar :)

moe 16y ago

I like how you build the tension towards the cliffhanger. ;-)

karterk 16y ago

Thanks for posting this. What do you use for handling the recurring billing?

mootothemax 16y ago
Right now I use the most basic of PayPal business accounts. With IPN notifications, it's pretty simple to get up and running quickly.

delvan07 16y ago

This is interesting. In the next piece can I request you go into a bit more detail about how you increase in traffic flow to your site...basically what marketing did you do?

MicahWedemeyer 16y ago

Wow, it's like reading my own history, especially the beginning, the knowing that gazillions of people will be clamoring for what you build. It's tough when you find that 99% of reactions are "meh..."

revorad 16y ago

Hey I remember when you launched! I even gave you some "business" advice - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641. Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).

mootothemax 16y ago
Me? Drama? Never! ;) Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D
- goatforce5 16y ago
  Make sure you buy the guy who recommended themeforest a beer. He sounds very wise and probably is totally awesome.
  - mootothemax 16y ago
    Yeah, he has his moments ;-p It'd be ideal if suddenly it earned enough to buy a couple of tickets from Canada to Warsaw so that this guy and his +1 can collect a pint in person :)
  - nateberkopec 16y ago
    Same. Why haven't I thought of that?

davidmat 16y ago

Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?

jh3 16y ago
I have never tried getting work off of vWorker or similar sites, but today I looked through vWorker for the first time in a while and it still seems to be what it was: a bunch of people offering hardly anything for complex projects. I'd imagine you would need to go through hundreds of postings in order to find someone who is offering a fair amount of money for a decent sized project. That said, if you dedicate all of your time to doing that (sifting through all of the bad postings on multiple freelance work sites to find the gems) and build a reputation, it seems possible to make some good money.
mootothemax 16y ago
I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it might not be that great in, say, London or New York.
- yeahsure 16y ago
  I would certainly love an article about how to do that. In my limited experience, it's actually pretty hard to make decent money through these sites.
- bobbin_cygna 16y ago
  > I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. A blog post about it would be nice.

dr_ 16y ago

This is great, look forward to reading the second part. At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs). I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer.

mootothemax 16y ago
I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer. Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?
- dr_ 16y ago
  Two weeks seems fair. Long enough to get familiar with the system, but short enough to make it inconvenient to keep signing up for free trial periods repeatedly with different twitter accounts they can keep making up. FWIW, Basecamp offers a 30 day free trial for their services.
- rhizome 16y ago
  You want it to be long enough for your customers to integrate it into their habits. If they tend to be slow to decide (low conversion for a given trial period length), then they might just need more time to depend on it.
- oscardelben 16y ago
  you want to do some a/b testing ;)

zacharyz 16y ago

I absolutely love reading articles like this that are grounded in reality where the point of the app is to actually make money. The fact that you are making any money at all brings value to what you have to say that all of us can learn from. I think most entrepreneurs will agree that it is that first sale that is the hardest part. I look forward to your next article!

csomar 16y ago

Great read. However, I wanted to mention that this is actually a story and not a guide.

taylorbuley 16y ago

I'm happily surprised that the word "lifestyle" hasn't been dropped yet in this thread.

mckoss 16y ago
At $500/mo, this is more like a "weekend-style" business, providing some nice walking around money even if not enough to pay the bills.

myearwood 16y ago

The fact that this article is so popular is sort of sad.That shows that a lot of people on HN are not making $500 a month from their web apps .We should have higher goals than this.

delano 16y ago
Every great product starts out as a dream but only a few begin with great fanfare. OP is talking about the more common reality of launching something new. As a wise advertisement once said, it takes time to cook a chicken.
ahoyhere 16y ago
I agree, kinda. I'm glad for the author's success so far (and, as another HNer said, that the word "lifestyle" has not yet reared its head in discussion). On the other hand,back in October, about how my products had brought in $216,000 in revenue in 2010 to date (from $0 in 2008), and I got maybe 30 votes on HN, barely made it onto the front page: http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/ http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/ Which leads to me to wonder: Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular, but nobody was interested in mine? For me, it's not just about getting the hits, but getting my message out there (I am all about making & SELLING paid products, not "startups"), so it's a question of effectiveness. I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between (which is where I fall -- now). But there's probably also something else going on, whether it's me, my essay, or the audience. If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.
- mootothemax 16y ago
  I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them. Hi, original post author here! :) I think the main difference between our two posts is that mine goes into more detail about how I created the app and bought in revenue, whereas your posts lists only that you're already making serious dough (incidentally, congratulations! :)), and how your revenues have grown - not a lot about how to get there in the first place. Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular I'd like to take issue with this point, although please do correct me if I'm seeing criticism where none was intended :) This is obviously not a full-on startup - I don't work eight hours every evening on it; in fact I barely put in that many hours on it per month. Maybe I need to clarify this in my next blog post. Either way, I don't understand why you're knocking it for being 1.5 years old.

