A solo journey to $100k in sales
draculatheme.com
draculatheme.com
Today is a special day. My solo side project has hit 100K in sales, which is absolutely insane. When I started this thing, I never thought this would happen.
Monetizing an open-source project is very difficult, so I decided to share my personal journey and lessons learned.
This is a visual timeline showing all the lessons learned from $0 to $100k in one year.
I hope this can be helpful and inspire your own journey :)
Let me know if you have any questions! I'm here to answer every single one of them.
But it leaves one big thing out. You didn't launch with no one paying attention. You already had a fan base - people you could reach out to. I know you had to build your email list from scratch, but at least you know who was going to be in that list, and those people already knew and had a relationship with you.
You should go back farther in time to when you had no following, no people who cared, and no one who knew your name. As you said below, it's a 7 year overnight success. For those who want to replicate your success (not your product), what advice do you have for those who want to build a following so that later they can capture that following into something that will be beneficial?
I'm far from expert in this, but I'll reply with what my wife would say. She's in a completely unrelated, non-technical field and has a pretty good online following. In short: post things people are interested in, follow up with the ones who respond or ask questions and be genuinely interested in the people who follow you. Don't be fake.
The theory is simple, putting it into practice for your particular field is the hard part :-)
Did you get many repeat customers? I see the licence is limited to 3 machines instead of the user. Did this have the effect of getting customers to buy additional licences?
It would be interesting to know if people are willing to pay again so they can use software on multiple devices or if it is more likely to put people off buying the software.
I should definitely do a better job by creating a template and allowing people to use that to convince their bosses. This site is a good example of that: product-toolkit.com
Your post gave an interesting idea - a gallery of products that people can buy to spend their budgets in case they don't have ideas lol
In the next couple of weeks, I should add the premium version on Dracula PRO ;)
NB: Really refreshing how you created this timeline! You should make a (Gatsby) theme out of it :)
Really enjoyed reading the journey, it was long but wow.
I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.
Jira is horrific.
How history repeats itself.
Most of that bloat you have to deal with? Blame your bosses, not Atlassian.
Every page load still took 30+ seconds.
From Jira’s owner POV, Jira is pretty great.
I suspect that there aren't enough people who would pay $99 for a IDE theme to support an ongoing company with employees. However, for a single designer, it's perfect. The fact that 99.9% of the population turns their nose up doesn't matter because 0.1% is still 600,000 people. $100k is just over 1000 sales, which seems eminently doable for nearly any project.
My take-away is that - if you're considering a solo side project that will only work if you charge a "high" price (which probably isn't as high as you think it is) or if you get a ton of sales - try charging the high price!
That's why I said scale of the project matters. Using a 1% (or 0.1%) metric to found a company is rubbish. Using it to guesstimate if a personal project might get some buyers seems much more reasonable. This probably isn't a $100k recurring revenue project, but it's reasonable to imagine that you could get up to $100k revenue selling a $99 product to programmers.
If you have a microtransaction for everything in your computer, they start to add up pretty fast. At some point you have to pick and choose, and nice UI themes start to seem less essential...
(Also, do note outside the first world $29 is not such a small amount of money. And $79 is unthinkable for a UI theme).
I do use the free stuff (GitHub, VS Code, etc).
And I also pay for NCrunch, Wallaby, RubyMine, Rider, GoLand, PyCharm, FastMail, PCloud, and more.
Most of the stuff I pay for has free equivalents (and yes, I know JetBrains have an all-products subscription rather than separate Ruby, .Net, Go, and Python, but I have reasons).
Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1]
But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a trade-off :)
[1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many empiric experiments, especially with business/social things like this HN submission.
It's simple things like this that probably help a side project like this get to where it is, great job!
Everything is priced based on what people are willing to pay. Supply and demand.
seems a combination of cloudflare worker and a couple other tools
Here's his insight.
How to turn a SHOT into a SCENE - Travel Video Storytelling
That's pretty cool, but also only is true because he appears to love creating marketing pages, blogging, writing a book, creating themes for applications he doesn't use himself, etc.
I'm happy that he (/you, I see you're reading along Zeno - thanks for sharing), but it's not exactly what I'd have in mind for my "working on open source" daydream :)
From Ableton, one of my favorite DAWs to Blender, one of my favorite tools for modeling.
Like seriously, WELL DONE, friend. I'm happily making my way to checkout right now, thanks for sharing this with us
I'm so happy to hear you got to the checkout process. Thanks a lot for the support ;D
About the reasons for refunds - you're right, many people buy without reading and then ask for refund later. Others might feel buyer's remorse.
In my case, the most common request was because of their personal taste. You see, I'm selling a theme for developers and they usually spend a lot of time using the same theme. It takes time to adapt to a new one color scheme, and some people ended up asking for the refund before they get used to it.
I think the most valuable lesson here is, that there is a market for a lot more things than we would have thought a few years/decades back. Kind of how Spotify enable niche band to have successes outside the mainstream, just by allowing people to listen to every fringe corner of the musical ecosystem.
I got things set up to where I can run: set-theme gruvbox or set-theme one and it'll switch color themes in half a dozen apps. It also supports an optional --toggle-bg flag to flip between dark and light mode if the theme supports it.
