bdunn

38 ms·

331.
by bdunn 15y ago
There will always be people who won't pay for products. These people borderline accuse you of stealing if you attempt to charge, or are obsessed with open-source, self-hosted everything. Ignore them. There are plenty of people who will gl
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by bdunn 15y ago
Competing on price is a loser's game. Build a great product that solves problems, rock at support, continually provide new value, profit.
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by bdunn 15y ago
I haven't written a post-mortem, but last week I had a post on how http://planscope.io (formerly Projector) made me $119.50 in a month. It got crazy traffic - about 40k uniques. I was really surprised how many people went on to explore
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What Is Your Product's True Conversion Rate?(planscope.io)
5 points by bdunn 15y ago|0 comments
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by bdunn 15y ago
Are you trying to solve a problem, or do you just want to be able to say you have a "startup"? From your first post, I would have said the latter. You wanted Y Combinator behind you in much the same way that a struggling band would want to
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by bdunn 15y ago
And we're using Backbone!
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by bdunn 15y ago
Thanks! The support thing is the reason I've had people pay me before they actually had to. I realize 2 minute response times isn't sustainable long term - but with the product in its infancy and still being battle tested, it's sort of nece
338.
by bdunn 15y ago
Thanks for the feedback! To attach a file, you need to also comment (I realize now this might not always be ideal). But the workflow would be: Attach some files, enter text in the comment box, post. I'm working on redesigning the entire tas
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by bdunn 15y ago
Thanks Rob, I really appreciate your feedback - and for being one of the earliest users, and thus had to deal with a substantial amount of bugs in its infancy :-)
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by bdunn 15y ago
This is where some "celebrity" came into play. Since we weren't getting organic traffic (nothing to index but the sales letter) and didn't have a blog up (big mistake!), a few people with lots of Twitter followers RTed me. It's a lot easier
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by bdunn 15y ago
I probably could. In fact, I could probably charge more across the board - two of my paid users said that it's more valuable to them than they're being charged (remember: the underlying goal is to help these people get more repeat work + mo
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by bdunn 15y ago
Edwin, I spent a lot of time reading freelancer forums and saw a lot of the same questions being asked: "How can I make invoice time less painful?", "I don't like being pestered with status update requests", and so on. Obviously, it's a ver
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by bdunn 15y ago
Agreed. BTW, I just changed this. Clicking the logo while at the blog now returns you to /
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by bdunn 15y ago
Marketing site or the app itself? The app is a Backbone app and uses pushState, which might be what you're experiencing. The marketing site... is just a normal site :-)
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by bdunn 15y ago
Wow. AMAZING advice Jason. I took Amy Hoy's 30x500 course, which opened my eyes to how a 10% month to month growth rate can be crazy in just a few years. The chart shown in a recent post of hers is mind boggling: http://unicornfree.com/201
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by bdunn 15y ago
I think the disconnect is the top left logo usually returns to a "root", which in the case of a blog is the blog index. Frankly, it might be better to have that go to the home page.
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by bdunn 15y ago
Will do, thanks!
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by bdunn 15y ago
Well - I wouldn't go that far :-) But they have a great API (and a Rubygem to boot) that makes it simple to sync whatever data you want with them. You can also setup tags. I have a "might pay" tag based on: 1) signs in often, 2) hasn't paid
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by bdunn 15y ago
Thanks! We tried being taking the opinionated route and not making a focused effort on having it be meant for internal product teams (I think Pivotal Tracker is probably still best for that.) We're working on the following: - Constant UI/UX
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by bdunn 15y ago
Would love to talk more about your experience and results. Feel free to ping me @brennandunn on Twitter.
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by bdunn 15y ago
Absolutely. So I'm not really running any ads (I did throw away $100 on an ad on clientsfromhell.net and got virtually zero results). My search strategy follows a lot of what patio11 covers here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/start
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by bdunn 15y ago
You're welcome! It's a fantastic service, but they won't let me throw money at them yet :-(
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Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank(projectorpm.com)
247 points by bdunn 15y ago|83 comments
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by bdunn 15y ago
Checkout my post from yesterday to see why I think solutions like this are a bad idea: http://www.projectorpm.com/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-tha... (Hint: Don't trust clients)
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by bdunn 15y ago
Glad you enjoyed it! A video of my talk (you can only infer so much from slides) will hopefully be available soon.
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by bdunn 15y ago
Right. I guess what I meant is that the backend is still responsible for everything it's always done except for generating HTML views. The rest still applies.
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by bdunn 15y ago
This. You duplicate validation logic on the client side in order to provide rapid feedback to the user. But it's a huge mistake to not let the backend have the final say.
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by bdunn 15y ago
Not so fast. The backend (i.e. Rails) still does almost everything it used to do: validations, access control, session management, data crunching, and everything else that you can't blindly trust a client to do. The real difference with cli
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How To Convince Your Clients To Pay You Hourly(projectorpm.com)
2 points by bdunn 15y ago|0 comments
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A Guide to Freelancing for Moms and Dads(projectorpm.com)
2 points by bdunn 15y ago|0 comments

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