Would you be willing to say how you came up with it? Was it in a problem domain you were solving for yourself, or was it something you had to research on before tackling it?
Only after 5 years did I turn it into a business. Until then, it was something like a project for me as a student.
So, there really was no formal process. I did a few things right, I learned a lot along the way, but there's nothing to copy or to model. It was mostly luck and an opportunity I took.
Edit: I once read: "The perfect time to start a company that is successful in 2013 was 2007" or something in that sense. This is what happened. I took this opportunity. I would do things differently today, but to be honest, I have the same hard time as everybody else to come up with a new business and a viable idea. Because everything changed since 2006. So what I did right back then wouldn't work now, process-wise.
Still, I did a few things right I guess that are still valid in 2013. Mostly: I concentrated on important things, I do customer support myself, I listen to people, I'm friendly, I help people solve their problems. I care about them, about their privacy and do everything to protect it. I write emails that take me 30 minutes if it's necessary. Why? Because I only get a handful of emails per day. It's not scalable but then, it doesn't have to be. I do some SEO and rank well for my niche keywords. About 50-70% is word of mouth.
What I don't do: I don't have a blog, I didn't integrate any social network crap, I don't use Google Analytics or any other fancy third-party application that must be included via JS. I use Piwik that I check occasionally (sometimes every week, sometimes only every few months). I don't have big metrics. My most imporant metrics are: Money earned per week/month. Amount of active (paid) users. Signups per week.
Edit2: My product has nothing to do with PHP and doesn't target IT people. Just in case this is misinterpreted. I mention PHP only, because people on HN hate PHP that much and sometimes forget that it doesn't matter if it's PHP or anything else, as long as it pays the bills. PHP is fast, PHP is reliable and I get shit done in PHP. That's why I use PHP.
Are you working on the next thing or happy enough with this success?
Do you think you could do it again?
Let me answer it first in a clumsy-sounding way: I want to be able to do it again, because I want to think of myself as someone who did a few things right and didn't ONLY have a ton of luck.
I think the knowledge I have helps me to do it again. I think that I have a few values and advantages that will enable me to do it again. Namely: I can distinguish between between good and crappy ideas. I can evaluate ideas relatively quickly and tell if I'd do them or not. I'm still down to earth, don't buy the hype and focus on stuff that seems to be a viable long-term business opportunity.
All these things I just listed are also big disadvantages: I dismiss many ideas that might be feasible as utter crap. In fact, I think most ideas are really bad. Even successful ones. Unfortunately, I feel that I can't see problems in a lucid way. For me, for almost everything there's already a solution, which is dangerous thinking, because I don't easily try and start new things. I'm a bit complacent in this way.
Are you working on the next thing or happy enough with this success?
I'm happy with the success and I'm working on expanding the existing business. But sometimes I feel like being on a plateau. No matter what I do, the business simply grows with a small linear rate.
A couple weeks back, I didn't check my analytics and metrics for 2 months or so. Nothing changed. My SEO rankings improved over time by doing...nothing. The amount of active people increased a bit, by doing nothing.
This is a good thing, but it also feels like there's nothing I can do to make it grow faster. I'll try a few things in 2014 though.
Anyways, I'm in a super-comfortable position. I can take vacation whenever I want (and I do), I make more money than I spend, I make more money than in my old 40-hour-week job, I don't have to think about money at all. If I want, I work 4-5 hours a week and still get paid fully. This is the perfect situation to start something new.
So, as I said, I'm happy with my success, but it's also boring sometimes. I want to start something new and I know that the fruits I enjoy won't last forever. I don't know what's gonna happen in 10 years, but I feel like I need a second business to be less dependant on my first one.
Being on "vacation" always has its perks, but as you allude to, you know that you need to diversify by building something else.
Start that fire and get cracking and then you can resume your boring lifestyle and sleep a bit better at night :)
The basic question for me was: How do I keep maintaining and improving the website with only the bit of revenue I got from ads and donations? That was maybe 300-500 bucks a month.
The answer was: I couldn't. Not with what I had in mind for my project. It wasn't enough to pay a programmer, an app developer and someone who writes educational articles for the project.
I was just the average IT student back then. Not much sense for business. I mean, I thought about how I could make money from it once in a while. I still have a list on my computer ideas to earn 10,000 euros with my project that I once wrote. Freemium for example, a standalone desktop application, and other ideas.
After a long thought process and endless discussions with an older friend, I came to the conclusion that literally change my life: I had to start charging people for my product. All of them. No freemium nonsense and all that other crap that was in my list.
Being the altruistic student, I anticipated that people would be disappointed. I could almost feel their soon-to-come disappointment and asking them for money was something that didn't fit my world view for a long time. It was hard to accept that I'd lose people. Sounds stupid in hindsight, but that's how I felt.
With this conclusion, a new feeling emerged that got deeply engrained, which I consider a fundamental thing for doing business:
If people don't value what you have to offer, they're not worth your time.
So, even if people were disappointed, it wouldn't be my fault. After all, I offer a truly great service and it should be worth a couple bucks a month.
Despite my newly won enthusiasm, I went ahead and wasted another nine months, before I finalized my decision. I had very sophisticated tactics for sabotaging myself. I got this braindead idea to rewrite everything from scratch in a newer technology to have it maintainable for years to come. I thought I'd have to offer more content, more articles, more whatever. It was madness. And nonsense.
Another friend brought me down and he said: Look, you have a great product as it is. Just charge for it. You don't need anything else.
So, a few days after my graduation and about 4 weeks until my first real job began, I send an email to all my users, telling them that my product would cost a euro a month, starting in 30 days.
I hit Send and thought that I'd either wreck this thing totally, lose many many people, lose my project I spent five years on to improve, or that it'd be a good thing after all and I could continue running and improving my project.
Merely 7 days before several thousand accounts expired, I finished the last line of code on my payment processing.
Two weeks later, I had 20,000 Euros in my bank account.
> I don't use Google Analytics or any other fancy third-party application that must be included via JS. I use Piwik that I check occasionally
I'm not trying to be a dick, genuine question, I thought Piwik was a JS include? Or do you feed it web server logs or something?
I ask because I currently run a niche site that is doing very well. I'm currently turning this into a general purpose platform for others to use. For the former site I just went with Google Analytics, but for the latter I'm now trying Piwik and am curious about other peoples experiences.
Why? Security, privacy, performance. GA is probably relatively trustworthy in terms of security, but you never know. Privacy: Gone with GA. Performance: If the included library isn't far away, it's faster.
So, Piwik is good enough for me. I recently installed it on a VPS but from the same hoster in the same location. The performance is still slick, but a tiny bit of work is now off the server and security-wise it's better to have as few third-party libraries and applications running parallel to my web app.
The most limiting thing was that I rent a managed server that doesn't allow too many custom things. Piwik is relatively ineffective memory-wise in generating reports over months or years, if you have traffic like me (about 50K visitors per week or so).
The managed server would always kill the process, because it consumed too many resources and took too long. Never found a work-around. Now, on the VPS, I can do whatever I want and that helps.
This just as a warning if you're planning to run Piwik in an environment that might have limits in resource allocation.
Feature-wise, Piwik is totally perfect. As mentioned before, I don't track many metrics anyways. It's just a reference for keywords, which keywords converted, where people come from.