Building a Product: One month later, $119.50 in the bank
projectorpm.com
projectorpm.com
The product that I'm currently living comfortably off of made me less than half that much after its first month. Don't think of it as $100/month, think of it as $100/month/month. That's your current acceleration, and it extrapolates out quite nicely!
Here's a more carefully worded version of my take on products like this:
That graph is nice but this is the real graph you want to see:
https://img.skitch.com/20120331-ft3faju2jpqseq3ucff1fgi31h.p...
That's the "estimated" (all open trials) revenue growth for Freckle over its whole life time. Look how stagnant it was, then slow, and for how long. And compare that to now :)
NB: real billing, trailing a month behind any given date, is 5-15% less than the estimate (due to trials not continuing etc).
It's nice to see entrepreneurs like you, coming out openly with business figures. Helps newbies like me, to go on and keep focus only on the product. Unabated by tiny bubbles we see in funding side of story - aka "herd mentality".
Why "Uh oh"? I'm not the boogeyman ;)
Is it possible for me to connect over email with you?
But, simply by looking at how long it took her to get to that revenue number, why would you think her program is "get rich quick"? Years is not quick, in Internet, Business, Internet Business or any other metric of time.
FTR: just under 30% of the revenue last year was from my class, but that's primarily because A) infoproducts pay bigger lump sums, faster than subscription income and B) we haven't yet publicly launched Charm (http://charmhq.com) which will drop very soon. Charm has already added ~$24k/yr to our baseline even while being invite-only. Pretty much all the revenue from my class was rolled into funding product development for our SaaSes. It's my Be Your Own Angel tactic.
On the other hand, all this discussion seems more like a silver lining towards disruption in angel investing space too. Sublime for entrepreneurs, disastrous for others may be.
It's threads like these that make my day at HN :)
This is true, but there are only 2 reasons I see:
1. Choosing the utterly wrong product. Smart people like us are drawn like moths to the flame of "great ideas," rather than "things which could help people and be really profitable." Something I teach against in my class, called Idea Quicksand. My philosophy about this is explained the first 3 free samples available on http://unicornfree.com/30x500
2. Barring "great ideas" which aren't businesses, people give up way too soon. They have no idea that it takes so long, and they don't prepare for it, and they think they've failed when they're really just normal. Which is a huge part of the reason why I blog & show up here.
I think about this a lot. Much like a writer, developers do the best work objectively when they "write what they know". What this means in practice is that the market is flooded with products that are at the union of common developer knowledge. That is why there are so many products for consultants out there. Basecamp, Freckle and Projector are all examples of this. Obviously there's always room for a new product, especially when you have used many of these products and decided exactly why you don't like them so you can come up with a uniquely better product.
But when I get outside of the tech bubble, I see that the majority of the business world has pathetic technical vision, but a lot more money. Now obviously you will never be a Facebook or a Twitter in an established market, but if you can combine some domain knowledge with cutting edge tech skills, there is a lot more low-hanging fruit than fighting over early adopters for the latest tech toy.
Careful. They may have more money in aggregate, but a lot of them don't buy tech solutions, don't want to change, aren't actually business-minded (e.g. always looking for improvements). This goes double for local biz like bars, restaurants, salons, and stores, and triple for education and nonprofit and NGOs.
I'm also finding hard to motivate myself to make something for people that are very different from me (I have a file sharing solution catered to small businesses in France). I imagine it's easier when you care naturally more about your end users.
When all my friends think this market is super-saturated, what I find out is that most of these small business people are just happy to use emails and the occasional FTP.
March 0.02
April 38.85
May 64.75
June 76.75
July 122.60
August 99.80
September 129.75
October 109.75
November 199.60
December 119.75
January 149.70
February 249.45
March 369.25
So now it's a little more interesting. I can make $369 in a month with 150 uniques per day. What can I do with 300-500 uniques per day? And I think I can get there easy because just one blog comment I made is responsible for 20 uniques per day and I know I can outrank that blog page with a little work.
Do. It. Now.
Pinterest is definitely a good place for these kind of products.
