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Show HN: I made a meme creator that makes around $4k a month
- tarey 5y agoGreat work
- par 5y agothank you
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI love the promotional messaging. :D "Your Instagram page will gain tons of followers. You will be famous on Twitter."
- par 5y agothanks, writing copy is not my strong suit, and this was after many iterations.
- pixiemaster 5y agoactually it’s quite to the point, no fuss, clear value proposition.
- smhenderson 5y agoAnd it comes across as just whimsically sarcastic enough to fit in with the overall subject really well. If that wasn't intentional, even better!
- gitgud 5y agoI was expecting to see cringy meme jargon trying to sell the tool. But your copy is very pleasant and funny, good job!
- conqrr 5y agoNice! What brings the revenue? Ads or do you charge?
- par 5y agoIt is subscription based model. $5/month or $35/year.
- joenr 5y agoWhat did you do to reach so many users? How did you grow it?
- par 5y agoI have been building the app for many years now. In the beginning I spent money mostly on instagram and facebook ads. I had pretty decent results on this, and could get installs for around 20-30 cents. However, those users also trashed my app in comments and didn't convert to paying users. Later I moved to App Store ads, it costs a bit more for the downloads, but the users convert much better. I am starting to think of going back and giving IG ads a shot though. Edit: forgot to mention, I also spent quite a bit of time improving app store ranking, which contributes significantly to getting more downloads and customers.
- tommymachine 5y agowhat did you use to do the ASO?
- par 5y agoI used the free version of App Annie, and did a bunch of experimentation on the title, subtitle and keywords that I entered into the app store.
- DantesKite 5y agoWay to go man.
- par 5y agothank you!
- nickthegreek 5y agoI loathe apps that want a subscription for such a trivial concept. Why did you choose this route over ad support or one time payment?
- mishafb 5y ago1. You charge what people are willing to pay, not how much your product is worth. 2. When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase, who knows how long it will last.
- FunHearing3443 5y agoTrue, with #1 this is pedantic but it could be restated as the worth of your product is what people are willing to pay.
- xaedes 5y ago> When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase, who knows how long it will last. Funny, for me this is the total opposite: subscription software may end any time and then you got nothing. One time purchased software you can just continue to use. Well, I guess in the games of rent-seeking, cloud-only, security and updates the viability of this is fading...
- WA 5y agoIt depends on the software. Is it an isolated thing? Then yes, you can continue to use it. But apps that read from APIs or scrape data are one version away from not functioning at all. Hence, regular updates. Hence, subscriptions to justify the ongoing modifications.
- cftm 5y agoTotal tangent, I used to have the Office 365 subscription but canceled it, yet I can still use word/excel - I've just lost access to the cloud features which I wasn't using to begin with - I would have thought they'd disable my version of word/excel but when I canceled it did not happen.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoFor some time I wanted to make browser-based utils/time wasters in the same vein (think Photopea but simpler, or .io games) - to generate some passive income, even if it'd be $100 a month or so. Has anybody succeeded in that and can share what was key to achieve income? I mean, most savvy people have ad blockers these days.
- par 5y agoPersonally I think app would be the way to go, and charge some in app fee or subscription. I don't think anyone would pay for browser apps, and you would require massive volume to be ad supported.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoI guess the adblock usage percentage for mobile is much lower due to the hassle required :)
- 0xbkt 5y agoHave a client from Turkey who is basically running all Agar.io clones today (600+ online players) in the Web. Google ranks him 1st in search results (even higher than the original Agar.io itself) for multiple competitive keywords, and he makes around €3-4k every month from ads. Target audience is mostly kids, who are looking for unblocked alternatives of their favorite browser games at school. He keeps saying SEO is everything, and won't drop the tiniest hint about how he's achieving to top Google results.
