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I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie. I would just think that no one would ever pay for this

I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie. I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.

zenorocha 6y ago
I never thought people would pay for a color scheme too. That's why, I tried to position in a way where you'd not only get the actual themes, but also a bunch of other resources to make you more productive.
- dlkmp 6y ago
  Might be just me but once I saw that "x tips to get better" ebook, the offer lost credibility in my eyes. It just feels more believable to me that there might be some guy who knows so much about colors and the corresponding theory that he can actually can come up with a theme worth 100 bucks than that there is a guy who can do this _and_ give me tips on random semi-related topics.
therealmarv 6y ago
Wow, I created a color theme for VSCode some years ago (which actually got some attention by some people and there was one guy even adapting it to Google Chrome dev console) and not even one second I thought that this kind of stuff could be monetised in any way. Well done.
- zenorocha 6y ago
  Same thing happened with me. I built this theme as an open source project and forgot it existed. People started to create different forks and port them to different platforms. One day I realized how big that was and decided to monetize. One year later 100k. Crazy!
mettamage 6y ago
I have a heuristic for this. When something sounds stupidly simple, then try it if the upside might be huge (and you have free time on your hands, there's always an opportunity cost). The chance is higher that you're right, but in my personal experience, less high than I think. Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1] But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a trade-off :) [1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many empiric experiments, especially with business/social things like this HN submission.
laurent92 6y ago
In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar thought “Let’s sell an equivalent to the dozen of free open-source bugtrackers, but for a price.” Today Atlassian is worth about $60bn, they owned about 75%.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  And it's ripe for a lightweight alternative that gets customers that want the fast, basic set of bug tracking features. Jira is horrific.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    People have always said that ;) but Jira is super-expensive. It was $60 per user (permanent), and they’ve increased the prices a lot. Especially since you buy Confluence and all the little addons separately.
  - thitcanh 6y ago
    Horrific but people keep buying it. From Jira’s owner POV, Jira is pretty great.
  - mritchie712 6y ago
    https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    I find the most common source of Jira-hate is a combined refusal to leave many of its features on the table by management and general ignorance about how little Jira actually imposes on you by the gangpressed users. Most of that bloat you have to deal with? Blame your bosses, not Atlassian.
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Jira is a bloated piece of garbage out of the box. It doesn't need PHB configuration to get there.
matwood 6y ago
People pay for convenience every single day. Just look at Starbucks.
- suyash 6y ago
  not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free
  - jiofih 6y ago
    I pay for GitHub
  - zenorocha 6y ago
    I disagree with the argument that developers don't pay for things. Yes, there's a huge open source culture where people can have access to free code on GitHub. However, there's a huge market of paid products that developers will purchase. There are many examples out there like Tailwind, Chakra UI, Envato, etc.
  - duckmysick 6y ago
    Yes - developers. Look how many of them pay for Digital Ocean/AWS to host their projects instead of rolling their own servers.
  - grumple 6y ago
    Yeah, but that also serves the purpose of making us encourage our workplaces to use GitHub, and they pay for it.
  - kcartlidge 6y ago
    > not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free I do use the free stuff (GitHub, VS Code, etc). And I also pay for NCrunch, Wallaby, RubyMine, Rider, GoLand, PyCharm, FastMail, PCloud, and more. Most of the stuff I pay for has free equivalents (and yes, I know JetBrains have an all-products subscription rather than separate Ruby, .Net, Go, and Python, but I have reasons).
- the_af 6y ago
aeturnum 6y ago
One of the things I think about is how important scale is for evaluating the viability of a product. I suspect that there aren't enough people who would pay $99 for a IDE theme to support an ongoing company with employees. However, for a single designer, it's perfect. The fact that 99.9% of the population turns their nose up doesn't matter because 0.1% is still 600,000 people. $100k is just over 1000 sales, which seems eminently doable for nearly any project. My take-away is that - if you're considering a solo side project that will only work if you charge a "high" price (which probably isn't as high as you think it is) or if you get a ton of sales - try charging the high price!
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  The "you only need 0.1% of people" is a fallacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358310.
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    From the article: "...it doesn’t work, unless you have massive amounts of funding or a brilliant idea that can completely disrupt the existing the market." That's why I said scale of the project matters. Using a 1% (or 0.1%) metric to found a company is rubbish. Using it to guesstimate if a personal project might get some buyers seems much more reasonable. This probably isn't a $100k recurring revenue project, but it's reasonable to imagine that you could get up to $100k revenue selling a $99 product to programmers.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

zenorocha 6y ago

I never thought people would pay for a color scheme too. That's why, I tried to position in a way where you'd not only get the actual themes, but also a bunch of other resources to make you more productive.

