[HN Gopher] A solo journey to $100k in sales
___________________________________________________________________
A solo journey to $100k in sales
Author : zenorocha
Score : 353 points
Date : 2021-02-25 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (draculatheme.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (draculatheme.com)
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| I am truly amazed and impressed with how many different software
| you bothered to create a consistent design language for with this
| theme.
|
| From Ableton, one of my favorite DAWs to Blender, one of my
| favorite tools for modeling.
|
| Like seriously, WELL DONE, friend. I'm happily making my way to
| checkout right now, thanks for sharing this with us
| verelo wrote:
| The refund part hits close to home. I've experience this too.
| What were some of the reasons for the refunds? I think theres so
| much to learn there. Some people are just jerks (they don't read
| what they're buying, and then blame you), but some people just
| didn't get what they expected due to some miscommunication, or
| product experience issue. I'd love to read more about this from
| this project!
| zenorocha wrote:
| It's definitely really hard to deal with refunds. You can make
| 10 sales in one day, but if there's only 1 refund, you might
| feel sad and disappointed.
|
| About the reasons for refunds - you're right, many people buy
| without reading and then ask for refund later. Others might
| feel buyer's remorse.
|
| In my case, the most common request was because of their
| personal taste. You see, I'm selling a theme for developers and
| they usually spend a lot of time using the same theme. It takes
| time to adapt to a new one color scheme, and some people ended
| up asking for the refund before they get used to it.
| FpUser wrote:
| Congratulations on your achievements. Very nice idea and good
| website.
|
| Having said that I noticed on your demo that the difference
| between selected text and non selected one it negligible. It is
| very unergonomic I would say. Funny thing I did notice the same
| trend on practically all dark schemes from other offerings.
| Themes for VS code for example. Curious why is that as the
| inability to clearly emphasize selected text would make my get
| rid of said theme immediately.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Thanks for noticing that, I'll take a deeper look.
| philk10 wrote:
| Congrats! Really minor observation noticed when looking at your
| site, image for Aseprite is broken -
| https://draculatheme.com/aseprite
| zenorocha wrote:
| Ohhh that's true! Thanks for catching that ;)
| zenorocha wrote:
| Fixed!
| nstj wrote:
| Terrific site - it reads really nicely. Well done!
| zenorocha wrote:
| Thanks! Credits to Fira Code, my favorite font <3
| option_greek wrote:
| >> I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this
| affordable.
|
| Saw this on clicking the pro link. Really appreciate the gesture.
| Wish more products/creators thought this way :)
| zenorocha wrote:
| Not everybody earns a US salary, yet we live in a world where
| all prices are the same. I agree with you, more creators should
| do that kind of thing.
| bbbrrrmm wrote:
| Just goes to show that people will buy any old shit.
| flipcoder wrote:
| Are you generating the configs for all these apps? Having a
| method of turning a universal theme spec into specific app
| configs might be worth more than the theme itself.
| nickjj wrote:
| I accidentally half way started this type of project the other
| month when I wanted to quickly change themes along with
| toggling dark / light mode in a bunch of different terminal
| apps.
|
| I got things set up to where I can run: set-theme gruvbox or
| set-theme one and it'll switch color themes in half a dozen
| apps. It also supports an optional --toggle-bg flag to flip
| between dark and light mode if the theme supports it.
|
| Ended up being a fairly small zero dependency Python script
| that I put together in a few hours. I made a video about it
| here https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-terminal-tmux-vim-and-
| fzf-t... and the script is in my dotfiles at https://github.com
| /nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.local/bin/se....
|
| But it wouldn't be hard to make the script more general purpose
| and put the configuration in a YAML file instead of in the
| script. Then add attributes for each supported app along with
| how those values would get replaced. If the app supports plain
| text config files it could realistically be done.
| zenorocha wrote:
| It's really hard to build something like this since some themes
| like JetBrains requires a gradlew build (Java), while others
| might require some other languages. However, there are some
| attempts on this field already, https://themer.dev being the
| best one so far.
| rasikjain wrote:
| Congrats!! This is a very pleasant news in these difficult times
| especially. Wish you lots of good luck. Hope you inspire lot of
| folks on HN here.