- afwefeawafe 5y agoGo here. https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker Search for his site: agario.tube (probably this) It lists backlinks. Example backlink is from bostonchildrensmuseum.org Go to google. Search "agario site:bostonchildrensmuseum.org" Takes you here: https://www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/exhibits-programs/exhibits/construction-zonehttp%3A//www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org https://www.bostonchildrensmuseum.org/exhibits-programs/exhi... Look at the html source: <marquee style="width: 0px; position: absolute"><a href="https://agarr.live/ https://agarr.live/" title="agario">agario</a> - <a href="https://slither-2.io/ https://slither-2.io/" title="slitherio unblocked">slitherio unblocked</a> - <a href="https://diepio-2.com/ https://diepio-2.com/" title="diep.io unblocked">diep.io unblocked</a> - <a href="https://agario.tube https://agario.tube" title="agario unblocked">agario unblocked</a> - <a href="https://yohoho-io.live/ https://yohoho-io.live/" title="yohoho unblocked">yohoho unblocked</a> - <a href="https://yohoho.gold/ https://yohoho.gold/" title="yohoho">yohoho</a> </marquee> tldr: he is hacking sites or paying someone to hack sites. likely exploiting wordpress vulnerabilities to insert hidden backlinks into thousands of websites.
- lurn_mor 5y agoWhom do you license the Original Content from? Or do you steal it without recompensation?
- Uberphallus 5y agoParody/satire is generally fair use.
- trolololooo 5y agoI wonder if that protects the person who makes the parody, rather than the app developer who make $4K a month. Lawyers will not typically go after targets that don't have money for payouts.
- hnick 5y agoOnly if you are parodying the content used. If you use copyrighted content to parody something else, you aren't protected. Penny Arcade had to pull a comic back in the day when they misunderstood this.
- par 5y agoI've always been concerned about this, but there are so many meme creation tools out there that don't seem to be impacted by this problem.
- giarc 5y agoI'd say just be ready to take down an image if someone approaches you and you should be fine.
- langitbiru 5y agoI mean Elon Musk steals memes all the time. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/style/elon-musk-memes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/style/elon-musk-memes.htm... Technically speaking, building a meme platform that takes recompensation into account is an interesting problem. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1370373708506750977?lang=en https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1370373708506750977?lang=...
- _ink_ 5y agoI am really envious of people living in countries that have fair use. In the EU somebody would sue you because of copyright infringement.
- par 5y agoI've always worried about copyright infringement as well.
- deadbunny 5y agoNope. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47708144 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47708144
- luckylion 5y agoThat's about platforms where memes are posted to though, not a meme generator that creates templates (i.e. other people's pictures etc) for you to post and takes money specifically for providing that service.
- cushychicken 5y agoMan, that's really cool. I love memes. I've always wanted to do some kind of a browser based meme maker I could either monetize with ads or a nominal ($10/yr) payment to remove ads.
- par 5y agoI think Kapwing has dominated the browser market as of recently, but before that imgflip was always my go to.
- santa_boy 5y agoWhere do most of your customers come from? Any typical profiles? Quite impressive that you could do this with a meme creator!
- par 5y agoThank you! The early users came from me buying instagram ads, and recent users are primarily from App Store ads. Amazingly there is some organic traffic as well. I spent a lot of time trying to improve my app store ranking, and that makes a HUGE difference for getting new customers. If you can rank in the top 3 for a couple of important keywords, you can do really well.
- javiermaestro 5y agoFrom your comments, you turned from a one-time purchase to subscriptions. Can you share your attrition rate? Also, how many want to pay per-month VS the full year (heavily discounted price)? Thanks!
- par 5y agoYes happy to. From the app store analytics over last 30 days Retention rate: 82% Monthly subs: 93% yearly subs: 7%
- javiermaestro 5y agoThanks! I just can't wrap my head around the fact that someone is willing to pay $5 a month for a meme app! XD Are the users active? Have you thought / analyzed if they pay and forget that it's a subscription? :-?
- par 5y agoYes the users are quite active. The main thing people are paying for are the video features and the video scraper. There is some code which allows the app to pull videos from youtube, instagram, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc, and I think that is really the thing that separates this app from other generic image editors.
- vletal 5y agoFrom YouTube? I thought that such app would get rejected from App Store...
- pessimizer 5y agoI don't know about the app store, but a screenshot with a satirical comment superimposed is easy fair use.
- 5y ago
- opencl 5y agoThe Android version seems abandoned, it hasn't been updated in several years and there are several reviews complaining that paid features no longer work. Are there any plans to update it?
- par 5y agoI do personally apologize for this. The android app was built by a very close friend of mine as a favor/side project back in the early days, and you are correct, it has been abandoned :( The plan is to just take it down. I need to contact him but don't want to offend him! Let that be a lesson of going into business with friends!
- imnotreallynew 5y agoYou’re making a healthy revenue, any reason you don’t want to just contract out a few updates? I work full time but I've also run a small contracting business for years, happy to do it at a reasonable cost.