jamespacileo 16y ago

Hey guys, not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin panel... I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)

pepsi_can 16y ago
Can anyone elaborate on this? From the regular license description: The main thing you cannot do is offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part of a project. So you can use the item in a free game, but not in a game that is on sale. You can use the item in a website, but not in a web template that you sell. Here are the full legal terms: http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-terms/ http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-te... Specifically, I wonder if you are referring to this line: (d) Unless you have our prior written consent, you must not directly or indirectly license, sub-license, sell or resell or provide for free the Work or offer to do any of these things. All of these things are referred to as Resale. (g) You must not incorporate the Work in a work which is created for Resale by you or your client. I wonder what they mean by "indirectly selling" the Work. Does this apply to SaaS? What about Freemium products?
- jasoon 16y ago
  Taken from http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-regular-and-extended-license-usage-examples/ http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-re... Regular License Examples - The Regular License could be used for any of the following: Single website (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single website for a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single intranet site project. Extended License Examples - The Extended License could be used for any of the following: Template for a web service such as WPMU. Part of a software package for sale. To me that reads like in this case, the Regular license would be fine. The extended license seems more about situations where your customers will be creating their own unique and publicly accessible content using the template (You start up a blogging service www.omgblogs.com and someone could create their blog at mahblog.omgblogs.com then pick from a template you got from ThemeForest)
16y ago

shazow 16y ago

I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident. Some feedback: * [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into. * Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them. Great work, I look forward to the second part!

icedpulleys 16y ago
> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them. Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.
- shazow 16y ago
  They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't "organically display" unfollows, you should not as well. > Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed on Twitter.
  - icedpulleys 16y ago
    Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing it, I appreciate it. It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.

bane 16y ago

Thanks for writing this up! We're currently going through a similar experience. The good news is that we went from 1 signup a month to quite a few per day (with a few days at over 100 new signups) -- mostly by following things that we've learned here on HN. A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do with. Exciting stuff!

guynamedloren 16y ago
Sounds like your hard work paid off indeed! Care to elaborate on how you gained users? Did you only email editors, or did you have other strategies as well? What were your pitches like? I'd love to hear!
- bane 16y ago
  I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different details) but here's our story: Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively. Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors. We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in. We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc. One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is. On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing. About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-from-gmail-or-yahoo-accounts-in-the-future http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-f... I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile. So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike. Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting. It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story. In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).

sushumna 16y ago

Thats an inspiring story and informative tips..Iam on my way to build one small app. I am expect atleast half of your earnings. Thats also big for me... as pocket money. Waiting for your next part.

phlux 16y ago

Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that should certainly be shared out... I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly. Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall: The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X. he then turns and build the application to do X himself. This in and of itself is fine -- but it will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely. The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit. I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way this article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind) This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and-of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.

jeromec 16y ago
phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369 To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way. > why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing work That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best. Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are busy building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are many amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off. Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?

eurohacker 16y ago

it would be good if you also describe what kind of architexture you are using for the app and why - what frameworks , languages ( django, jquery ) also what other tools you are using for development/testing and why ( github, eclipse, firebug etc.)

nikcub 16y ago

Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page. Make the rules so that a blog post referral only requires a single click - that way you can verify that the blog post is from who they say they are Once you have that infrastructure, you can use it as a more generalized referral system for people that want to tweet out a link to your product, etc. For eg. every tweet referral signup gets you a free month There are hordes of freelancers out there who do nothing but affiliate marketing. For those types, you want to send them 30-50% of revenue. There are entire products to do this for you - cj.com et al. Their referrals made up over 50% of new users on a product I worked on previously.

lsc 16y ago
>Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page. this would solve the problem of people who don't produce clickthroughs getting paid, but it wouldn't solve the problem of looking scummy, and if you have a bunch of duplicated content all over the place, you look scummy, and the person who actually wrote the content is going to be cheesed. Reputation management (which is to say, wanting to not look scummy) is the primary reason why I don't have a referral system. Well, that and I'm not willing to put that much cash in to customer acquisition. But it's primarily about reputation; It's hard enough presenting a consistent message when you have two or three employees. Even if you only care about money, reputation is worth quite a lot. I'm sure there are ways to do affiliate marketing without looking scummy, but it's not obvious or easy.

josefresco 16y ago

Love how he cited the crappy design as the main reason why the app sucks ... Then proceeds to put the minimum effort into design to adress the problem. Give a designer a chance to work for you, you will end up with a result that is better but more importantly unique.

liamgooding 16y ago

Thanks, an interesting read that puts a lot of the other "I'm so amazing because my rails app makes me and my uni buddies £50k a month" into perspective. But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice to turn that $500 into $5k :)