| zenorocha wrote:
| That's the whole point. If it inspires at least 1 person, then
| it was enough already.
| nbzso wrote:
| Congrats. Instead of thinking in the line of "Wow $99 for a
| config file with colors and fonts". My reaction is: So there is a
| premium market for this things. Good.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Yes! There's a premium market for everything.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how
| devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for
| a hosted product but don't bat an eye for shelling out $99 for
| what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .
| johnx123-up wrote:
| FWIW... I guess, the paying customer segment might be
| different. Since he seems to be selling the bundle, he may not
| be knowing the demographics. I vaguely guess the paying segment
| might be from the designer ecosystem like Sketch or Figma.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If that doesn't tell you how bad LastPass is, I guess there's
| nothing to learn here.
| hobs wrote:
| That's just a lesson in promising things to your customers - if
| you never promise free nobody bitches; changing things you've
| already delivered is the simplest way to a marketing problem.
| xtracto wrote:
| I think I am one of those. I generally don't like "subscription
| model" products. I am OK paying whatever price one time to buy
| something, but having to keep paying recurrently for some
| service incites locking to me, as the moment I decide I don't
| want to pay anymore I end up empty handed.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| Yeah, I feel like paying a subscription to keep using
| software just feels like a rip off, even if it's actually a
| fair price, and am much less inclined to sign up for it.
| Lich wrote:
| I'm asking out of curiosity, as someone who is thinking about
| implementing a subscription model, do you not like it even
| though you know the product you're using has recurring costs
| for usage (e.g. charges for API/DB calls), or are you only
| against subscription models when the cost of usage is minimal
| to none (e.g. MS Office, Adobe CS)?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Usually both of those costs are added to the product
| specifically to have an excuse to charge a subscription,
| which gets especially galling when 99% of users have no
| real use for it.
|
| But the most hilarious/sad model has to be Elastic's "you
| need to pay us based on how bloated our garbage is,
| regardless of whether we're actually involved in hosting
| it".
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| I have no problem paying for recurring usage costs. For
| example I have a paid vps and paid email. But in my mind
| I'm paying precisely for the compute, storage, and network
| infrastructure behind them, not paying, e.g. to run linux.
| And I'm happy to pay for someone else to manage that
| infrastructure because the setup is nontrivial, I dont need
| to own the infra, etc.
|
| Contrast this with Office 365, or even more niche pay per
| use or per month products, that are not better in any way
| that matters to me because they are hosted elsewhere. With
| these products I feel like someone wants me to pay a
| recurring fee just to run their code. Some of it is
| psychological, but I feel like I'm getting ripped off, that
| someone is trying to find a way to get me to keep paying
| for something (which they are).
|
| Spotify and Netflix have found a good balance of offering a
| subscription, but providing such a large catalog that the
| value vs. actually owning all the content is clear. Most
| SaaS feels more like having to pay monthly just to own a
| single DVD.
|
| But TLDR for me is I dont want to pay recurringly for the
| privilege of executing your code, I will pay recurringly
| for needed* infra, support, etc that goes along with it.
|
| *not just tacked on to make it SaaS or to deploy it as SaaS
| GVIrish wrote:
| So if a SaaS offered a prepaid consumption plan alongside
| a monthly subscription you'd be more likely to buy?
|
| Like $19/month unlimited use or $50 for x amount of usage
| (api calls, transactions, assets, etc.)? Then you decide
| if you want to reup when you've used up your credits?
| spoonjim wrote:
| Both Office and Adobe CS now have hosted features (file
| sharing) too so they are moving more in that direction.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| I had the same question. But when I saw how many apps he
| supports, and it comes with decent fonts... I'm quite tempted.
| I'm normally one of the cheapskates. But getting consistent and
| good themes across my desktop? That's a hell of a lot of work
| for something I'd really appreciate.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| I have nothing neither against LastPass, nor for Dracula, and
| I've never used either so I might be wrong, but here are a few
| differences that IMO matter a lot:
|
| - Dracula is FOSS. LastPass has some FOSS projects, but the key
| ones aren't.
