31 ms·
Tweetminer opens up all their stats (income, server, users)
- jv2222 17y agoI want to add something to this discussion. Something I certainly did not expect would happen. Since I released the revenue figures publicly I have had three angels contact me saying "what are your plans, are you looking for any investment". Imagine that! Angels perusing me!! As I say it wasn't intended - but it's a nice side note.
- onewland 17y agoPursue, not peruse. Maybe they perused the statistics though :)
- paraschopra 17y agoThanks, it is a gold mine. Interesting to see huge variation in October and November revenues.
- jv2222 17y agoFYI - First sale was on Oct 17th which probably accounts for the variance :)
- paraschopra 17y agoHi jv2222, two questions if you don't mind me asking a) Did you start selling paid accounts from day 1. Or was there a paid beta period? How many of your paid beta users converted? b) For payments I see you use PayPal. Can you point to some resources to get the subscription based system with PayPal up and running?
- jv2222 17y ago1st Line of code August 10th 1st Signup September 13th (34 days to go beta) 1st Sale October 17th (68 days to first sale - 1 month beta) 1st $1000 November 17th (98 days to $1000) About 500 beta testers signed up. Very few converted because I gave them all a free pass for one year. Here's the paypal links I used to get things up and running... https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/html.html https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/html.html https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/Appx-ipn_subscription_variables.html https://www.paypal.com/en_US/ebook/subscriptions/Appx-ipn_su... https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/e_howto_html_Appx_websitestandard_htmlvariables#id08A6HI00JQU https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...
- paraschopra 17y agoOther curiosity: are you working on it full time or is it a side business? Please feel free not to answer any of the questions if you think it is personal. I totally understand.
- earle 17y agoWell, it's not selling crack cocaine, but hey, its more than Twitter.
- jv2222 17y agoGetting from the first line of code to $1000 revenue is the hardest part of ANY business. Think about it. Google. Facebook. Twitter. TweetMiner did that in 98 days. That's VERY rare for a web startup, especially for a part time project in a space that everyone says is not monetizeable. Sometimes it's not about the amount of revenue - it's more about what the business proves. After that it's just a question of scaling and not f*ing up...
- FreeRadical 17y agoI don't think it is more than twitter. Recently the Twitter COO indicated twitter made more than $4 million from the Google and Microsoft deals.
- bumblebird 17y agoFWIW Even if true, I'd rather have a large number of consumers spending money, than 2 customers paying millions.
- paraschopra 17y agoAnother interesting stat: their conversion rate (paid/all users) is 3.38% (62/1830)
- jv2222 17y agoOops! There's a slight bug in the customers by plan stats code. The real number of customers is 51 (2.8%) -- listed on the customers line -- (bug fixed now)
- jimboyoungblood 17y agoWhat motivates one to expose all their internal business data? Call me an old fart, but I just don't get it... can someone please explain?
- jey 17y agoI doubt it's deliberate. Someone probably just wasn't too creative with the URL and didn't bother to put in any kind of authentication. I don't see this stats page mentioned on their front page nor their blog's first page.
- patio11 17y agoNope, it is deliberate. The developer announced on the Business of Software forums that he was sharing it. Some of us around those parts do -- it answers what is far and away the most common question from newbies, provides for some external motivation, and satisfies a little bit of the human urge to know you're not totally alone in the endeavor.
- CitizenKane 17y agoHe also talked about it here as well http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971498 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971498
- vaksel 17y agothey probably saw how well that worked for Balsamiq, and think it'll work for them too. I don't think it'll work as well, since they have a different business model.
- jv2222 17y agoYes, I've been very motivated by balsamiq - but another big reason is because we talk about it weekly on our tech podcast http://techzinglive.com http://techzinglive.com - the main reason is because this is exactly the kind of data I wish I had been able to see when starting my earlier one man businesses
- 17y ago
- waterlesscloud 17y agoThanks for this, always good to have real data!
- zachware 17y agoThese days the operative buzzwords are open and transparent. I don't advocate both of those concepts blindly but I do ask, what is the potential downside of offering this level of data to the public? If you keep everything private then you have something to hide, better yet you have something to manipulate. Perhaps you want to go public or attract investors with your projections not your reality. In appropriate cases this type of sharing can bring your users into your business in ways no other tactic can. Devout users want to see you succeed and this gives them that barometer. All in all, I applaud them (assuming making it public was intentional.) Not only does it help me benchmark my business but it helps me connect with Tweetminer in a way I otherwise wouldn't.
- vaksel 17y agowell looking at this data you can tell two things: business is dying, less and less signups every day and their premium membership is next to zero hardly numbers, you'd want to shout from the rooftop
- sanswork 17y agoAre we looking at the same numbers? November was higher than October and December is higher per day so far than November. Also 3% conversion rate is hardly a bad one and about 1% higher than most people could hope to expect.
- vaksel 17y agoI'm just looking at the numbers made available under this "full disclosure" thing, which basically just shows November signups, and if you just look at that you can def see the decline.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoThankgiving.
- bumblebird 17y agoWhat does the affiliate bit mean? Affiliates generating income for tweetminer by selling it? Or tweetminer acting as an affiliate showing people adverts and generating income?
- jv2222 17y agoAffiliates are generating revenue by helping promote tweetminer. The software used is http://www.idevdirect.com http://www.idevdirect.com
- bumblebird 17y agoInteresting. Thanks :)
- terpua 17y agoHow did you get $75 for 3 transactions (during Dec, so far)? Do you count the yearly $60 as per month revs?
- jv2222 17y agoYeah. The lump sum transactions are not pro-rata they are logged as in the month they happened.
- zackattack 17y agohave you considered going open source?
- jv2222 17y agoLOL. That may be a step too far ;)
- japetheape 17y agoSoo cool you made these stats public. It's not only that you can't loose anything by sharing this data, but you also inspire people by giving out data like this. Really really cool. One question... can you expand on how you marketed this website, sounds like you really did some marketing on this website, I already saw this affiliate program you're running, are their other ways you target your customers, like adwords? Organic traffic? And what's your ratio of development/marketing? Thanks very much for sharing.