[HN Gopher] My 2 Year Journey to $10K MRR
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My 2 Year Journey to $10K MRR
Author : ronyfadel
Score : 415 points
Date : 2021-01-27 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bannerbear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bannerbear.com)
| fudged71 wrote:
| I'm curious how much development, marketing, and maintenance is
| needed to maintain this level of revenue. How long can you coast?
| How long can you go without new features? I know that may not be
| the goal and there are other reasons to work on it, but
| hypothetically...
| sixhobbits wrote:
| > In my case, I found that the more documentation I wrote the
| more conversions I got.
|
| I think this is key and great documentation is one of the most
| underrated parts of business. Stripe nailed this. Digital Ocean
| nailed this. Most places don't or can't.
|
| [note - personal bias as I have a startup in this space, but it
| seems very clear to me and I think there's a win-win in
| businesses focusing more on their docs in terms of improving
| global efficiency _and_ improving sales and trust in that
| business - it 's just really low hanging fruit in a majority of
| cases I've seen]
| guzik wrote:
| > Stripe nailed this. Digital Ocean nailed this
|
| I would like to add Unity 3D engine to that list.
|
| But that sounds great - I love writing documentation and
| tutorials (how many bugs and holes I am finding during that
| process!), so I have another justification for working on more
| articles for my product. I usually underestimate that 70% of
| traffic comes from Google looking for stuff like "measuring
| temperature in python".
|
| fyi: I am building "Arduino for Biosignals"
| (aidlab.com/developer)
| speg wrote:
| Reminds me of 2005 and trying to figure out jQuery vs.
| Mootools.
|
| jQuery had lots of docs with examples, and I never was able to
| wrap my head around Mootools.
| nnadams wrote:
| I second this exact comparison.
|
| Being able to try and customize jQuery UI components was also
| what sold me back then. I think simple web-based demos in
| your docs go a long way in explaining what your product
| actually feels like to use. Even a demo that's a bit
| contrived is useful. People will even just mindlessly play
| with demos. They are very worth doing in my opinion.
| winrid wrote:
| This is why https://fastcomments.com has an example above the
| fold on the homepage.
|
| Good docs will be coming soon...
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Similar to a sibling comment, I really enjoy this page & site
| - even though I was already expecting it to be good.
|
| Well done to whatever tasteful individuals designed and
| executed/approved those decisions.
| klysm wrote:
| Nice and clean but the lack of syntax highlighting bothered
| me more than it should have.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Wow! FastComments.com is hands-down the best landing page
| I've encountered in a LONG time. Crystal-clear what it is,
| why it's a good choice, how it works, and a set of FAQs
| answering virtually all the questions / doubts / potential
| objections I could think of. Bookmarked; I may well use this
| for my own site when I get around to re-launching it. Bravo!
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| I found that technical blog posts and documentation have made
| me aware of brands I otherwise wouldn't of known existed.
|
| Digital Ocean was great at this in the early days. I don't know
| if they haven't put as much effort into as of late or changes
| in SEO, but I don't seem to get funneled there by search
| engines as frequently.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-
| digit...
|
| This is a fantastic way to get your marketing into
| stratosphere. I'm seeing more and more companies doing it.
| j45 wrote:
| Being able to create beginners of your product helps create
| market and retain customers like nothing else.
| de11 wrote:
| Great post. Website and product looks sleek.
| luthfur wrote:
| "I would do one week of code, then spend the following week
| tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped -- then repeat"
|
| This right here is a very important organizing principle for
| indie devs. It's more effective than say doing both coding and
| promotion in parallel by dividing the the day into two.
| cercatrova wrote:
| In contrast, splitting the day helps to pivot more easily. I've
| had situations where I thought I wanted to work on a certain
| feature but when I talked about it, people didn't want that
| feature. So if I spent a week implementing it, it would have
| been a waste of my time.
| odonnellryan wrote:
| This works for larger companies and larger teams, too.
| geniium wrote:
| This is very interesting IMHO !
| buzbe_uk wrote:
| Great story - thanks for sharing that. So many useful learnings
| in there - and the final product looks slick! How did you decide
| on pricing in the end?
| ronyfadel wrote:
| A little note: I'm not the blog post's author but I've contacted
| Jon to reply to questions in the comments.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| > Don't target your SaaS at other indie hackers. It's a small
| niche of people who like to build things.
|
| This is what I've never totally understood about product hunt. Is
| the goal to get feedback from other creators, or launch to an
| audience that isn't necessarily your target market?
| notretarded wrote:
| Yes
| cercatrova wrote:
| I've been following Yongfook for the past 2 years now, super cool
| guy, I'm glad that he got Bannerbear to click, I know he was
| trying out many different ideas over the years.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I like the note about alternating dev weeks and marketing weeks,
| and using the marketing weeks to market what you developed the
| week previous. Documentation could also be considered part of the
| marketing bucket, too.
| jdlyga wrote:
| MRR = monthly recurring revenue
| jspash wrote:
| TY!
