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Comment by 23andwalnut | Hacker News Reader

I'm a solo developer and I built the first version of this app a couple of years ago. This is the third major rewrite and I've added a ton of functionality since then (i.e. recurring invoicing, kanban, reply by email, more flexible user roles, etc). I'd love to hear any feedback you guys have - about the actual app, the landing page, or anything else. Always looking to make it better and more appealing. I'll be completely honest, marketing has been...very challenging for this product, but occasionally there will be a huge boost in traffic and sales will go up pretty quick, I just haven't been able to make it sustainable.

Here's the HN discussion from when I posted the first version a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698741

I already got approval from dang to post again since it's been so long and a lot has changed about the app.

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Add a hosted option with a monthly fee so people can try it out or even just have you host it.

I know that then its just like the others, but really its not like the others. The small differences are huge to a user.

A monthly fee will help stabilize the income.

Also, at $10/mo you'll make the same revenue every year as selling the whole thing. For comparison, basecamp is $29 or $79 per month.

Definitely do this. I'd say even $15/month would be a good price point for a hosted version.

Having to both pay for it and being forced to host it yourself is the worst of both worlds.

Hosting yourself is the best of any world. I don't see how this is a negative unless you don't have resources? Just slap it on Digital ocean and pay $5 a month.

I have absolutely no use for this app, however I'm glad there are still people that don't think storing important things in the cloud is no biggie.

A few years ago I read somewhere that "privacy is dead" and I thought it was an exaggeration. Not anymore.

Sorry for the rant and good luck with your app.

Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups?

It might sound flippant but I'm serious. There's no hard fast line between off-site backups and whatever you are claiming is the terrible idea of storing important things in the cloud. If all my 'important things' were stored locally I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

> Not storing important things in the 'cloud' is surely a bigger problem. Every heard of off-site backups?

Yes, those are external hard-drives that are moved to a different location, and which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours.

I won't put my stuff in a cloud backup the restoration of which will take several weeks (supposing it doesn't fail during the process)...

> which can be restored in a matter of minutes or hours.

In theory. More realistically, most don't take DR very seriously and it would be more in the days to weeks range.

For example- that backup you have- is it in any way hardware or base OS image dependent? Are you absolutely sure of that? Do you have unused backup hardware offsite with the OS on it and ready to go in case there is a fire in the rack at the server farm?

I'm busy enough, I'm glad I don't have to screw around with shuttling an external hard drive back and forth. I use Backblaze, and when my laptop was stolen, BackBlaze FedEx'd me a replica overnight for $200.

One important thing that seems to be missing from your marketing site are the technical requirements. What stack is Duet based on? This makes a huge difference to the moderately-technical small-business owner who is comfortable configuring Wordpress on their shared webhost but will have no idea where to start if you ask them to spin up a Node server.

It's PHP and Javascript. I just added a small note in the 'Easy Installation' section on the front page. I'll try think of a better way to present it going forward.

Can you expand on the requirements? What PHP modules are expected or needed? What's the minimum version of MySQL?

For a self-hosted app, I would want more information about it before I considered buying it sight-unseen. Maybe consider providing a small PHP script that I could run on my server to validate all the requirements?

It's built for the lowest common denominator. Literally all you need is PHP 5.4+ and Mysql 5+, and curl. There aren't any required modules for basic usage but you may want smtp (if you don't want to use built in php mail function). Cron for recurring tasks, which isn't required for basic usage, but for things like recurring invoicing and reply by email. I'll add a new page in a couple of minutes that lists all the details.

Also agree about a validator script. I'll work on that too.

no orm .. i mean postgresql support ?

Or easier provide a Dockerfile

That's not easier at all. Not for the moderately-technical small-business owner that the parent comment discusses, or indeed many other (mostly shared hosting) scenarios?

Fair point. For me it's easier :P

Your product looks really nice.

If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.

I raised prices for about 6 months. Total revenue and number of purchases went down dramatically during that time. I think I need to target a different type of user to charge more, just not entirely sure how to reach those users.

There are a lot of ways to raise your price while still making it look like a steal.

You should definitely split test all of this and pretty much everything you do, honestly.

Price Anchoring:

Use a giant unreasonable number for the unlimited plan with 1 month of phone support, 12 month same business day email support, you will install it for them, all the ACH and Credit Card processing through you (and you through stripe), etc. A HUGE list of features to go along with the $574 price tag.

