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How we got to $1,000 in recurring revenue
- arohner 13y agoNot enough people say this anymore, but congrats! That first $1/$1,000/$1,000,000 is the hardest. Good luck.
- smalter 13y agoMuch appreciated, Allen. That means a lot, especially because I'm a big fan of what you're doing with CircleCI.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- king_magic 13y agoCongratulations!
- graeme 13y agoWell done. Just signed up for personal account, I've been looking for a system to let me track this.
- adamrubin 13y agoCoincidentally, I recently built a similar service as a week-long project to solve the same problem for a client. I tried idonethis, but found the interface confusing and the pricing prohibitive. http://simplestatus.io http://simplestatus.io
- smalter 13y agoHey Adam, what was it about the interface particularly that you found confusing? We're working on improving it and I'd love your feedback on this.
- amjith 13y agoWould you mind sharing some screenshots or provide a demo account to tour the interface? It wouldn't hurt to add a signup button at the top of the page either.
- adamrubin 13y agoThe tour will be up tomorrow. Agree on adding a sign up button up top. Thx.
- adventured 13y agoTwo quick points of feedback: First - not a particularly important detail - but please do your site a favor and get rid of the very tacky rocket ship clip art. I don't know why every SaaS MVP decides to abuse that image. Second, this: "Status reports suck. We make them suck less." That's not a professional sales pitch. Unless you're trying to sell to college teenagers (who wouldn't buy the product to begin with), it comes across as almost a parody or joke. Also, saying you make the focus and point of your product suck less, is an extraordinarily bad way to try to sell a customer. It's a sales pitch from a negative. Never do it.
- adamrubin 13y agoAppreciate the feedback. The icons are all stock flatui. As I said, I built it in a week, and launched it two weeks ago. I'm working on a makeover, but prioritized getting the app polished ahead of the marketing site. I disagree on the tagline, though. I'm not saying that our product sucks less. I'm saying that it makes doing status reports suck less. You may prove me wrong in the long run, and I'd be happy to be wrong on this, but my initial instinct is to keep it the same. Thanks though! And sorry to the idonethis team. I don't want to hijack your thread.
- adamrubin 13y agoAfter taking more time to digest your feedback, I think you're right on both points. I made some stopgap changes to the marketing site last night. Thanks again ;)
- JacobDmsky 13y agoExcellent work! Our solution was to email daily commit logs at 12AM to the team. The logs are parsed and beautified so they're easier to read, like a report. This only works for the programmers, your solution makes more sense for other departments.
- fsareshwala 13y agoNice work! I've been tracking your product for quite a while. I've been building something similar for myself as well. It's not quite ready yet though. Congratulations on your achievement!
- louthy 13y agoPlease take this as constructive: I pay for your system for a team of about 10 people. It works and it's been useful to us - but as soon as I get some free time I'm very likely going to roll my own, because I slightly resent the $5 per user per month price-tag for such a simple service; I think it's pretty expensive for the features compared to other single-purpose cloud tools. I'm not asking for more features, because I like the fact it does one thing and does it well. I reckon it's probably a fair price around $1-$2 per user per month. I can't help but think you'd get more revenue overall with a lower price-tag.
- flylib 13y agoGoogle has their own similar internal software called Snippets that instead of nightly sends out an email once a week, collects responses and sends out a digest along with a web app interface explanation of software: http://tech.pro/blog/1490/how-it-works-google-s-snippets http://tech.pro/blog/1490/how-it-works-google-s-snippets some former google engineer rolled out an open source version of the software that with some factoring, nightly cron jobs instead of weekly and potentially a cleaner user interface for the web app could prolly fit your needs https://github.com/kushal/snippets https://github.com/kushal/snippets
- zach 13y agoFWIW, I've used http://www.snptz.com/ http://www.snptz.com/ off and on since it debuted on HN some years ago for weekly snippets. I've since developed my own daily forward-looking/backward-looking format, essentially a simple text-based mashup of David Seah's inspiring productivity forms: http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/ http://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
- caseyf 13y agoLaunching the paid team version was a great idea. As a personal tool, iDoneThis is neat but it competes with a ton of other tools in a very crowded market. I had already lost interest and stopped using it when they launched the team version and pricing. ...but when I heard about what they were doing with teams it was immediately obvious that this would be great for us. Everyone seemed to like it and get it right away. Thumbs up to iDoneThis for recognizing their potential as a team product.