| oksurewhynot wrote:
| was this really hard to read for anyone else? The spacing and
| layout is really hard to make sense of.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yes. I really don't understand the constant war against text.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Agree, don't think this format makes for a very legible or
| compelling post, but I guess his target market probably likes
| it.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| yeah felt the same, didn't feel like I was reading a blog more
| like the landing page with how big/sectioned everything was.
| read on 1920x1080
| allenu wrote:
| It's really beautiful, but I admit that I'm not a fan of the
| "bite-sized" formatting that's common these days. I found
| myself scrolling through it to look for some more depth, but
| the mix of embedded self tweets with short sentences left me
| with more questions than anything.
| artembugara wrote:
| same.
| devortel wrote:
| The video generation demo is pretty neat but it took nearly 2
| minutes to finish rendering. I'd be interested to know how this
| scales under high workloads and how updates can be deployed
| without disrupting long running processes like this one.
| thegeomaster wrote:
| For updates, you can do your classic blue-green deployment:
| wind down traffic for instance (remove from load balancer etc),
| wait until it finishes outstanding jobs, deploy update, resume
| routing traffic, repeat for every instance (or do it in
| groups).
| cooervo wrote:
| amazing, kudos!
| sdoering wrote:
| Wow. Great write up and cool timeline format. I had never heard
| of the "Open Startup" [1] idea and clicked - and was stunned
| (positively) about the transparency.
|
| [1]: https://www.bannerbear.com/open/
|
| Edit: Is this a thing now showing the numbers for the world to
| see? I like it - but just have no prior experience.
| voiper1 wrote:
| I first heard about it with buffer and ghost
| https://buffer.com/revenue https://ghost.org/about/
|
| I think buffer also made their various iterations of salary
| formulas public.
| eric_khun wrote:
| We're hiring engineers and an EM btw ;)
|
| https://journey.buffer.com/#vacancies
| ronyfadel wrote:
| It's a trend, yes:
|
| - https://baremetrics.com/open-startups
|
| - https://openstartuplist.com/
| tnt128 wrote:
| Curious is this using imagemagik for backend image generation?
| What about videos?
| humbleMouse wrote:
| Interesting, although from reading the blog I still don't know
| what banner bear does except for taking an audio files and
| creating video out of it.
| fastball wrote:
| They generate Open Graph content (images and videos) for you.
| OG is what you see when you post a link in a messaging app or
| similar and it pops up with an image + description (link
| preview).
|
| This service automates the image generation part so you don't
| have to. Basically it makes link previews for your site sexier
| / more engaging in a (semi) automated way.
| runjake wrote:
| Great explanation! I had no clue what open graph was, and
| this succinctly explains it.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| how did you get your first paying customer?
| JamesAdir wrote:
| https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-25-saa...
| brundolf wrote:
| On its face this seems handy: automatically generate pleasing
| social-media images for different links on your site instead of
| fiddling with photoshop by hand, and throw in an integrated CDN
| to serve them
|
| But the pricing, for the above, seems insane: $99/mo for the
| standard plan
|
| So I assume I'm missing something about what this service can do,
| and what value it provides. Can anyone fill me in?
| encoderer wrote:
| Here is the value:
|
| If you were going to produce these images anyway, using some
| other means, it's probably costing you more than $99 a month.
| brundolf wrote:
| I guess if you're a company with a full-time designer,
| probably paid $30-$50/hr, depending on the number of images
| you need that may work out
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| It's for small business that can't afford a dedicated
| designer. At the moment you pay a freelancer a couple grand
| to do your branding every few years and you make these
| designs yourself. $99/month is cheaper and is 80% as good
| as a freelance designer every couple of years
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| Off Topic. I love the way how this is being presented.
|
| But there is something about the design, along with the main
| BannerBear website seems to be off scale. I had to Zoom Out twice
| to make things looks normal.
| OJFord wrote:
| > I had to Zoom Out twice to make things looks normal.
|
| 80% (two zooms out from default in FF) is my default, since I
| found that was by far my most common choice per-site, changing
| it more often than not.
|
| I also have quite a few at 67%, and only the odd site (HN for
| example) at 100%. Just seems to be a trend for everything to be
| 'big' and (to me and you) 'zoomed-in'-looking.
|
| This is consistent (as in I do the same thing, it doesn't sync
| unfortunately) across my Linux desktop & (retina) MacBook Pro,
| before someone says something like 'well Linux is janky like
| that, try a Mac, they just work' :).
|
| (I use 'Zoom Page WE' in Firefox for persisting per-site zoom
| levels: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/zoom-
| page-we)
| bberenberg wrote:
| Huh you are exactly right. As soon as I zoomed out twice it
| looked perfect.
| sneakymichael wrote:
| I find that a lot of sites seems to be designed on, and looked
| at internally on, large-screen desk setups (e.g. 27" iMac), so
| everything looks somewhat huge on smaller laptop-size screens
| (e.g. 13" MacBook).
| ksec wrote:
| That was my first thought as well. Designer must have been
| large screen display.