dlkmp 6y ago
Might be just me but once I saw that "x tips to get better" ebook, the offer lost credibility in my eyes. It just feels more believable to me that there might be some guy who knows so much about colors and the corresponding theory that he can actually can come up with a theme worth 100 bucks than that there is a guy who can do this _and_ give me tips on random semi-related topics.

therealmarv 6y ago

Wow, I created a color theme for VSCode some years ago (which actually got some attention by some people and there was one guy even adapting it to Google Chrome dev console) and not even one second I thought that this kind of stuff could be monetised in any way. Well done.

zenorocha 6y ago
Same thing happened with me. I built this theme as an open source project and forgot it existed. People started to create different forks and port them to different platforms. One day I realized how big that was and decided to monetize. One year later 100k. Crazy!

mettamage 6y ago

I have a heuristic for this. When something sounds stupidly simple, then try it if the upside might be huge (and you have free time on your hands, there's always an opportunity cost). The chance is higher that you're right, but in my personal experience, less high than I think. Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1] But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a trade-off :) [1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many empiric experiments, especially with business/social things like this HN submission.

laurent92 6y ago

In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar thought “Let’s sell an equivalent to the dozen of free open-source bugtrackers, but for a price.” Today Atlassian is worth about $60bn, they owned about 75%.

DrBazza 6y ago
And it's ripe for a lightweight alternative that gets customers that want the fast, basic set of bug tracking features. Jira is horrific.
- laurent92 6y ago
  People have always said that ;) but Jira is super-expensive. It was $60 per user (permanent), and they’ve increased the prices a lot. Especially since you buy Confluence and all the little addons separately.
- thitcanh 6y ago
  Horrific but people keep buying it. From Jira’s owner POV, Jira is pretty great.
- mritchie712 6y ago
  https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I find the most common source of Jira-hate is a combined refusal to leave many of its features on the table by management and general ignorance about how little Jira actually imposes on you by the gangpressed users. Most of that bloat you have to deal with? Blame your bosses, not Atlassian.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Jira is a bloated piece of garbage out of the box. It doesn't need PHB configuration to get there.

matwood 6y ago

People pay for convenience every single day. Just look at Starbucks.

suyash 6y ago
not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free
- jiofih 6y ago
  I pay for GitHub
- zenorocha 6y ago
  I disagree with the argument that developers don't pay for things. Yes, there's a huge open source culture where people can have access to free code on GitHub. However, there's a huge market of paid products that developers will purchase. There are many examples out there like Tailwind, Chakra UI, Envato, etc.
- duckmysick 6y ago
  Yes - developers. Look how many of them pay for Digital Ocean/AWS to host their projects instead of rolling their own servers.
- grumple 6y ago
  Yeah, but that also serves the purpose of making us encourage our workplaces to use GitHub, and they pay for it.
- kcartlidge 6y ago
  > not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free I do use the free stuff (GitHub, VS Code, etc). And I also pay for NCrunch, Wallaby, RubyMine, Rider, GoLand, PyCharm, FastMail, PCloud, and more. Most of the stuff I pay for has free equivalents (and yes, I know JetBrains have an all-products subscription rather than separate Ruby, .Net, Go, and Python, but I have reasons).
the_af 6y ago

aeturnum 6y ago

One of the things I think about is how important scale is for evaluating the viability of a product. I suspect that there aren't enough people who would pay $99 for a IDE theme to support an ongoing company with employees. However, for a single designer, it's perfect. The fact that 99.9% of the population turns their nose up doesn't matter because 0.1% is still 600,000 people. $100k is just over 1000 sales, which seems eminently doable for nearly any project. My take-away is that - if you're considering a solo side project that will only work if you charge a "high" price (which probably isn't as high as you think it is) or if you get a ton of sales - try charging the high price!

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
The "you only need 0.1% of people" is a fallacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358310.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  From the article: "...it doesn’t work, unless you have massive amounts of funding or a brilliant idea that can completely disrupt the existing the market." That's why I said scale of the project matters. Using a 1% (or 0.1%) metric to found a company is rubbish. Using it to guesstimate if a personal project might get some buyers seems much more reasonable. This probably isn't a $100k recurring revenue project, but it's reasonable to imagine that you could get up to $100k revenue selling a $99 product to programmers.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]