- par 5y agoI have considered this, I don't see anywhere near the same purchase conversion on android that I do on iOS. But that could also be due to build quality. Do you have any insight on how successful pay models are on android apps?
- 58x14 5y agoThis is pretty standard - most Apple ecosystem users tend to be somewhere between 2-3x more measurably valuable, whether App store v Play store revenue [1] or as audience segments in advertising. You may consider a relationship with another developer where they maintain the Android distro in exchange for some significant percentage of revenue. 1 - https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-2020 https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-20... - source needed, but speaking from experience at scale
- 5y ago
- gldev3 5y agoI enjoy seeing posts like these, good for you pal. Is it hard to maintain? Is this just side income? :)
- par 5y agoThank you! It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, mostly side income at this point. But I have put in a LOT of hours on it over the years. I will work on it in bursts, and take a few weeks and work on it 3-5 hours a day, and then not work on it at all for a while. I do need to keep the image library fresh, but that is pretty easy. To be honest, if I worked a bit more on it, I think it could do a lot better.
- yreg 5y agoThank you for all the info you shared in this thread, it is interesting.
- giarc 5y agoAt $4k per month, you could sell it for quite a bit of money. Multiples on apps are pretty high right now.
- guessbest 5y agoAre there any marketplaces for apps. I have a few.
- giarc 5y agoYes, many options exist. The big one is Flippa which will take just about any project and allow you to list. There are others that are specific for large businesses (either have a listing price floor or a revenue floor) such as FE International and Empire Flippers. Another new one that is 0% commission is MicroAcquire. I follow the founder on Twitter and they seem to be doing quite a bit of volume. I've personally sold projects on both Flippa and MicroAcquire and happy to chat about the pro's/con's of each.
- gramakri 5y agoI am seeing "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue" in firefox. Here's a screenshot - https://imgur.com/a/SzVS75Q https://imgur.com/a/SzVS75Q Same in chrome. The cert is wrong, it has the cert of "search.dnsadvantage.com"
- par 5y agoHmm, i just installed a new SSL certificate today, but it seems to be installed correctly. Can you try some kind of refresh or a different browser? edit: oh, please try https://metameme.app https://metameme.app edit: the cert should be sectigo https://imgur.com/a/jb91a0z https://imgur.com/a/jb91a0z
- gramakri 5y agoHeh, seems to be something with the wifi because it works fine with android+mobile network. Suspicious! Looks like a misconfigured dns server in the coffee shop. Sorry for the false call .
- par 5y agono no, it's not false! My friend on at&t has also noticed some really weird dns or server configuration issues with my server. It's a digital ocean cloud instance. I need to get to the bottom of it.
- kebsup 5y agoGood job! I've created gif meme creator and so far I've only received one 5 USD donation. :D https://gifmemes.io https://gifmemes.io
- par 5y agoUhhh, WOW! This is actually really well done. I love the labels anchored to the objects in the image. That is so crucial. And the frame editor, the label position editor, I mean this is seriously well done. I think it might be a bit too powerful for average users though.
- atum47 5y agothis looks super cool. I'm working (from time to time) in a web flash app, that could be used to this kind of meme creation. How do you do the tracking? Is it blob tracking or do you use something more sofisticated? this is how my web flash app is coming along: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9BbCp2ZTj6LTknue5guAL2 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9BbCp2ZTj6...
- atum47 5y agoI'm also interested in the GIF export. Right now I'm only exporting videos using canvas record stream, but I'm thinking about using ffmpeg.js to support different formats including animated gifs
- atum47 5y agoMemes are a good source of income now a days, just look at Elon Musk. Jokes apart, great to see a fun project like this giving profit. Well done.
- par 5y agothanks! memes can pay off apparently :)
- damsta 5y agoNice work!
- zfxfr 5y agoIt looks like the Android version is not accessible or the link contains a mistake. Or you removed it from Google play store ? If so why ?
- par 5y agoseems like it was just taken down by my friend... the android version is woefully out of date. Sorry about that. I am removing the links now.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoGood job, may I ask , what was your marketing strategy? Did you engage a lead generation company, SEO? How did you gain visibility in the virtual shops? Used social media for promotion? Pricing structure? If those questions are too profound, feel free to not address them, but either way, this is impressive for a solo Indy dev. And what is the tech stack? Do you listen to users feature requests and bug reports? I have a project in mind myself and all the above questions I wouldn't know how to handle.
