Pinegrow Year in Review 2014 – From 0 to $100K

Fantastic write-up and application.

I gave y'all my money a two or three months ago, and I've been very happy with your product. I had been flirting with a few other mostly-online solution for over a year (looking through book-marks they were layoutit.com and jetstrap), but always felt the features offered were half-hearted and clunky in a browser.

"You can’t come out to a saturated market with just a couple of useful features. Pinegrow had to have all the main features from the start: ability to open any HTML file, full range of configurable Bootstrap components, CSS editor with integrated LESS parser and the ability to edit multiple pages at the same time. After all, that is what distinguished Pinegrow from the rest."

You had me pretty well sold with stand-alone software, lifetime usage w/ 3 installations for commercial purposes, and element drag-and-drop combined with side-by-side page + code view. Access to edit CSS was a feature I didn't know I needed, but I definitely did. I was very impressed with the "Open From URL" feature when I found it, but it certainly wasn't a purchase point for me.

If the market was providing these things elsewhere, props for capturing my queries first.

Kudos for an impressive product that does the thing it's supposed to well.

The dealing with piracy part is brilliant: "when I come across a forum post where somebody is asking for a cracked version of Pinegrow, I reply that whoever needs a license but can’t afford it should contact us and we’ll help them out."

That's turning a negative situation into a positive, which is what a good entrepreneur does.

Very cool! I particularly love your attitude to piracy. Do you have any data suggesting that's resulting in positive effects for Pinegrow? It's good to do either way, but data there would be particularly interesting.

I've been meaning to do a review of Pinegrow for one website I write for - will definitely get on that now.

Incidentally, if you come up with a simple Wordpress theme solution, as you're suggesting, then you move Pinegrow from "Hmm, interesting" to "OH MY GOD TAKE MY MONEY" in my book :)

Congratulations, the product looks very polished and powerful.

I just wanted to point out about the mythical "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies:

I work for one, but they won't buy your product at U$ 75 because you're not selling it to the people with purchasing power, you're getting sales from internal champions.

I think you should read Jason Cohen's articles on his A Smart Bear blog, your company sounds a lot like his - I'm trying to find a particularly relevant post where he talks about an internal champion for your product, but I can't find it, I did find

http://blog.asmartbear.com/pricing-business-model.html

Also, Joel Spolsky's famous article on pricing:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

$49 is a very interesting price point.

It is easily worth more than $49 to use this software. But $49 is the kind of price where a professional may just buy it from themselves without bothering to hassle their boss to buy it through the company.

This means less of a hard sell and more copies will be sold to people like you or me who discover it through HN or a tweet or something.

I do think they should increase the company price though, because once a company has decided they want to buy it, the sale is done. The difference between $79 and $199 isn't such a big deal, and something like $999 for 10 licenses could be done too.

Hi Matt,

Great job you're doing. Would be really interested in seeing the Wordpress product when it's out. Haven't found anything for perfect conversions as of yet.

You're currently using Paddle that takes 5%, in my opinion this is far too much, you could save 2.5% a year by going to Stripe or even more by going to GoCardless. Besides the clump sum you get at the end of each month, what is your motivation behind using Paddle compared to other, cheaper services?

Thanks

as a pinegrow user and supporter, I'm a big fan and really loved this write up. I think pinegrow is positioned to kill it in the WordPress space soon. I've been using it as part of my workflow. It doesn't carry me start to finish but it makes some parts of design and makes them sort of fun again. I realize that people on here accept abstraction as a given in technology. the more better code is the way. But just like the promoters of vim / emacs tout the benefits of staying within the environment, enhancing focus, that's the same thing with visual builds. to go back and forth from code to design and to abstract it all together cause focus problems that are hard to quantify but are definitely prevalent. Pinegrow is one of a few tools that can help as they improve. Pinegrow in partiular because of it's fantastic browser render preview, multiple editing modes and as you've read, backend flexibility and intelligence due to the way it was constructed.

Congratulations Matjaz!

You're living the dream :) I've got my own product launch coming soon, and I hope things go even half as well for me as they have gone for you.

I'm interested to hear about your marketing efforts. You mentioned that you have 16000 mailing list subscribers and that this has been effective in terms of growing sales. How did you find these subscribers?

Are there any other marketing hints you might be able to give to a soon to be launching app?

Cheers, Eli

"I don’t obsess over competitors. In practice that means that I don’t do any in-depth testing of their apps or services. I feel that would just obscure my vision for the product. Comparing yourself to others too much leads to losing the confidence and appreciation of your own unique identity."

100% agree. Measuring one thing has little to do with building it. Under building mode, there is only one path you could go. Under measuring mode, we only want to know the distance from the target to the place reached. In other words, building is a somewhat one-dimension activity while measuring is more often a multi-dimension activity.

Excellent story. The best of luck for 2015.

One idea: Why not provide the option to buy 2 years of updates at a higher price? It would give you some more cash up front which could be used for ads etc.

That looks awesome and as a backend developer it's something I'd love to use. But I'm not sure how to use it in my environment. We use compass/SASS to build our CSS files as we change them.

So my process is tweaking html, updating the SASS file, waiting for it to build CSS, then reloading the page.. tweaking... it's really, really slow. Can we use this app somehow in our environment?

I'd be very interested in a writeup on how you got to grips with node-webkit, if you were so inclined?

This looks like a very polished application - well done!

Congratulations! You story is an inspiration.

Awesome! Love your take on piracy. Maybe put off potential pirates by stating that customers that have purchased get put on a mailing list with regular software updates and pinegrow ready templates. A user submitted portfolio of templates for sale/free could be a nice addition as well.

Even if it where open source, I'd still pay the yearly renewal - It's worth every penny!

The link to your website 404s: http://pinegrow.com/index.new.html

Fantastic writeup, it's inspiring. Thank you.

Can I buy it once and receive updates forever?

Nice one.want to try it.

Looks amazing!