Then drastically back off of that pricing for the 10-25 team ($249), 5-10 ($199), 2-5 ($149) and solo ($99) plans. You need to also reduce the features, support windows, contact method as you drop the price, not just the number of users.

Additional Revenue Streams:

1) Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf, if you have 500 customers doing a few thousand each month on average, you processing fee will drop a lot. Always default to ACH via Stripe (0.8% fee, and a 25 cent transfer) bill the customer at 2% + $0.30 and you are making money.

2) Annual licensing. Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix. And make sure to always be improving your product (which it sounds like you are)

3) Cloud hosted. As someone else said take the annual price divided by 12 and add a premium to it (25% or so). Also push updates to this channel regularly and add a few extra premium add-ons to it (like the a custom domain name self hosted has but for an extra $5/mo)

4) Plugins to various other solutions for $49/piece.

I know this is probably a side project, but you could turn this into a viable small business with an additional 1-2 developers.

Conclusion: I'm totally buying it before you potentially take any of my advice ;)

> Include your own payment processor and accept payments on their behalf

What's the benefit to the customer (and you) of this, vs letting them plug in their own Stripe account credentials (and handle chargebacks etc themselves)?

I have a side project and we've let people enter their own details thinking it would be less hassle for us (customers: 3). Curious what I've missed..?

Whether or not you decide to follow this advice, its pretty good and based on a lot of lessons learned from dumb things others have done.

You should write up a blog post with these and more stuff that works. Lots of OSS developers get overloaded on the projects and dont make money. A useful tool can use tactics like you describe to avoid that. I never thought of the payment processing trick. Good idea.

Ask and you shall receive: http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects...

Wow. The original comment was fantastic, but this is above and beyond. Thank you!! :)

No problem. I miss doing this for a living.

As a side note, someone else decided that my blog was worth posting on HN, so if you have any questions or comments, you can ask them over there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409577

Great write-up! That's the kind of wisdom I was looking for. I'll pass it along when people seem like they could use it for their project or service. ;)

The things you learn making other people rich :)

I was a product developer for 8 years. Developing tools in the SEO, Reputation Management and Email Marketing space. Eventually you find little tricks that just work across the board.

Then I left that job for corporate america and I regret it every day.

You know you're not trapped. There's more than enough money to be made in that field if it's what you love.

If you read the comments on my post (which reached all the way to #3 on HN!!!!!!) you will see why I left it. The job can suck you in trying to find little 1-2% optimizations here an there that are a little more black hat than you might want, but all playing on human psychology in a way that is exciting until you take a step back and reevaluate what you have been doing, then you feel sick to your stomach. At least, I did. It didn't help being in the SEO/SEM/IM/EM/AM space, so every customer was receiving nearly 0 value because they were too lazy to do the work and just wanted to get rich quick.

I now work directly with our marketing team, but they hire out to vendors for the email marketing bits, the retargeting and ad spends. I just provide my 2 cents every now and then and go back to developing in house products.

So the stuff is happening anyway, you're supporting company ordering it, and feel better because you're not doing it directly? Sounds legit. :P

You might be about staying away from that sort of thing on principle but there's another angle. Being the one making those decisions, you have the ability to reduce the short- and long-term harm they make by picking good strategies. Schemes in marketing and driving profit up are inevitable. What's not inevitable in general is inaccurate information, highly-biased profiling, products that don't work (or do harm), customers getting fewer products than they want, technological lock-in, and so on.

Consider getting with the right companies pushing a collection of useful products or less harmful services vs other garbage on the market. Then all your schemes and optimizations would be benefiting people since the right companies would be benefiting. Companies you can vouch for. Best if they've been in business over a decade with good practices and/or are a non-profit with sustainable revenues. Just a thought.

My point was that you could work for yourself. You don't have to work for a company to do good work in the field, and you can stick to your own ethical guidelines when you take jobs.

If you're including your own payment processor, work with Gocardless for UK/EU support too!

I'd argue that the problem is not that you raised the prices but the user increments are set way too low ... to appeal to teams I'd have the cheapest plan be at least $99/year maybe the full $149 but also give them 5 users by default - then allow a monthly option which effectively forces people to pay a 10-15% ish premium over the yearly option.

Then make a plan for say up to 15 or 25 users that is substantially more expensive and finally the unlimited user plan could be even higher.

