Show HN: I built a tool I wanted to have, but didn’t exist | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a tool I wanted to have, but didn’t exist

madebypixelate.com

119 pointspixelate35 comments

It always makes me smile to see a submission like this.

  - Solves an actual problem that people actually have.

  - Charges money to solve that problem.  Without apology or explanation.

My advice to anybody here who doesn't yet have a product out there: Do what this guy did. Build something small that people will pay for.

My advice to anybody here who's currently building one of the four dozen photo tweeting services/Facebook cookie cleaners/thing-that-fixes-the-css-on-hackernews's that get submitted here every day: Stop. Then do what this guy did. Build something small that people will pay for.

> My advice to anybody here who's currently building one of the four dozen photo tweeting services/Facebook cookie cleaners/thing-that-fixes-the-css-on-hackernews's that get submitted here every day: Stop.

Hi. I rather enjoy making little css-mess-withers and other things that may not be quite as profitable as this. We all have things we enjoy doing, and I'm going to keep doing the things i enjoy doing.

So thanks for the unsolicited advice, but I think I'll survive without it.

Your advice is only half right.

Older businessmen know something the internet generation doesn't. You need one business as your cash cow which will allow you to toy with other businesses.

So yes build something small that people will pay for, or find a way to get passive income. Now that you have that, you have all the freedom in the world to build yet another photo sharing app that may get you $100M.

Great idea! I signed up and will definitely use it for my next app.

A few initial thoughts:

* You refer to "games" throughout the site, but the site is (almost) just as good for non-game apps. A simple word change might make non-game developers like me feel a little more at home.

* It's a big leap from free to €99 + VAT. Indie iOS developers don't pay VAT (it's taken by Apple on top of our 30% cut), so a VAT-inclusive price is easier. I'm more likely to pay €9/month unlimited or, even better, €5 for up to three apps.

* How are average scores calculated? This sounds interesting but there isn't much detail on it at the moment.

One last thing, is the "- username" text in the top left a Google+ joke? I like it :)

Thanks for your feedback!

There are some things about it that are games-specific, such as the festival calendar and the sites that Promoter is crawling for press mentions. It could be expanded to non-game apps in the future, but I wanted to start with the area I have most expertise in.

The VAT pricing is due to the tax rules we have in Europe, but I can see that it adds noise to the price point. Monthly payment is something I'd want to add, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible starting out.

For the average scores you enter the scores from the reviews to Promoter (e.g. 7 out of 10). Promoter will then calculate the average of all reviews.

Not sure what you mean with the Google+ joke? ;)

I guess the VAT situation must be different in other parts of Europe. I'm in Ireland and prices are usually advertised as ex-VAT if customers have a VAT bill they're paying themselves (because they charge VAT). That isn't the case for Irish devs which is why it's noisy for me.

One other thing I noticed: I suddenly got lots of emails from promoter because the search terms I used were too broad. I have a google alert "switch multi user browser ipad" which works well, but promoter emails me every time any of these terms appears. I couldn't find a way to correctly match articles containing all those terms (is that possible?), so I had to disable it by entering a random string in the search field.

I'm based in Sweden, so you'd only pay VAT if you're located within the EU and do not have a valid VAT number or if you're located in Sweden.

The syntax is different from Google Alerts (see the little grey text above the text field for the search terms). For your app I'd try "multi user browser" without commas.

+1 for a more generic 'App' (not just games) approach.

I suppose I could do this today (mostly) by curating my own app-specific RSS list in the app?

The RSS list is global for now, but give it a try to test Promoter with your app anyway. There is a big overlap between game and general iOS/Android sites, so it might still be useful to you.

Is it only for iOS, or will it work for Mac App Store too?

It's targeted towards games on all platforms really, so Mac App Store should work just fine. The only features that are iOS only are the promocodes and showing the average user rating.

> It's a big leap from free to €99 + VAT. Indie iOS developers don't pay VAT (it's taken by Apple on top of our 30% cut), so a VAT-inclusive price is easier.

I always thought that "VAT-inclusive" meant that the price included VAT. If so, doesn't charging VAT-inclusive mean that those developers are now paying VAT twice on this expense, once through Apple and a second time as part of this purchase. (Ordinarily they'd be able to take a credit for the latter, buf if it's bundled, they don't have the relevant information, or rather, receipt.)

As an iOS developer, I can say that I agree with the statement that this would be beneficial for non-game apps as well.

As for the strategy, I would highly recommend you read "Business Model Generation" if you want to flush out this idea a bit more. It seems like you're on the right track, but maybe need to clarify a few points.