|
| - Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the terrible
| trend where everything must be subscription based.
|
| - You can use Dracula when the server is down. You can't use
| LastPass when the server is down. Yes, you can manually backup
| the vault somewhere, but (a) there's AFAIK no way to automate
| it, and (b) you should be updating the backup every time you
| edit the database, which turns into a PITA.
|
| As a customer I really dislike LastPass' business model. I
| rather use KeePass, and pay a hundred bucks for some Vim rice.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > - Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the
| terrible trend where everything must be subscription based.
|
| Let's be fair here: LastPass needs to finance storage
| servers, network infrastructure, security engineers etc..
| Dracula needs a CDN for downloads. Of course this is a bit
| simplified (the author needs the editors and a payment
| processer, for example), but it's a lot easier to work with a
| one-time fee when nearly all of your cost is up front and you
| have basically no running costs.
| [deleted]
| sithlord wrote:
| Personally, I have no problem paying for it, but I hate the
| bait and switch crap. I'd rather pay someone who has always
| been paid, then wait for lastpass to decide to strip more
| features unless you pay up more.
| Threeve303 wrote:
| If people are buying it then the argument can be made it is
| both useful and fairly priced to the customer. It's not like
| the company has a monopoly on IDE configuration.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Do you know that it is the same people holding these
| conflicting stances? Seems like HN is a big place, room enough
| for both cheap devs and more well-heeled devs.
| mercer wrote:
| Intuitively I'd guess that they're very different audiences.
| I'm sort of near the type of person who would shell out for
| ease-of-use stuff like the same theme across editors, but
| also the type of person who would even want that.
|
| I suspect a person similar to me would also pay a bunch of
| bucks for, say, a screen arrangement app for MacOS, or a way
| to more quickly pair AirPods (ToothFairy).
|
| It's a type of user that has no problem paying for
| convenience, I suppose?
|
| That said, $79 is too steep for me to pay for a set of
| themes, even though I do really like this one.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Nope, just some good ol' generalizin!
| jdxcode wrote:
| I admire your honesty!
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Hahahha well, what do you think? Is this too pricey for
| what you get? Or do you feel it's a unique buy that's worth
| it?
| darrenoc wrote:
| There is a large contingent on HN who are both rich and
| cheap, so I don't think this holds any water
| deathtrader666 wrote:
| Looks like the set of developers who cannot edit their own
| config files and the set of developers who are careful enough
| to use a password manager are mutually exclusive.
| matwood wrote:
| For me, it's one-time purchase vs. subscription. For example, I
| was happily paying 1Password every couple of years for a long
| time, and left when they made it clear subscriptions were the
| future.
| wp381640 wrote:
| Lesson for startups is it's easier to start high and drop
| prices but fucking hard to bend user expectations and increase
| prices
|
| Lastpass aren't the first or last company that has felt this
| blowback
| xwdv wrote:
| It illustrates what people are really willing to pay for.
| Swizec wrote:
| $99 for a great config file is buying time. A good config can
| take years to hone. Easily adds up to 50 hours over 10 years.
|
| How much are your 50 hours worth? What about cutting that 10
| year lead time down to 1h?
|
| LastPass on the other hand is a tool you use because the world
| sucks. And their UX is pretty bad. And switching away is an
| annoying chore. You feel trapped and extorted into paying.
|
| I configured my own editor and people often ask for details. I
| use LastPass begrudgingly because at this point I'm too
| lazy/busy to switch.
| wastedhours wrote:
| > LastPass on the other hand is a tool you use because the
| world sucks
|
| I feel like this gets missed a lot when questions about
| price/value come up.
|
| Just because something's useful doesn't mean you _want_ to
| buy it, and things you don 't want to buy, but need, are
| likely to be thought of more harshly when it comes to price.
| nkingsy wrote:
| This emotion seems obvious and I wonder why we don't have
| clear, sustained global consensus for creating/maintaining
| non-profit alternatives for strict needs.
|
| Is this part of mainstream economics yet? I see "the
| economist" argue around the edges of this, but then they
| ran a front page hit on Bernie sanders.
| wastedhours wrote:
| I guess because the more it looks and feels like a public
| service, the more it feels like a tax. Or the more it
| feels like a non-profit, the more it feels like charity.
|
| Each of those concepts has had a long time to become
| embedded, but the kind of globalised, "net-good" non-
| profit that still gives you as an individual benefits,
| has barely even reached the corners of HN yet (would
| assume there's people here who haven't yet discovered
| LetsEncrypt, for example).
