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It's a great accomplishment to book thousands of dollars of revenue within a few weeks of launch. But as the article states, this is profitability without cove
by jbyers 18y ago
It's a great accomplishment to book thousands of dollars of revenue within a few weeks of launch. But as the article states, this is profitability without covering salary -- a big disclaimer.
- swombat 18y agoAnd doesn't count the product development sunk costs, either. By his maths, my first business was profitable in the first week, including my salary. What makes product businesses unprofitable upfront is not the ongoing costs, it's the development costs.
- jraines 18y agoOff-topic but honest question: Why does everyone say "maths" instead of "math" these days? Is it a European thing, an academic thing, or just a meme among hackers? I never once heard it or saw it written like that before Hacker News / proggit. I cringed when someone on proggit recently said "Do the maths!" I don't think that's a saying anywhere.
- sethg 18y agoUK "maths" = USA "math"
- pc 18y ago"Maths" is the standard term outside of North America, as far as I know. I'm Irish, and "math" has always sounded odd. It seems that "maths" is the semantically correct option. To take your quote, "do the math" expands to "do the mathematic" - which is surely wrong.
- tlrobinson 18y agoI also cringe when people use the term "codes" instead of "code". I don't think of code as being divisible into discrete units, it's like a fluid. Like "water", you rarely say "waters". There are "programs" and "libraries" and "frameworks" that are made up of "code" or multiple "files containing code"... but they are not "codes"! If you want to use the word "codes", you'll need to give me an adequate definition of the word "code" as a singular noun (which I will most likely disagree with). In my mind "code" means programming language code, and "codes" means cryptography related codes. </rant>
- gaius 18y ago"Codes" is the common usage in the engineering sector, probably because "code" was already in-use to identify component items.
- davidw 18y agoI agree with you, and the name of the concept is "uncountable noun": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun One of the funnier differences between Italian and English is that in the former, you say "hairs" - it's not uncountable, which to us sounds pretty funny, as I'm sure we do when talking about our "one hair". "My hairs are all messed up!"
- mst 18y agoI despise it. It's an effective way to eliminate idiots though, "plz send teh codes" being the canonical example. I find 'plz' and 'thx' and 'tks' and '10x' and so on the most annoying though; how the fuck is it polite if you can't even be bothered to spell the complete word? If you want to show gratitude, 'thanks' or 'thank you' are much better, and english already provides 'ta' as a short form. Sigh. People treating IRC like AOL make my sad.
- tlrobinson 18y agoUnfortunately it's actually not a very good idiot filter because a lot of non-native English speakers seem to use "codes" instead of "code".
- Mistone 18y agosunk cost are sunk cost. after launch they don't matter, so I think he is on target for leaving those off. Oh and congrats on this early milestone. I'm wondering why your going to focus ads on the low performing market, why not hit where the iron is hot (i.e the market where you are gaining customers)?
- balsamiq 18y agoHi Mistone, I am focusing on the plugin version because the margins there are much, much higher. That said, I am definitely working hard to keep customers of my desktop version happy...just look at my blog's posts from the last few days...oh, and Mockups For Desktop 1.1 is coming up on the 21st! :) Re: ads: I haven't done any AdWord-style advertising yet, just through bloggers and twitter. So far so good.
- balsamiq 18y agoI agree that not including my time so far is a BIG disclaimer, but isn't every startup a labor of love to some extent? :) What funded most of the development of Mockups was my day job, as I worked on Balsamiq for many, many nights and week-ends before "making the jump". Like I said in the post, I am counting as costs only what's in Balsamiq's bank account statement at the moment...I am only just starting after all.
- cawel 18y agoas I worked on Balsamiq for many, many nights and week-ends And this for sure is another form of cost.
- webwright 18y agoYaw, using the word profitable isn't really reasonable even with a disclaimer. Software startups have very few significant expenses other than manpower. Our 3-person startup (when we start paying ourselves) will literally be paying out 10x more per month in salaries (that's with fairly stunted salaries) than all other expenses COMBINED. It's a long road. Nonetheless, killer accomplishment and I think it's a kickass tool. I am leery of the non-recurring revenue (I read the authors post on why he made that decision, but I still think he's wrong)... Every customer adds a touch to the support overhead and doesn't add to the revenue line but once. Customer acquisition is hard, and fixed price software has to do it constantly or die. SaaS is golden. Low risk for the customer, beautifully aligned interests, and you cease to be a slave to the launching new versions just to get your current customers to give you more money.
- balsamiq 18y agoHey there, thanks for the comment. Regarding your last point: I totally agree SaaS is golden, I just don't want to host it myself now, and thus be a slave to having to keep the service up all the time. :)
- webwright 18y agoHeh-- you're just choosing a different master. You're going to be a slave to sales/distribution instead. I'm only half-kidding-- it's no coincidence that most shrink-wrapped software guys are trying to get into SaaS offerings.