Ended up being a fairly small zero dependency Python script that I put together in a few hours. I made a video about it here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-terminal-tmux-vim-and-fzf-t... and the script is in my dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/se....
But it wouldn't be hard to make the script more general purpose and put the configuration in a YAML file instead of in the script. Then add attributes for each supported app along with how those values would get replaced. If the app supports plain text config files it could realistically be done.
Now 160 countries have unique discounts based on their currency value and social climate.
Given that dynamic, it can be hard to distinguish cause from effect, let alone layer on things like A/B tests or other statistical analysis that might hold for things at bigger scale.
Dealing with the highs and, more importantly, the lows is what differentiates success from failure.
In this tweet [1] you mentioned that Dracula PRO was in the works for 7 years.
1. Would it possible to start monetizing the product earlier?
2. If yes, how much earlier in the case of Dracula PRO?
While $100k looks like an impressive number, in the grand scheme of things, it's just 14k/year, which is about $1150/month, which equates to an hourly wage of $6,50. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you were to maximize revenue?
[1] https://twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1227622330731335686
I like to consider myself a bit of an amateur asthete, and I see tangible value in this kind of stuff so I have no problem spending a little bit of money to make my work day more pleasant. It's just as important to me to enjoy what I'm looking at, as much as it is to have a useful tool.
Saw this on clicking the pro link. Really appreciate the gesture. Wish more products/creators thought this way :)
Having said that I noticed on your demo that the difference between selected text and non selected one it negligible. It is very unergonomic I would say. Funny thing I did notice the same trend on practically all dark schemes from other offerings. Themes for VS code for example. Curious why is that as the inability to clearly emphasize selected text would make my get rid of said theme immediately.
Congratulations on this. You’re doing a stellar job on all of this - your hard work is paying off.
Thank you so much Steve for the kind words.
Original: Clarification: that's $100K in a _month_, not annual. (Very impressive, I might add!)
I suspect a person similar to me would also pay a bunch of bucks for, say, a screen arrangement app for MacOS, or a way to more quickly pair AirPods (ToothFairy).
It's a type of user that has no problem paying for convenience, I suppose?
That said, $79 is too steep for me to pay for a set of themes, even though I do really like this one.
How much are your 50 hours worth? What about cutting that 10 year lead time down to 1h?
LastPass on the other hand is a tool you use because the world sucks. And their UX is pretty bad. And switching away is an annoying chore. You feel trapped and extorted into paying.
I configured my own editor and people often ask for details. I use LastPass begrudgingly because at this point I’m too lazy/busy to switch.
I feel like this gets missed a lot when questions about price/value come up.
Just because something's useful doesn't mean you want to buy it, and things you don't want to buy, but need, are likely to be thought of more harshly when it comes to price.
Is this part of mainstream economics yet? I see “the economist” argue around the edges of this, but then they ran a front page hit on Bernie sanders.
Each of those concepts has had a long time to become embedded, but the kind of globalised, "net-good" non-profit that still gives you as an individual benefits, has barely even reached the corners of HN yet (would assume there's people here who haven't yet discovered LetsEncrypt, for example).
I use LastPass because my employer compels me to.
Took my less than 10 mins to switch everything and download 1Password on all my devices. Super simple. Everything got imported over.
- Dracula is FOSS. LastPass has some FOSS projects, but the key ones aren't.
- Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the terrible trend where everything must be subscription based.
- You can use Dracula when the server is down. You can't use LastPass when the server is down. Yes, you can manually backup the vault somewhere, but (a) there's AFAIK no way to automate it, and (b) you should be updating the backup every time you edit the database, which turns into a PITA.
As a customer I really dislike LastPass' business model. I rather use KeePass, and pay a hundred bucks for some Vim rice.
Let's be fair here: LastPass needs to finance storage servers, network infrastructure, security engineers etc.. Dracula needs a CDN for downloads. Of course this is a bit simplified (the author needs the editors and a payment processer, for example), but it's a lot easier to work with a one-time fee when nearly all of your cost is up front and you have basically no running costs.
Lastpass aren't the first or last company that has felt this blowback
But the most hilarious/sad model has to be Elastic's "you need to pay us based on how bloated our garbage is, regardless of whether we're actually involved in hosting it".
Contrast this with Office 365, or even more niche pay per use or per month products, that are not better in any way that matters to me because they are hosted elsewhere. With these products I feel like someone wants me to pay a recurring fee just to run their code. Some of it is psychological, but I feel like I'm getting ripped off, that someone is trying to find a way to get me to keep paying for something (which they are).
Spotify and Netflix have found a good balance of offering a subscription, but providing such a large catalog that the value vs. actually owning all the content is clear. Most SaaS feels more like having to pay monthly just to own a single DVD.
But TLDR for me is I dont want to pay recurringly for the privilege of executing your code, I will pay recurringly for needed* infra, support, etc that goes along with it.
*not just tacked on to make it SaaS or to deploy it as SaaS
Like $19/month unlimited use or $50 for x amount of usage (api calls, transactions, assets, etc.)? Then you decide if you want to reup when you've used up your credits?
Many people already have cloud storage (dropbox, icloud) and don't see the need for another subscription. I certainly don't.
I'd enjoy spending money on a nice meal or say a guitar, things that bring joy rather than a say a boiler that brings utility.