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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 $9

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.