50 155 460 510 730 1200 1225 1645 2180 2185 3085 3310 3805
The graph for the first year of AR and BCC turned out to prove this out in a very dramatic fashion. Recurring revenue: the best kind of revenue.
P.S. Charge more. I just got a very uneventuful email about a particular customer hitting their 30 day mark w/o canceling including my system's guesstimate of their likelihood to stay a customer and their LTV. Probabilistically counting my chickens before they hatch, they're worth like a whole month of bingo cards and we've never even exchanged an email.
care to share how you calculate the likelihood, please?
Everybody else thinks they're reading a blog on your product site, and that clicking the logo will take you to the root of that. In other words, the homepage for your product. When it doesn't, they tend to simply hit the back button enough times to leave.
I've found it to be a much better fit for my workflow than Pivotal/Basecamp etc. Brennan's been great at looking for feedback and keeping in touch with everyone so far (even if I am lax at replying). There's some real speed behind updates and it's improving every day.
Aside: Didn't sign up just to big the project up; I do have another account on HN which has been around longer, I just try not to associate my real name and nickname.
You should also try and show that you aren't just for companies who might have multiple projects on the go. We only have a single product and could see the benefit of something like this as a very rudamentary issue tracker and feature suggestions between the team.
- What kind of a roadmap do you have (features primarily)?
- How long has it taken you so far?
We're working on the following: - Constant UI/UX improvements - A better dashboard - Metrics that will help you see how accurate your estimates were vs. reality. A lot of people are using Projector as a "living estimate" that they send to their clients. Since it's money focused, you can see in real time how adding and removing tasks affects the overall project budget. - Better email integration - A functioning mobile experience
It's taken about 3.5 months to get the product to where it is today.
Had a look at the product. Looks v.solid. Just a couple of things:
- When I attach a file via /projects/project_name/stories/ it completes the upload then the files seems to disappear? What I mean is that the progress indicator goes to 100% and nothing else happens. Then if I go back to root and back to stories there is no file.
- I think you need labels on the 4 symbols on the left hand side. The only one which is self evident is the '?'. The others I have to hover over to find out about and that is annoying from a UX pov.
Cheers and good luck :)
To attach a file, you need to also comment (I realize now this might not always be ideal). But the workflow would be: Attach some files, enter text in the comment box, post. I'm working on redesigning the entire task detail page, which will hopefully make this less confusing.
I agree. I'm trying to figure out a good way to make this more evident without widening that left sidebar. This is the current UX problem that's keeping me up at night :-)
Thanks again, I really appreciate your feedback!
You can also setup tags. I have a "might pay" tag based on: 1) signs in often, 2) hasn't paid yet, 3) has added 5 or more tasks and features. These are people I like to keep an eye on and get to know :-)
- Create a list of people interested before you launch
- Be proactive with support, consider it a sales tool
- Have a great first use experience, that's when people are deciding to use your system.
Great post and well done on your success so far.
I really hope people take your advice on board, I think those techniques made the difference for me.
As in they signed up when you announced it was open, or paid? 100 signups on launch is still extremely useful for starting out.
Would you mind to share your strategy on entering a crowded market (in this case, project management tools)?
Did you do any market research on your competitors?
I didn't really do any market research, outside of having used other tools in the past. I think we have a very specific audience, and forum activity, etc. showed that there was a gap that had to be filled. We've already had quite a few users thanking us for building a tool that's making their clients happier (=== they make more money consulting!)
I searched through a few pages of your blog archives looking for your customer acquisition strategy, specifically search and ads. Can you tell us anything about that?
My search strategy follows a lot of what patio11 covers here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
Write relevant content for your audience (educational content: how they can better their lives or work) and promote where possible. I'll sometimes to go message boards for freelancers, see what questions they're asking, spend some time on a post, and then cycle back to them.
Long term strategy is having a healthy amount of crawlable content that my audience might search for.
My suspicion on this is that since Clients From Hell offers no reason to go to the site itself (no extra commentary, no user comments, etc.) it's easier to just read it from an RSS feed.
Really, I'm serious!