3 ms·

Three years ago I started a proof of concept electron app to design and print labels on thermal printers. That app has grown into mid-6-figures revenue from mos

Three years ago I started a proof of concept electron app to design and print labels on thermal printers. That app has grown into mid-6-figures revenue from mostly “one-time license” sales. I do offer monthly subscription pricing with an expiring license and after a year my MRR has hit $3k. My competition is windows only and closed-source, largely backed by private equity. I live in a small town in Minnesota so I don’t need to make much money to be comfortable, raising a family. I’m in my late 30s and have done mostly iOS and Node IIOT consulting the last 10 years. That’s what was paying the bills until my electron app started making “real” money. On the technical side. I get emails every day saying how much a user loves my app. It’s really rewarding. Every year I get one angry email or App Store review saying that there are much better design/desktop-publishing apps out there. These reviews are usually written by technically savvy people that don’t quite get how stupid-complicated label printing can get. Like, don’t expect to design your company logo in my app. But surely, you can drag in your company logo and my app will dither your image for a 200 DPI zebra printer. My app is basically a no-code image processing pipeline that effortlessly hooks up spreadsheet data, generates barcodes, resizes and fences text, dithers images, dynamically changes colors, and then talks directly to a thermal printer without using a driver. And you can use it for free for 14 days to see if it works. It’s a single download. Yeah, it’s electron, yeah it uses some memory. But you can share the design files between Mac and windows and it doesn’t require internet for use. I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty good solution. Read more at https://label.live https://label.live

aydwi 5y ago
Very interesting! I'm always amazed at kind of creative work I come across on here. Did not expect to read a success story about generating imagery for thermal printers this morning, but I'm glad I did. Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?
- semireg 5y ago
  Yes, the app uses node-usb to read and write directly with printers matching vids/pids. Each vendor is a custom implementation with some similarity and lots of differences. It usually involves parsing status to get DPI, busy states, then sending raster image data, and other commands to place the image, feed speed, heat settings, cutter, etc.
- semireg 5y ago
  Also worth noting they in my journey I’ve added the ability to submit the label jobs as PDFs to existing printer drivers. This allows for targeting full color label printers like epson and Primera, but also inkjet and laser printers that use sheets of labels. This is accomplished by rendering the labels on a larger page and then sending the resulting PDF to the system printer. There’s also the option of sending the images to a directory on the file system and naming the files using a column from the spreadsheet. Quite versatile … but difficult to market.

aydwi 5y ago

Very interesting! I'm always amazed at kind of creative work I come across on here. Did not expect to read a success story about generating imagery for thermal printers this morning, but I'm glad I did. Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?

semireg 5y ago
Yes, the app uses node-usb to read and write directly with printers matching vids/pids. Each vendor is a custom implementation with some similarity and lots of differences. It usually involves parsing status to get DPI, busy states, then sending raster image data, and other commands to place the image, feed speed, heat settings, cutter, etc.
semireg 5y ago
Also worth noting they in my journey I’ve added the ability to submit the label jobs as PDFs to existing printer drivers. This allows for targeting full color label printers like epson and Primera, but also inkjet and laser printers that use sheets of labels. This is accomplished by rendering the labels on a larger page and then sending the resulting PDF to the system printer. There’s also the option of sending the images to a directory on the file system and naming the files using a column from the spreadsheet. Quite versatile … but difficult to market.