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| LastPass saves you time too, compared to being hacked. (And a
| lot more than 50 hours) I don't get how honing a config file
| is not madness, but good password management is extortion.
|
| You are holding it wrong.
| praveenperera wrote:
| Agreed, mostly. Expect for switching being an annoying chore.
|
| Took my less than 10 mins to switch everything and download
| 1Password on all my devices. Super simple. Everything got
| imported over.
| scruple wrote:
| I use BitWarden because the world sucks.
|
| I use LastPass because my employer compels me to.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I am writing my own password manager because the world
| sucks. I use passpack because I am not done.
| Kneecaps07 wrote:
| Switching away was actually very easy. You can get a CSV with
| all of your information in a few clicks.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Which is the more satisfying purchase?
|
| I'd enjoy spending money on a nice meal or say a guitar, things
| that bring joy rather than a say a boiler that brings utility.
| musicale wrote:
| > LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product
|
| Many people already have cloud storage (dropbox, icloud) and
| don't see the need for another subscription. I certainly don't.
| villgax wrote:
| If you build it, they will come.
| Mc_Big_G wrote:
| This is exactly the opposite of reality.
| vwnghjmjew wrote:
| What about better mousetraps?
| zenorocha wrote:
| +1000
| ogjunkyard wrote:
| How did you go about implementing Parity Purchasing Power? Was it
| an automated thing, or did you grab a table from somewhere and go
| from there?
| mrwd021 wrote:
| well done. bravo
| quaffapint wrote:
| I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme -
| something that people think of as a freebie.
|
| I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not
| even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in
| that.
| mettamage wrote:
| I have a heuristic for this. When something sounds stupidly
| simple, then try it if the upside might be huge (and you have
| free time on your hands, there's always an opportunity cost).
| The chance is higher that you're right, but in my personal
| experience, less high than I think.
|
| Empiricism > rationalism/intuition [1]
|
| But rationalism/intuition takes less time, so there's always a
| trade-off :)
|
| [1] Unless you're an expert at the topic (see the research of
| Kahneman, Tversky and KLein), then there are many cases where
| your intuition might fit the model of reality better than many
| empiric experiments, especially with business/social things
| like this HN submission.
| zenorocha wrote:
| I never thought people would pay for a color scheme too. That's
| why, I tried to position in a way where you'd not only get the
| actual themes, but also a bunch of other resources to make you
| more productive.
| dlkmp wrote:
| Might be just me but once I saw that "x tips to get better"
| ebook, the offer lost credibility in my eyes. It just feels
| more believable to me that there might be some guy who knows
| so much about colors and the corresponding theory that he can
| actually can come up with a theme worth 100 bucks than that
| there is a guy who can do this _and_ give me tips on random
| semi-related topics.
| laurent92 wrote:
| In 2001, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar thought "Let's
| sell an equivalent to the dozen of free open-source
| bugtrackers, but for a price." Today Atlassian is worth about
| $60bn, they owned about 75%.
| DrBazza wrote:
| And it's ripe for a lightweight alternative that gets
| customers that want the fast, basic set of bug tracking
| features.
|
| Jira is horrific.
| [deleted]
| laurent92 wrote:
| People have always said that ;) but Jira is super-
| expensive. It was $60 per user (permanent), and they've
| increased the prices a lot. Especially since you buy
| Confluence and all the little addons separately.
| thitcanh wrote:
| Horrific but people keep buying it.
|
| From Jira's owner POV, Jira is pretty great.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| https://linear.app/
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I find the most common source of Jira-hate is a combined
| refusal to leave many of its features on the table by
| management and general ignorance about how little Jira
| actually imposes on you by the gangpressed users.