| franciscop wrote:
| Funny you say that, this is one of the few sites that is
| perfect at 100% for me. I normally have all the sites at 130%
| (actually that's my default), might have something to do with
| hiresolution/scaling in linux though.
| drawkbox wrote:
| What a great write up and very open and honest. The timeline
| format is amazingly clean and I am a sucker for timelines.
|
| I think the product is great and the name bannerbear really is
| memorable. I think that is a major key along with a great
| product. You have to be able to remember the name easily without
| effort and the two word format works well for human memory. Being
| high up in the alphabet is smart as well in terms of lists, it
| may not help much later but early on naming like this is
| important.
|
| > _I would do one week of code, then spend the following week
| tweeting / blog posting about what I shipped -- then repeat_
|
| That is gold for indie/small business value creation and
| extraction. Many times marketing is like audio/sound for games,
| an afterthought for the programmer/creator/product person. Here
| you have a system that locked it in but only _after_ creating,
| how it is supposed to be. I think it is a great way to avoid
| burnout as well, you are refreshed on both creating and promoting
| on those weeks.
|
| I believe that there is value creation
| (product/creative/engineering) and value extraction
| (marketing/business/finance) and it has to be in that order.
| There has to be enough value created to value extract and this
| system is quite nice.
|
| More excellent point:
|
| > _The best way to make money on the internet is to ignore
| everyone telling you how to make money on the internet, and just
| do some hard work._
| https://twitter.com/yongfook/status/1328865845527805952
|
| > _Knowing your target market is good, knowing your target 's Job
| to Be Done is better_
|
| > _Jobs to Be Done is only something you understand after talking
| to users_
|
| > _Upgrade your user, not your product_
|
| This is how you make products people love. Even if it is only a
| few minutes a day, when people use a product if it is fun or
| refreshing and makes their lives easier, that is game mechanic
| that is replayed. Same goes for games, it is all in the basic
| game mechanic, it has to be fun. Focus on the lives of the
| user/player of your product. I like to parallel that to like a
| fun game or a comicstrip, bring joy to people even if it is only
| a very small slice of their day, it will be a good part of their
| day. Make your product a "friend" of the user/player.
|
| You have all the little details that make your presentation fun
| like a good indie game with details and easily approachable. Even
| your subscribe form has a refreshing way to look at the captcha,
| rather than "confirm you aren't a robot" it is "confirm
| Humanity". Nice touch, but your presentation is a series of nice
| touches. Well played, these things are hard to instill in company
| cultures and usually only present in smaller more product people,
| or even gaming, focused projects.
|
| I just love everything presented, it has that _thing_ that makes
| it fun.
|
| Congrats on your success Jon Yongfook I am sure you are headed to
| much higher ground with your North Star in focus all along.
| KennyFromIT wrote:
| > upgrade your user, not your product
|
| What does this mean, exactly?
| reggieband wrote:
| I'll take a crack at a possible meaning.
|
| Imagine you have a product with 10 features. You want to
| generate growth. Your first instinct might be: time to add a
| new feature (upgrade the product). Another approach might be
| to investigate your users behaviour. You might find users are
| only using 5 of your features. You may then choose to educate
| your users on the other 5 features you already have (upgrade
| your user).
|
| This is one of the purposes of marketing. You would be
| surprised how often a customer will say "I didn't even know I
| could do that".
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If you click on it on the article you'll get an explanation
| and this https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/23f092c7da7ef6
| dcd0b36a...
| locallost wrote:
| It looks very polished. The pop effect when done is very cool. If
| I may ask, who are the people that need this? QR code generator
| is kind of clear, but for e.g. image generation? Bloggers maybe?
| eliseumds wrote:
| Just signed up and am finishing the integration. One thing
| though: I don't think 30 requests is enough in the free plan,
| there are many features to be tried out. After reaching the
| limit, I'm still not confident that I should commit to your
| service. Maybe you could shove a watermark in there after the 30
| free requests? Just so that people can keep testing out different
| templates, colour combinations, dimensions, stuff like that. Our
| designer wants to play around with the template creator now but I
| had to create some throwaway accounts for him to do so.
|
| Congratz on your journey, you're in a market that has been barely
| explored, so much potential.
| 0898 wrote:
| Off-topic I know, but how can I make my blog look like this? So
| many posts like this on Hacker News have this clean, confident,
| gentle-exposition style. (As you can tell I don't really have the
| design vocabulary, but hopefully looking at the site you know
| what I mean.) Is there a particular Wordpress theme that people
| use? Or is this another CMS like Ghost?
| atom-morgan wrote:
| I'm guessing he designed it himself but if you have Twitter you
| can ask him directly: https://twitter.com/yongfook
| klohto wrote:
| https://www.bannerbear.com/blog/the-bannerbear-marketing-sit...
| This should explain the stack
| devlopr wrote:
| "All the javascript on the marketing site is good ol' JQuery"
|
| JQuery works perfectly here.
| brundolf wrote:
| The creator's bio says he's a professional designer, so he
| probably designed it himself
| config_yml wrote:
| Probably using Tailwind CSS.
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