Tricks to Monetize Your Side Projects
jeremyaboyd.com
jeremyaboyd.com
No point in storing dead accounts. I don't care about a falsely inflated user base. People love that.
Also, I end the email by saying, "click reply to talk to our CEO directly and ask any questions you may have."
The last one gets a lot of conversions, and helps tremendously in figuring out what their concerns are.
This system is doing the magic for me.
We tested this out on the "Agency" vs "Basic" and "Pro" plans for Linklicious.
Tough line, I have a proper company, and under this entity, all side projects are run, so that keeps it mostly okay to say CEO. I happily open up a bit if people get curious though, usually in the many emails people send over the months.
http://www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/letter/General+Scot...
That's a lot of work and as a developer I couldn't care less, since it's just a side project. Just ask people about your core message and if it doesn't resonate, change things.
> On-boarding
This is the hardest thing to get right. Too much instruction will be counter productive, too little will be unpredictable. Black magic.
> 1 Hour later
I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.
It also probably converts more :)
> Price Anchoring
Do, test, ask. This is the most crucial part of any business. I'd personally push a lot of focus here.
> QA the SHIT out of your product
Well said, any product start should have this as #1 priority.
> While I know this is probably only a side project, there is no reason you couldn't turn this into a viable small startup with an additional 1-2 developers
What you listed above already takes a fulltime job of 1-2 people.
I agree with you on unsubscribing from the emails, but it works. 86% of the users open, 54% click, 23% replied to the email and only 2% unsubscribed.
At my job with HKSEO/Humankind, this is what I spent my days doing, but I would do 4-5 prototypes at a time, pitch them to the owner, build the 1-2, launch and repeat constantly. Once the product was making a decent amount of money, we would spend more time doing the split testing and on-boarding (which was also split tested).
So I know a single developer can do this on 20% time if they aren't expecting a 1 week turnaround.
Software developers are among the most cynical when it comes to marketing, so I expect us to say that these suck.
What I wonder though is if every company starts to take the same approach, does a public collective fatigue set in?
I imagine that the conversion rate on direct mailers that look like novelty checks started off quite high, but the public eventually became immune as the "trick" is absorbed.
Signing up enrolls your user email into a drip marketing thread, from "Joe", the founder. He asks "how's it going? can I help?" I reply with thanks and a couple of questions. No reply.
A few days later, a canned follow-up email from "Joe", etc.
As I try to figure out the service and sharing, I sign up with another email address. Bam, the same number of hours later, a "personal" query from "Joe", as above.
Research suggests that "Joe" has abandoned this side project (his right, of course).
I'd suggest though that "drip marketing" + abandoned site is an anti-pattern. I'd be happier with "Joe" and his free service if I'd never gotten the transactional email (especially the second or third in the sequence, when he's never replied.)
The oddly good news: the lack of replies plus the Googling it instigated made me realize I was relying on an abandoned project, so of course I backed up my stuff.
How did you measure this if there's literally no email clients left out there that load remote content by default?
According to Customer.io, the change was to make images load by default, not requiring the end user to click Show Images. Thus making the open rates more accurate.
AFAIK all webmail providers do too, otherwise there wouldn't be so much of a market regarding email marketing with open rates and remote updating content (eg https://movableink.com/gallery/autotrader)
They do that, but images in mail have unique URIs per recipient to enable this sort of tracking. Before Google enabled caching, it was possible for sender to figure out the exact number of times an email was read, now you can only know the first time it is read.
It is the last information I have from my job with Humankind before I left for a corporate gig.
Really? Clicking a link? And Gmail often even adds their own "Unsubscribe" button.
Recently, Postach.io did a comeback with the service where they started out by mass-emailing inactive users what problems they are facing about the service. I emailed them expecting an automated "Thank you for your time" response.
Instead, a while later I got a custom email talking about the very specific issue I had emailed about and how they had been getting complains about the same from other users and how they are working to resolve this issue.
That made me feel they actually cared about my problems. Needless to say, I am on board!
