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Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the link :)

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).

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Uh oh! Didn't know you were here too.

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".

Hi. That's what I'm here for.

Why "Uh oh"? I'm not the boogeyman ;)

Hi, yep. It's just that I wasn't aware of your presence before I wrote that compliment on your work. :)

Is it possible for me to connect over email with you?

Hi Amy, going to ask you the same questions that many have asked before: you developed products in a more or less saturated market, how do you come to the conclusion that the world needs your product? (considering that there are nice looking time-tracker and customer support out apps out there).

I hope people are skeptical of these results. I wouldn't be surprised if you made most of your money from your get rich quick program.

I'm going to assume that it's because you're new here that you have a chip on your shoulder. Understandable.

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.

Thanks. I'd hope if I were a liar trying to convince you to buy my "get rich quick" program, I'd make up a better lie than 3 years, haha.

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.

Amy publicly announces the prices and enrollment for each class, so you could have easily tested this hypothesis. Last year, the posted numbers would put 30x500 class revenues somewhere around $160k (give or take a few grand depending on how many used discounts) — so as Amy says, a supermajority of her income must come from other sources.

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