Lastly, have you considered going with a monthly subscription based service? Possibly even tiered? I just think that you're more likely to get people to pay $10/mo (with the first 30 days free or something) than $99/year. For recurring subscriptions done easy, check out recurely.com.

Thanks for the tip on the book, I'll check it out.

I considered monthly subscription and want to offer it in the long run. Recurly looks like the best solution out there, but it's also pricey when you're starting out and want to keep costs low.

I really went with the most simple solution I could come up with, which is one price point and Harvest+PayPal as a super cheap payment solution that does not require payment gateway and merchant account.

Flat and unlimited pricing can often be a problem. Flat means EA pays as much to manage all their game-press for all their games as an indie dev does for one.

Also, I realize you're keeping it simple now but have you thought about figuring out scarce resources (likely bandwidth) and charging based on that? Or, even just setting a threshold at which there will be extra charges. (1GB traffic/day or 2GBs stored.)

When I see a company offer unlimited deals I wonder how long they'll be able to offer that.

Looks neat, if I had a product being released it's stuff I know I wouldn't be as on the ball with as you now are. I'll sign up (even at current prices) if I release anything.

Yes, I thought of pretty much every single possible pricing model, and I went with the simplest one I could come up with. Figuring out the price point and payment solution was the biggest hurdle that kept me from launching while the app was in private beta, and flat pricing meant and could keep things simple.

Even though an EA division would pay as much as an indie, I think the pricing is still very fair with effectively being less then 9 EUR / month and with the fact that I don't charge people if they don't want to renew after one year, but still keep the existent data.

* recurly.com

See also: Spreedly, CheddarGetter, Chargify, Vindicia, Zuora

Thanks for including Chargify.

--- Lance Walley, co-founder, Chargify

Have you considered a Chargify Lite (or an HN discount =])... I'll be launching a SaaS product soon that will be $10/mo. Even your Launch and Start plans won't be usable since they'll suck away the early revenue (which curtails my ability to reinvest growing the user base).

After digging into the service a little, I stumbled on to this feature: "Compile the best quotes from your reviews on a great-looking promotional webpage." The result looks like this: http://pixelate.promoterapp.com/pub/spirits/ . That's really cool.

Although I have an app in the App Store, I actually couldn't help signing up for this to help in the promotion of my web app. :)

This looks very cool, and I will just add that I don't think it's specific to even apps at all. It's relevant for anything that would get talked about on blogs, twitter, etc.

I have my own annoying aggregation stuff set up, and I'd love to be able to use what you've done instead. I can use google alerts for a lot of stuff, but I have not automated checking twitter search results.

This is incredible.

One route for this would have been to make it so it could be used across any industry but by sticking to games you've made it incredibly valuable in that niche.

Keen to see how it goes and if you adapt it to other niches (I know a whole heap of people in the music industry who would kill for something like this).

Thanks! Yes, the music industry would be another niche that you could spin it off, but I still think you'd need to target the needs of that niche to make it really work well.

I think your product is probably 90% of the way there to being relevant for the music industry. It would appeal to music industry publicists, labels, marketing companies, artists etc etc.

I'm sure there is plenty of gas in the tank for the gaming industry!

Love this!

My first app is getting submitted this week (with #2 about 3 weeks behind it). I've been building spreadsheets and other hacks to manage this, but this looks like a much better solution. Thanks!

BTW you should change the font size and color on your blog to match the better size/color on Promoter.

Not all of us have good eyesight.

What device are you reading the blog on?

Nice work. Tweeted it to all my game dev followers for you.

Generalize it to non-iOS games too - for instance Newgrounds, Kongregate, Armor Games scores and Jay Is Games reviews for Flash devs. In the Flash side of casual games you have major portals (like those mentioned) who license/produce games in significant volume and can't track that stuff unless they want to spend all day in Google.

Only two features are iOS-only: promocodes and average user ratings. For everything else, it works great for Flash games as well.

This should help indies who don't have time to manage their PR. Lemme give it a try.

I like your understanding games, game, a lot i look forward to finishing it!

Thanks! ;)

Its gonna take me 5 hours to make this app so it suites my needs and one more day to make it usable for everyone.

Basically you are selling the time it took you to add all the blogs to your search engine + the CPU time it takes to parse the results.

It actually took me 4 hours to build the very first version of this. To get it to where it is now took me another 21 months working on it part-time though.

You're in an excellent position to compete then! Looking forward to seeing your product.

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