Oh and please please please, put some effort into multi-account detection (if not a side project). It's really annoying / unprofessional to trigger off a new series of On-boarding emails just because I added a new org.
Also, price appropriately, just because your unlimited plan is stupidly priced wont make people thing the solo plan is reasonable if it's not. Ask your early customers what they're using and what features they'd use/pay for if individually offered to them.
Screw that. If I haven't flagged you as spam already, I will now. You're either incompetent because you actually don't know if I've logged in or not, or you are intentionally misrepresenting what you know. Either way, you've lost me.
As far as the "it works--percentages" stuff, I hate to break it to you, man, but I think you've got a serious case of correlation/causation confusion.
There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself when you send an email:
1. Is your business spam? 2. Are you literally engaging in fraud?
If the answer to both of those is no, email is probably not the droid you are looking for. There are some exceptions, but not many--and fewer by the day as people figure this out.
I agree split testing is a lot of work, but you can use something like a bandit algorithm to automate the testing to reduce the amount of work needed.
>I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.
you might, but I do not mind the emails as long as they have not hit the 1 per day threshold. I usually get annoyed at that point and look for the unsubscribe. Sending out a set of emails as he describes works very well in most cases.
A while back I signed up for a pingdom alternative. I was pretty happy with the interface and probably would've considered paying for some of the extra features.
However, I very soon after received an 'informal' message from the CEO or whatnot asking if I'm happy with the product and about upgrading the paid version. And whenever I logged in, a chat box would open with some first-name-basis employee asking me if I'm happy with the product and whether I'd be interested in upgrading. On top of that a number of the screens would have similar types of messages.
I've rarely experienced such aggressive on-boarding, and I implore every business owner to avoid doing so. Because as a result, I am less likely to upgrade to a paid version.
Oh my god, those damn chat boxes! I work for a company that uses one of those chat box providers. They seem to be actively used and i haven't gotten many complaints.
With that said, our chat icon just sits in the bottom. However, often when i login to the icon provider (to check messages, reply to customers, etc) they have a 6th of my screen taken up by some fake non-replyable chat announcing some faq item, new feature, etc.
I've downvoted every one, and they just keep coming. The activity of it is quite annoying. Especially since we're already a paying customer for them. I hope to god my company doesn't decide to push any of these fake messages out.
My hosting provider has a support chat box that occasionally pops up, but generally isn't very intrusive. I've used it a bunch of times for support and it's been very helpful. I think chatboxes are great when they're used in this way.
Anything else is just annoying.
Unless you have a tonne of traffic, and let's face it, side projects tend not to, A/B testing simply doesn't work. I've tried it a few times with BugMuncher, but the results take 3 - 4months, and are usually inconclusive. I've spoken to other people in similar situations and they've found the same thing. For reference, BugMuncher is lucky to see 3,000 uniques a month :)
I believe A/B testing is a good idea when you have the traffic for it, and I'd love to be able to make use of it, but unless your side project is getting 10s of thousands of unique views each month, there's much better things to spend your limited time on.
A/B testing is best left to larger scale projects where you can dedicate a proper resource to it.
But I think it still makes sense for smaller projects to make "big" A/B test, like testing a completely different homepage/landing page with different copy and marketing approach.
Another example of useful A/B test on small scale: for registered users, testing if an automated "support" email is helping moving customers to the next step of your funnel (A: send email B: don't send email. Measure the conversion of that specific funnel step)
I'd also add that being casual about test statistics in the way this post describes is only going to mislead you. If you can't take the time to understand the math and run proper experiments, you're better off not testing at all since you'll just end up cherrypicking statistical outliers over and over while thinking you're doing something useful.
I have some projects that fit the use case very well, but I personally hate receiving them. I know that I am not the target audience of my app and that familiarity with a product and just having the name show up over and over makes the product easier to recognize. Of course, the data shows it converts better.
It just seems like one of those dark patterns.
Is it really about choosing ethics or money? Is there a third option?
You legally always need to make that an option.
