I got 40 paying customers in 6 months with 0 dollars spent
blog.pixelixe.com
blog.pixelixe.com
No wonder Quora is such garbage now. It's basically a self-promotion platform.
I guess "how to successfully do X" of the type of clickbait HN readers enjoy.
While it's cool that you are making headway, a better question is: does this financially make sense in the long run.
This calculation doesn't make any sense. Can you build the initial Google project in your spare-time? Probably, if you find enough qualified volunteers.
Does that mean it's a viable business?
Absolutely not.
You need to check how much you would have get paid when working in your last highest paying job... (Even when you do things in spare time)
If my alternative is sitting in front of the TV, or reading a book, or gardening, or... whatever but I choose to do something like this, the cost of that time is effectively zero because that's what I would have been doing with it otherwise.
So, by "working" at something I enjoy and that I'm doing by choice, I'm basically being paid to entertain myself.
I would also argue that getting 40 paying customers is pretty decent validation, and the author can now spend money on marketing if that's the direction they want to take it.
Given that context I think any paying customers / level of profitability is a success. Yes, you can do lots of math about cost of time and opportunity cost but that ignores the original intent behind the project.
I played around with the tool a bit and it's actually pretty impressive--really solid for for a one person team and I wouldn't be surprised if it gains more users.
You have to distinguish between a hobby that brings you pleasure and the beginning of a business that will earn a profit if you valued your time at its opportunity cost.
I'd love to make an extra $240 a month.
"I worked on this project during my free time (weekends, evenings, holidays) for approximately 12 months, from April 2018 to March 2019."
If by "free time" the author means 1h per working day and 4 per day on weekends, that would be ~680h -> 85 days (8h per day)(back to back). Not that's not a good ROI at least for me. I won't count the deeply unique value of "time not spent with family/friends/children".
I sincerely hope that this picks up and gets 4000 paying customers, but so far for a year's worth of work it's not impressive.
Also, young people's time has a different value from an older married with kids people's time.
(most young people I know spend tons of time on youtube, yik yak (zip zap? or whatever it's called), playbox x-one things, etc...)
Example: I could spend a week learning carpentry and build a dinner table, or I could buy it from IKEA for $40. That's a dumb move for most people, unless I am super interested in carpentry.
He spent time, not money. His statement is accurate.
Edit: It's a subjective point of view to say it's not "useful". I found it helpful to see what he did.
All time spent can't just be measured straight in money / hour can it.
In any case, if he's happy and proud of his project that's the worse I wish him
I have tons of side projects I've spent months on that never made a dollar
But it was also twelve months of side project time, not full time
Only took me 8 years (on the side) to make a cartoon maker/meme editor that exports to MP4 and I get paid $0 for it and have no traffic:
If a subdomain blog has high ranking from backlinks, it’s not really a problem that this doesn’t transfer to the root domain. The visitor gets the content they want and the visitor is also exposed to the company/product that owns the blog. For example, if I land on Stripe’s blog and I’m interested in a credit card processor, there’s a high likelyhood I will also visit their main site, and I will be more qualified since they’ve already provided value from the blog post.
Search engines rank pages, not domains. Search results aren’t a list of domains, they are a list of pages. The domain is only one factor in the page’s rank. Whether a blog lives at a subdomain or root domain, the root domain will not rank higher than the blog post for keywords backlinked to that post.
"Make good content others want to link to" is not something automated SEO testing and SEO consultants can sell, unlike "You have a subdomain blog, please move it to /blog for better SEO points."
The problem is when you want to rank both your content on the blog AND some dedicated landing pages. Keeping blog separate will make it harder to get the juice passed to your landings.
The assertion that sub domains don’t contribute to domain authority is not backed by facts or authoritative evidence.
I would offer an alternative approach to launching with working billing in place. I believe a good way to validate an idea is to launch a site quickly and see how easy it is to generate traffic. I would rather not spend time on coding that may never get used. And early usage may point to improvements and pivots where time will be better spent before attracting paid users.
And it's possible to fake it with free trial periods that extend longer than promised. No one will complain about being allowed to continue using a site for free. And I believe it relieves some of the stress of having trying to support paid customers on early versions of a site.
How much maintenance/work on the product do you do per week excluding marketing and sales?
My experience, from numerous projects I've started over many years is that the vast majority of time, you won't get any SEO traffic at all even though I've gotten temporary increases in traffic from posting on HN and ProductHunt, quorra and reddit.
This post is simple, yet it really gives me simple steps to figure out how to get the 'marketing' aspect for my product... which was a bit obscure to me, until now. Of course not looking to build the next big thing, just help me understand the basics and get my feet wet.
Thanks!