- energyboy 13y agocongrats guys! i love products that leverage email as part of their core workflow/product experience. email is so ingrained in our everyday habits, i hope more startups take advantage of it. email is really the ultimate "dashboard" for knowledge workers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- graeme 13y agoSome major feedback: send out a "yay, you're signed up" email. I signed up on my iPad, and forgot about this, assuming an email would remind me. If I hadn't checked hacker news again I would have forgotten about your service entirely. You can use this email to orient new users too. Edit: might have been a bug due to a clumsy signup I had on my iPad. Couldnt input well on the keyboard. Just changed my password and instantly got an orientation email.
- jacquesm 13y agoLouthy in this thread is making a good case for the kind of user that you can afford to lose. If $5 per user does not cause some of your users to go away then you're too cheap. Scale it up an order of magnitude, or even two, watch your competition like a hawk and make sure that you make you users happy, never mind about them resenting to pay. The way to offset that is not to lower your price but to give more for the same price. best of luck, I feel that "We made $1,000 in recurring revenue" is so much more constructive than 'Show HN'.
- victoriap 13y agoSo it's time for a 'Show HNtM', which shows HN the Money :) That said, Show HNs are one of the most exciting parts of why HN rocks, even if they don't yet make money.
- lusr 13y agoIt's not really a "Show HN", though is it? It's an paid-for extension of an existing product. In that vein, while an informative post I did find the following statement a bit disingenuous: "As Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and partner at Y Combinator, says, the correct order of operations is to “sell before you build.” When you launch, you want a whole list of people that you can tell to buy it. But more than that, you want to ensure that you’re investing all that time building something that people want to buy." As far as I can tell, they built a product for 40,000 people over a certain period of time without generating a cent in profit or knowing in advance that any of those people would ever consider paying from the product. While some users did claim they wanted a team version they would pay for, this was only after the base product was built without knowing people would pay for it. This bugs me a bit because I'm working on a project where I'd love to be able to sell before I build, as it's obviously a very sound principle, but in practice I just can't see how to go about it and I was hoping to learn something new from this post.
- mattmanser 13y agoThat comment jarred with me too, in reality what they did is the total antithesis of what Paul's quote embodies. There are a few options for seeing if people will buy before you build. The often quoted one here (and it's also used in the Lean Startup as an example) is have a sales site, have a 'buy now button', but go through to a 'we're currently in beta, email me when it's ready'. Then buy google ads or whatever your sales pipeline is and see if people click 'buy now'. If no-one does, you've got a problem. If you've got a big ticket item, you can do something similar but be upfront that it's not built. Talk to clients, see if they want what you're thinking of making and suggest a price to see if they say yes. Again, if you can't find anyone to say yes, you've got a problem. And for some projects, Kickstarter is another obvious method.
- jkaljundi 13y agoWhen we launched http://weekdone.com/ http://weekdone.com/ team management and internal communications tool, we decided to take the price out of equation by having the lowest possible price: $1 per employee per month. That has proven to show companies willingness to pay, while at the same time experiment more with the product. At the same time we know we can easily raise the price in the future. Basically I suggest other startups to consider the price a part of the marketing mix. It's never a standalone thing. You might discount on price to decrease your marketing costs, or vice versa. The higher you go with the price: $3, $5, $10 per user - the harder it becomes to understand how much is it the price and how much the product that's holding back paying users. Another option is to have different prices for different team sizes depending on your sweet spot. Eg Atlassian JIRA starts at $10/10 users, then goes up to $2-3, then down again. Asana is free for 30 users, then goes up, then down again. Weekdone now is also $1.5 at lower level, then growing to $2-3, the lower again. Weekdone has some similarities to iDonethis by the way, although we work with the weekly, not daily paradigm. We actually have many users who use both, or switch between the two.
- sspiff 13y agoI wonder, with a product as simple as theirs: how do they differentiate from clones? I mean, they're targeting developers and teams with a useful service, but also a service so simple that most developers could create a minimal clone that performs their core feature in a few hours. Either their product needs to have really neat integration into other tools (like time tracking, project planning, etc) or they need to have some magic tricks that I don't see. Anyone care to enlighten me?
- seunosewa 13y agoThe domain is pretty unique and memorable.
- giantSlayer 13y agoNice. I know how it feels. I'm done with my first 1,000. Going to the next level.
- e12e 13y agoFirst: congratulations! Second: you say that: "Your privacy and security is our top priority. We take all reasonable precautions to keep your data safe and secure." Does that mean that you support s/mime and gpg for the emails you send and receive?
- speg 13y agoI've been an idonethis user for a while, but feel like it is missing some extra features. So I rolled my own and am looking for early alpha testers: https://teamtracker.io https://teamtracker.io
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stephenhacking 13y agoI initially checked out iDoneThis and liked the idea, but $5/user/mo was a little too much for my bootstrapped startup. Hence, I just created a mashup of Google Calendar + Docs and Gmail to create a solution does the same thing as iDoneThis for zero dollars.