Also it was over 10 days, so kind of longer than a week ;)
But a transnational email is expected on signup, that is how you activate your account and verify your email address. Then the personal welcome was always a VERY highly opened and responded to email. I would do my best to keep up with the questions.
The third email wasn't always sent, only if they hadn't used the product, and it was assumed they needed help.
And the last email was a coupon, and who doesn't like coupons!?
The beauty is that we run it all using Intercom.io, and if someone really doesn't want to hear from us, they can unsubscribe and never hear from us again. If they stay on, we can really tailor the drip onboarding emails and tailor it to suit their situation (e.g. logged on less that 'x' times, only entered < 5 transactions, never visited a particular page etc.)
Speaking of 'dark patterns', I absolutely abhor, and insist on never using pop up email request dialogs on the main landing page of our site. My philosophy is never badger a potential customer before they sign up, but rather entice them to engage with me and my product after they have expressed an interest and signed up for a trial. We don't want to 'punish' people for just looking but we don't want them to feel alone if they are looking to become a user.
Even then, if they choose to walk away, we stop pestering them after one last attempt to entice them back.
Something that's worth trying is to tell the reader in that first email how many emails you're going to send and give them the option to unsubscribe now.
I'd also consider moving any guides or assistance on getting started emails into a drip feed course that they can opt into. That should reduce the amount of emails they receive while keeping the quality up.
For most of us receiving mails, the quality is important. If it's an email we're interested that links to things that are interesting we'll open it and click links (even if there's 5 in a week). If it doesn't, it's just noise.
I do an online email course on career hacking using ConvertKit[1]. I'm not really selling anything (I was but had to pull the product) but splitting the onboarding off not only lets you easily gauge interest but reduces the spam. For people who are interested in looking at how this works, you might want to take a look at the course, and of course I'd welcome any feedback by email.
Somehow I just picture the scene from A Christmas Carol where Jacob Marley is telling Scrooge that he will be visited by 3 ghosts over the course of the night.
> "Over the course of the next week, you will be visited by FIVE marketing emails"
If you don't send anything after those few emails, it's very hard to call them spam. Most people will even like receiving them.
By the way, personally, I've got very wary of those personal emails from CEO on sign-up. They are blatant lies, it does not feel right and does steer me away from companies that send them. Does a "Note from the CEO" with a "reply to talk to me" at the end convert any worse?
I was recently commenting on an excellent Show HN for a product called Duet and it was the most karma I have ever received on HN (17 votes in 4 hours), and another respondent said I should write it up as a blog post. So here it is.
What do you think of MNMN.io? That's one of my side projects.
This landing page is too busy with the animated backgrounds as you scroll.
From my short look, I think you will have a hard time finding that person who has no time to read an article and instead wants to outsource that to you. You would do better if instead of having a human summarize the articles, utilize one of the many NLP Summarizers out there (they aren't great but they scale). More about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_summarization
You can charge users for credits, then base how much an article costs on its length.
For a product like this it is always best to hide the true cost behind credits, then charge tiered prices for the credits.
Buy 100 credits for $7 or 1000 for $25, etc.
You will then want to explain WHY the person NEEDS this, and probably in autoplaying animated video with a professional voice over actor reading a script that is also close captioned in the video (test the autoplay though. some audiences convert like crazy on it, others bounce).
Then have 3 product offerings, NLP, Human Written and a Voice Mail type MP3 recording of the summary.
Most people will go for the NLP, but some will pay for written, and you can out source that to various crowd sourcing platforms for about $1. For the voice mail you will probably have to pay $1 for the summary then $3 for a person to read it.
Credits should be purchased on a subscription plan for a discount over the one-time purchases, and you should offer a few sample outputs and get testimonials from people.
That should get you started! If you have any other questions, let me know.
I agree that credits might work better, but I love transparency and therefore I'll also stick with money :)
With due respect to jermaustin1, please, people, do not take this bit of advice. Using credits or other pseudo-currency is a standard dark pattern used by casinos and free-to-play games to extract more revenue from customers by obscuring the amount of cash that a user is paying for a given action. See, for example, http://evilbydesign.info/greed/money-to-tokens/.