Because you're able to do so much inside of one application I could easily see companies paying $1k+ for parts of this on a yearly basis especially when they had 20+ users of something like the task management tool.

Personally I'd also suggest modularizing your different pieces (so you can just buy the project management or just buy the invoicing etc.) As teams get larger they may want to do more or do less inside of one application, you dont want to have people feel like they're paying for things they don't need if they arent using them.

Just my $.02 I know all this takes a lot of work, but the product looks great, I hope you can figure it all out!

Best of Luck!

Agree with the comments about raising price. And your notion that you may be targeting the wrong people. You're already much less expensive than BaseCamp (let alone enterprise tools). But for people who want a hosted version, that won't matter. BaseCamp isn't that expensive.

Think of it as being like BaseCamp, but with complete control of the data. It's a feature, and to some people, it should be worth more.

Your pricing plan of 1/2/Unlimited Users doesn't really capture this. The plan before unlimited should probably have 100 users or more. That way, larger customers who want to control their data can pay the right price (and feel more comfortable doing it, as @patio11 has pointed out-- you can be too cheap for people to buy).

Good luck!

Try selling for 10 times as much. Look how much Jira costs:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing?tab=host-on-...

For corporations this isn't big money. They'll worry more about ongoing cost of a sysadmin looking after the installation.

I totally agree. Either go for self hosted and charge a lot more, or cheap affordable hosted option.

+1 should be at least 3 times the price, IMO.

No.1 lesson from my dad was "think of a number, then double it, they'll always pay more"

I purchased Duet a few years ago and it was unworkable. When I asked for a refund you denied me.

No hard feelings, but you didn't back your work (or even offer to troubleshoot the problem) so I won't be buying again.

Really sorry you didn't have a good experience. I'm not sure why you weren't able to get support. I've always done my best with that and I've recently formalized the process with a support center, ticketing system, and community based support.

If you're interested in trying the new version please open a ticket (http://duetapp.com/ticket) and I'll just give you a copy of 2.4, the current version. No fee. Just let me know what email you used when you made the original purchase.

The issue was something to do with the software being slow. You said it was probably my server. When I asked for a refund you politely refused. Again, this was several years ago and I don't remember the exact details. I just moved on and made a mental note never to buy your software again.

BTW, thanks for the offer but I'm happy with what I'm using now. Best of luck to you.

Google searches on his domain for "Fast", "Quick", "Speed", etc. returns nothing. He never claimed his product was faster than the competition. It is however cheaper.

Why would you be entitled to a refund? Do you buy a Hyundai Accent and then come back the the seller asking for a refund because you saw a Mustang drive faster than you?

I wonder if a simple requirement with one-click install (DigitalOcean droplet with 1GB of ram, etc..) could solve this problem.

As an example, there is one-click-to-deploy here[1] for Heroku and Azure.

[1] https://github.com/rauchg/slackin

> I've recently formalized the process with a support center, ticketing system, and community based support.

What system(s) did you choose for these? I have a small side project and finding support software that doesn't suck or cost the earth or make my life more difficult or make providing support slower, is a nightmare!

Risky to deny refunds. A few chargebacks and he could lose his payment processor.

I offer refunds, but it's usually only if the actual product is defective and if it's something I'm unable to fix. It's a bit different than what people are used to with SaaS because the product can't be returned. And I can't 'turn off' access once they have downloaded it. I try to be fair though, and in cases where I can't offer a refund I always try to offer something else

EDIT: I should add that if someone legitimately can't use the app, I would give a refund. I'm just pointing out that unlike SaaS apps that have a policies that provide refunds regardless of the reason, I would rather work with you to solve the problem, because 99.9% of issues are solvable.

Some advice: you may want to re-consider this approach, even though it may feel like you risk being ripped off, your reputation and overall sentiment about your product are probably worth more than the 59$ you don't want to give back.

If someone feels they can't use your product - for any reason - it's going to feel unfair to them that they can't get a refund, no matter who's fault it is.

Note that the top reply to your thread is a dissatisfied ex-customer who felt obliged to post about his bad experience (fair or otherwise), and I bet that may have almost immediately cost you a few sales.

I'm not saying give everyone a refund who asks for one, but just saying "it's not a SaaS product and I can't turn it off" might not be the best rationale (and certainly won't impress any customers who are legitimately unable to use your product).