- par 5y agoI have not engaged in any outside marketing consultancy, lead gen or SEO. I have done some stuff myself, written blog posts and tried my hand at basic marketing tasks, but honestly i don't have much time for it. For gaining visibility, i mostly rely on app store optimization or paid ads. Tech stack is swift, and python on the backend. I do listen to user requests and bugs, in fact I get tons of great feedback from my users with how quickly i respond to their issues, usually resolving issues within an hour, all on my own. It takes up a decent chunk of time, but I do care a lot about the customers, so that makes it worth it.
- mritchie712 5y agoWorking on something for hackers who hate marketing: wax.run Basically outsourced growth
- thenberlin 5y agoAs a hacker who hates marketing: What is this exactly?
- mritchie712 5y agoWax helps you systematically find and implement strategies that grow your company. The system is based on the book Traction[0] by Gabriel Weinberg (founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo) and Justin Mares (founder of Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto). Wax guides you thru process of testing growth channels to find what works for your company. We also offer a "done for you service" where a contractor will execute the the strategies for you. 0 - https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer/dp/1591848369 https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...
- Etheryte 5y agoSince you're essentially mostly repackaging content other people have created, what's your approach to copyright and royalties? Or is the plan to simply hope you never get a DMCA notice or the like?
- lxe 5y agoAwesome work, Par! Nice to see this on HN.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- par 5y agothanks buddy :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mastrsushi 5y agoI'd love to scoff who would pay a subscription fee for a meme generator, but clearly plenty of people. Good work!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dburenok11 5y agoThis is very cool and inspiring! Would you mind sharing how you implemented the object tracking feature? It seems very complex, I've seen it on big apps like Snapchat or Instagram but you made it all on your own. Would love to know how!
- HumblyTossed 5y agoSlightly OT: Other than mobile apps and web sites what are some other ways for devs to make beer money?
- samename 5y ago$4k/month is beer money? I must be doing something wrong
- njsubedi 5y agoDepends on where you live. In some cities in Europe, after paying taxes and living expenses you might have money left only for a couple of beers a day. In the developing parts of the world, $4k a month is 10x the average developer’s salary. But if that’s a passive income I don’t see a need to live in an expensive city so your comment makes sense.
- HumblyTossed 5y agoNo. I did not mean at all to imply that.
- Sebb767 5y agoThat's about 10 Maß (Oktoberfest beers) per day. Sounds reasonable.
- jslpc 5y agoPiggybacking off of this to come back to it later. I'm also looking for some side project to start that'll encourage me to learn more about programming while I'm still in school for CS. I've launched some hobby projects online in the past but none of which are monetized in any way, and almost all of them ended up costing money to run or still continue to do so. I'd love to build something for practice (to start out), with the intent of it eventually being good enough of a service for others to use too. I'm just blank on ideas at the moment.
- appguy 5y agoDid you change the original paid app to the free/subscription model? How did the original users who paid for the app react to this? Considering to change one of my apps to a subscription model, but unsure if this is the best approach.
- csilverman 5y agoWhen apps I use switch to subscriptions, I stop using them and switch to ones that don’t. When I’m considering an app and I see that they’re demanding regular payments, that app is out of consideration. (I’ve also convinced my friends and employer to avoid subware as well; people often back away from it once they do the math and realize how expensive it really is.) I have no problem paying $50—or even $100—for good software, once. Thousands of dollars over the course of years is simply not reasonable.
- calltrak 5y agolooks good. Would be nice to see a feature to share your image on our image sharing site https://picc.io https://picc.io
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Lapsa 5y agoMeaning of word meme got raped.
- freediver18 5y agocongrats, I was looking for something like this, but tried 5 different apps and gave up. there's a bunch of these apps. how do you stand out?
- laangregor 5y agoWell Done! Really appreciate you sharing your experience.
- retox 5y agospam
- wly_cdgr 5y agoNice work! Living the true freedom dream, love to see it
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Gamemaster1379 5y agoWhat lead you to settle on a meme creator? What would you suggest for a small independent entrepreneur looking to come up with his own SaaS? I'm pretty comfortable with a broad enough frontend and backend stack from my day job. Where I lack is market research.
- alias-rahil 5y agoI love it!