It signals that a business is willing to take advantage of human cognitive blind-spots to get additional revenue rather than being purely focused on delivering good value for money.
Everyone around the world can discuss an item and be like 'it costs 50 tokens for blah' and do comparisons between items in the store based on simple token amounts, but actually be paying different costs (and see different amounts) for it with their own currency.
To use programmer terms, it adds a layer of abstraction on top of the service, with all the associated pros and cons that goes along with that.
You might want the units you charge by the word summarized. A possible issue might be highly technical texts that require specialized knowledge. You could charge more for those.
Your business model is basically what I call 1:1 - One person pays for a summary and you perform one summary.
It might be more profitable to do a N:1 - A bunch of people pay for the same summary and you perform one summary.
This is how SparkNotes and CliffNotes work. Imagine selling "The top ten daily Hacker News posts/comment threads summarized daily."
Even better would be to offer summaries of things many people want that are relevant for longer periods of time (so you can sell to more people). A site that summarizes famous speeches would be one such example.
Edit: also, you mention transparency to prefer money to credits, but I don't see prices.
As I do lots of hobby projects, I like your advice and will definitely try some of the pricing approaches.
Keep up the good work!
We are aware of the aesthetics of the site, and working on that, but we have some discussions on how to monetise it; should we go for a credit system (with weekly reports about your site, historic information, automated improvement tips), should we go for selling expert advice, or should we focus on other things, like advertising, reselling services like pingdom/gtmetrix, etc?
We would value your opinion in this!
Your back end product could be something like "managed customized cloud hosting" (a.k.a. 3 $5 digitocean droplets) $85/mo. I did something like this with a wordpress hosting product we launched. $50+/mo. We just used a specialized hardened image on digitalocean. The lowest product was a single $5 droplet for the wordpress install and a $10 droplet for the MySQL box.
Or hold back some of your recommendations, generate a report with contact information so they can get in touch with you and set up a service agreement giving them EXACT things to change. Try and set up a retainer for 5hrs/month @ $200/mo then tack on specialized hosting!
At the moment, I think we don't want to recommend specialised hosting when we cannot prove it will benefit their site, but we might add a host comparison to get better data on this.
Thanks again for the help, your feedback is much appreciated!
So the end customer buying a $20 product still only pays $20, but you charge the store/company they bought from $1. The company ends up with earning only $19, and you end up earning something like $0.50 after you pay the portion of the fee you were charged by stripe or paypal or whoever.
Sure, there is money to be made here, but it isn't free and you need to manage the extra risk and liability that comes with it. What if someone discovers your platform hasn't got the same anti-fraud/verification processes that the larger players can afford by virtue of being a larger player, and decides to take advantage of it?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287
--------
Since pro accounts initially cost £6 for month, it turns out that this is low enough that it won't send red flags to stolen cards. ... If there's a dispute on Stripe, there's transaction fees for reversing charges. £15.34 in fact. Since I know I'll lose the dispute, it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility.
--------
What's behind the EXRTRA risk? Couldn't he just simply pass over the liability to Stripe who's the actually payment processor?
We had an accounting software that was used in some pretty big Martial Arts schools, we handled their payments through Authorize.Net (stripe didn't exist yet), but in the contract, we told them a reversal will cost (making the numbers up because it has been so long) $25 + the transaction and a bounced eCheck was $30 + transaction. These fees were directly pass through, we didn't try to profit on them.
That said, the number of fraudulent card/check or bounces was 0.
We were the payment processor for a business, not working with skeezy customers directly (like Duet is).
If there is fraud, you bill that back to YOUR customer. Just like Stripe bills you for a bounced check or a reversal, you bill your SaaS customer.
BadGuy uses your service to sign up for BadGuyDojo, and attaches a stolen bank account. 10 "customers" sign up with stolen credit cards, process payment, and the money is gone along with them. A month or two later the credit card companies come looking to you for the money.