I would err on the side of trusting your customers, and accept that some might rip you off but most won't, and you'll partially salvage a bad product experience with some good customer service.

I agree with everything you said. I definitely give refunds. I just ask for the opportunity to help customers solve their issues first. Over the course of the last 3 years, 99.9% of refund requests were solved once I actually understood the issue that they were having and I was able to fix it for them. But I agree with you, fairness and goodwill are important. I was probably too rigid with that in the past.

So my suggestion would be to have the service registered via a license key that can only be used on 1 IP or an email address. Then you can turn off the license remotely and offer the refund.

We did this with my VERY last product working at Humankind (Bullet Viral Traffic). It was a WordPress plug in, and you bought site licenses for it 1 site, 10 site and unlimited.

Every function call did a "phone home" to validate the license. When it came back unverified, we would only print an error message to the screen.

Can this be subverted, yes, but 99% of the time it wasn't, and, honestly, it was just a lead-in to training.

I realize this is your bread and butter, but maybe work training in on the back end for a little more money. Lead them in with this outrageously low price, then stun them with offering a recorded seminar/webinar for only a couple hundred bucks.

My company dropped $20k on training for InfusionSoft AFTER dropping $1200/mo just for the service. There is more money to be had in training than the product (99% sure).

To be frank, your position is hurting you, and doesn't make much sense to me. If you supply customers with your source upon purchase, you're already working on a trust model -- without much effort, they could give copies to a thousand people who wouldn't have to pay. And if you're working on a trust model, you might as well give the benefit of the doubt to a paying customer asking for a refund.

There are already several methods to encrypt part of the software and bind it to downloaded licenses

> When I asked for a refund you denied me.

This is terrible. I won't even consider trying Duet after hearing that.

If you're an independent software developer, the absolute worst thing you can do is to treat your customers poorly. Refusing refunds shows that you don't have faith in your product or your customers.

There's a reason that almost every successful online company has liberal trial and refund rules.

> > When I asked for a refund you denied me. > This is terrible. I won't even consider trying Duet after hearing that.

This is absurd. I know that most people are used to get refunds for anything, but if you know nothing about the problem you can't say they deserved the refund (I'm not saying they do, I'm saying we don't know).

You go to a fast food restaurant and get a hamburguer, but it's a rat? refund and lawsuit.

The same restaurant but you get food that is really disgusting and you notice as you receive? Either free meal and/or refund are ok.

You go to the same restaurant, get the food, enjoy it, and then ask a refund because they had blue balloons in there? No.

> Refusing refunds shows that you don't have faith in your product or your customers.

Considering when to refund and when not to also means that you value your product.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say

The landing page could do without the animated text or the chatbot that pops up and asks for my participation. Too busy, and a little irritating... I'd like to learn about the product first before Im bombarded with stuff like that. Good luck, seems like a solid offering.

I would like to see the ability to apply a rate to a person on a project and have that flow through to the invoice. I think there needs to be flexibility to edit the rate or write down hours but other than that its really nice.

What's your stack and how did you get to be so productive as a solo dev?

Might it ever be possible sign in to Duet via Google Apps login?

I don't see a feature for time entry. Can I enter time and generate invoices from an hourly rate? That's 90% of what I use freshbooks for.

Yes, you can enter time on the task panel using the timer, or you can enter time manually.

You can also enter time directly on the invoices.

Or you can drag a task that has time entries onto an invoice and the line items will be created automatically. Improving the docs is pretty high on my next steps list.

This looks fantastic. I think there is an additional opportunity you might be able to capture by adding functionality for the indie software store. The number of software developers who are paying 8% to fastspring for some pretty basic functionality is incredible. If you're looking for next steps, I'd think about a simple ecommerce storefront for digital licenses.

Pretty sweet! I have a feeling that self-hosting might make a come back

Are your clients mostly tech companies? If not, how do you manage the setup for non-tech companies?

Thanks! I did a survey of the users about a month ago. Most are small tech companies (i.e. web developers, designers, etc). I have some services companies (i.e. lawyers, construction). For non tech companies, I just do the setup for them. In most cases it only takes about 5 mins for me to do.

You should have two very different landing pages for tech and non-tech audiences (charging an extra to do the setup for them - like $20).

Unless you want to focus on only one of them (I would choose non-tech for market size if I were to choose).

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