I'm a small business owner and you are my client. You and I have a relationship. You aren't a random BadGuy. The likelihood of you purposefully bouncing a check or committing fraud is next to nil. In this scenario, similar to what Duet is doing (facilitating communications and payments between known vendor-client relationships) the SaaS that processes the payments is pretty safe from fraud.
Now, I would never roll this out on any of our SEO services. When we had credit card payments on the earliest version of Linklicious, we fought over $1200/mo in charge backs from fraud or "fraud." After nearly 3 months of our mailbox filled with chargebacks and complaints, we switched to PayPal and only once did we have an obscene amount of fraud (hundreds of signups from stolen French PayPal accounts) at which point we blocked the country of origin for a week and the problem disappeared.
You have to be intelligent no mater what payment method you chose. There are negatives on both fronts.
Could you tell me what tools or services you use to automate the emails, and detect which ones to send based on if users are using the service?
Thanks
It's mostly books I like, and books I've read, but it's current revenue comes from Amazon affiliates. I know affiliates are often frowned upon, but I do my best to not recommend anything crap ;)
Side projects tend to not have the traffic for this. If in doubt, use a calculator to calculate how long it would take to statistically detect a given uplift.
Instead, user-test everything. User-tests give feedback that's rich, nuanced, instant, qualitative and granular. And each one needn't take more than five minutes.
1 Hour: email
Day 2: email
Day 6: email
Day 10: email
Maybe it works but that kind of crap is super annoying and for me is going to turn me off your product. IF I ask you a question, quick and helpful followup is often the key between my staying with your product or moving on. Annoying unsolicited spam is not.
It works because none of the emails are spammy like typical marketing emails.
If you were to just badger the users with hard sale after hard sale you would quickly have no users.
I liked the white paper. I'd gladly let him check back with me 4-5 times a year and I might even buy one of his courses. But the guy has lost me forever with this rabid emailing. You'd think a marketing expert would know that wouldn't you?
This sort of marketing is pretty sociopathic.
I strongly disagree with this point. Patching in bug/security fixes to different versions of a product is several orders of magnitude more work than just having everyone on the latest, most secure and most patched version. For a side project to be successful you want to spend as as little energy on admin as possible and much energy on the project as you can.
Have one version. Differentiate between tiers by using feature flags so everyone is on the same codebase. Make development easy and design things so there's as little admin work as you possibly can.
Ideally though, you should be associating that data back to userids and bucketing it by whether or not that particular user converted to paid or let his trial expire. That way you can collect statistics on what things make your users happy so that you can know what sort of features to add in the future, and so that you can gently steer wayward users toward doing things that you know will tend to bump their chances of converting.
I've been writing a bit about this lately. Here's a better thought out explanation of the above:
http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/maximizing-saas-trial-...
I always wanted to use kissmetrics, but the owner would never pay for it so we made due with our GA and custom rolled everything (which honestly cost more to maintain than the 200/mo kissmetrics).
For monetization, I would probably stick with the shitty micro payments. Or use them as resume fodder to pitch consulting gigs.
That said, I only recently got into mobile development and have been doing only enterprise distribution, so I don't have to worry about what Apple/Google allows or not.
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/07/apple-revokes-gba4ios-sig...
In internet/affiliate marketing this is what we called a "lead in" to the back-end offer (typically training or a consulting gig).
We would typically write an ebook and give it away for an email address, then over the coming weeks send tips and tricks leading into a soft sale of a product or training that would completely automate everything they just learned in the ebook.
Oh well. I'm just glad I can help a lot of people with this post.
When I get this email, I unsubscribe/ignore/tell them I'm not interested. If it's too high-pressure, I'm out.
No doubt if I email you you will give extra trial period, this could be done automatically though with an accompanying follow up email to reengage. As you would be tracking usage metrics anyway there would be plenty of data to decide if I have properly trialed the full capability of the software or not.
In my opinion this decision (not only which payment provider to use, but whether to do it yourself at all!) depends highly on the kind of project. Fraud detection, international tax compliance, etc. can quickly become very expensive. Choose carefully.
Paywall isn't implemented yet so feel free to sign up and try it out.
A lot of feedback I've gotten so far has been on the pricing and finding it hard to get the right mix.
As a scenario if you were referring your contacts, what would you want out of it?
What is CLTV?
While this is true, it's worth acknowledging that this comes with some risk. If the current version is doing reasonably well, you could potentially miss out on a lot of conversions by replacing it with an untested version.
Yeah, these aren't a secret if you live and work in products. For most people creating a side project, though, marketing and product management is some sort of dark voodoo magic.
I like lifting the veil on that.
Now that that is out of the way, the only way to make something like this more legit looking and be able to monetize is to wrap it into a product.
The domain name is actually a very big asset. An almost English-sounding 4 letter word is very rare. Hold that as long as you can! If you have to go without food for a month to renew it, do that!
To wrap this into a product, you will want to add additional features.
1) Sign up for an account 2) Create a project 3) Import a video from youtube or your computer (also a checkbox saying they are allowed to) 4) Edit the video, drag other imported videos around, etc. 5) Download or Send to YouTube (with a watermark unless you are premium)
The clicking and dragging can be pretty simplistic, just use the thumbnail and have a start and end time for clipping the video shorter.
Its a lot of work, and it has been done before, but if you make it simple to use and cheap enough, you could probably make $15/mo or $150/year.
Just be sure to find a good admin theme from wrapbootstrap.com or themeforest.net
* 650 KB of JavaScript. Why should this be a client-side app? (This being the landing page)
* The gif is great, because it directly shows me what this is. I would invest the saved KB here.
* The "featured on"-part looks a bit cheap and unorganized.
* {{ lang.premium }} {{ lang.upgrade_why }}
Mind explaining what you mean why this should be a client side app?
Btw: Your German translation is so bad, I would rather keep it English. "Premium" is translated as the German word for "bonus" or "bounty", while "Premium" itself is a perfectly fine German word. This probably hurts the conversion rate more than it helps.
It might be tolerable for a free as in beer service, but if anybody wanted me to pay for it, do the translation properly (e.g. hire somebody for a few bucks), or focus on languages you mastered first. I am more likely to pay for a "proper" English-language service than a crappy "German"-language one, but that does not necessarily translate well to other Germans.
In Czech version they call their "Premium" plan button as "Insurance".
This is good point for monetising side projects: if you are going to create international version, spent 20 USD on people who actually speak that language or keep it in English.
Also, many of the "tricks" are bullshit, or, if they're not, at least they're not proved in any way.
Why not make money on the side by providing additional values? E.g. if you write a plugin that enables the customer to deliver his service, don't charge a fixed price but a yearly license fee, including updates to the software and the ability to write you an email if a question occurs.
In the end being honest is always paying off more in the long run. If you do shady stuff like that it will work in the short run, but will cost you customers who just find other developers.
What is this in regard to? I was always a product builder (I haven't done client work in nearly a decade) and if I could utilize someone else's product inside mine to not only save me development time but provide a better experience and charge more, I will do that ever time. There is nothing dishonest about that.
When you get a cab from point a to point b, you are paying more than just the gas/depreciation, you are paying for the fact that someone is doing something for you. Same with every product.
The service you provide should be paid well. But recurring income without telling any side of the business may even be illegal.
I am still very confused by your meaning. If you could expand it further, that would help me possibly better get my point across. I think there may be a miscommunication.
If your small business goes to Stripe/Square/etc you will be quoted a 3% + 30cents transaction fee. By pushing volume through them, they lower your transaction fee. As far down as 2% + 0cents. This would allow you to add value while profiting from the spread.
And to your stealing money comment, all business is stealing money. You take a service that is less than you sell it for. If you were doing it any other way, you wouldn't be in business for long.
You mean, the customer is hiring a service from you but does not expect you to take a cut?
You can make that high-tier throwaway suggestion when the app is an invoicing app for freelancers who will never buy that tier, but it's bad general advice. For the general product, you better hope you don't get a few enterprise customers who don't see a difference between $100 and $500 when it comes to pricing, and who can drain your phone with demand...