|
| Most of that bloat you have to deal with? Blame your
| bosses, not Atlassian.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Jira is a bloated piece of garbage out of the box. It
| doesn't need PHB configuration to get there.
| servercobra wrote:
| Exactly. Brand new project, no configuration? Runs like
| trash. And then you add in all the manager/PM overhead.
| aeturnum wrote:
| One of the things I think about is how important scale is for
| evaluating the viability of a product.
|
| I suspect that there aren't enough people who would pay $99 for
| a IDE theme to support an ongoing company with employees.
| However, for a single designer, it's perfect. The fact that
| 99.9% of the population turns their nose up doesn't matter
| because 0.1% is still 600,000 people. $100k is just over 1000
| sales, which seems eminently doable for nearly any project.
|
| My take-away is that - if you're considering a solo side
| project that will only work if you charge a "high" price (which
| probably isn't as high as you think it is) or if you get a ton
| of sales - try charging the high price!
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| The "you only need 0.1% of people" is a fallacy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358310.
| aeturnum wrote:
| From the article: "...it doesn't work, unless you have
| massive amounts of funding or a brilliant idea that can
| completely disrupt the existing the market."
|
| That's why I said scale of the project matters. Using a 1%
| (or 0.1%) metric _to found a company_ is rubbish. Using it
| to guesstimate if a personal project might get some buyers
| seems much more reasonable. This probably isn 't a $100k
| recurring revenue project, but it's reasonable to imagine
| that you could get up to $100k revenue selling a $99
| product to programmers.
| matwood wrote:
| People pay for convenience every single day. Just look at
| Starbucks.
| the_af wrote:
| True. On the other hand, $79 (or even the discounted price of
| $29) is pretty steep for what is only one minor optional tool
| in a dev's toolset. Imagine if you paid a similar amount for
| every single tool you use, no matter how trivial.
|
| If you have a microtransaction for everything in your
| computer, they start to add up pretty fast. At some point you
| have to pick and choose, and nice UI themes start to seem
| less essential...
|
| (Also, do note outside the first world $29 is not such a
| small amount of money. And $79 is unthinkable for a UI
| theme).
| suyash wrote:
| not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free
| grumple wrote:
| Yeah, but that also serves the purpose of making us
| encourage our workplaces to use GitHub, and they pay for
| it.
| zenorocha wrote:
| I disagree with the argument that developers don't pay for
| things. Yes, there's a huge open source culture where
| people can have access to free code on GitHub. However,
| there's a huge market of paid products that developers will
| purchase. There are many examples out there like Tailwind,
| Chakra UI, Envato, etc.
| jiofih wrote:
| I pay for GitHub
| duckmysick wrote:
| Yes - developers. Look how many of them pay for Digital
| Ocean/AWS to host their projects instead of rolling their
| own servers.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > not developers, look at GitHub - it's all for free
|
| I _do_ use the free stuff (GitHub, VS Code, etc).
|
| And I _also_ pay for NCrunch, Wallaby, RubyMine, Rider,
| GoLand, PyCharm, FastMail, PCloud, and more.
|
| Most of the stuff I pay for has free equivalents (and yes,
| I know JetBrains have an all-products subscription rather
| than separate Ruby, .Net, Go, and Python, but I have
| reasons).
| therealmarv wrote:
| Wow, I created a color theme for VSCode some years ago (which
| actually got some attention by some people and there was one
| guy even adapting it to Google Chrome dev console) and not even
| one second I thought that this kind of stuff could be monetised
| in any way. Well done.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Same thing happened with me. I built this theme as an open
| source project and forgot it existed. People started to
| create different forks and port them to different platforms.
| One day I realized how big that was and decided to monetize.
| One year later 100k. Crazy!
| [deleted]
| Vinnl wrote:
| > I never had time to work on my open source projects, but now
| that I was monetizing, I was able to spend more time doing
| something I love.
|
| That's pretty cool, but also only is true because he appears to
| love creating marketing pages, blogging, writing a book, creating
| themes for applications he doesn't use himself, etc.
|
| I'm happy that he (/you, I see you're reading along Zeno - thanks
| for sharing), but it's not exactly what I'd have in mind for my
| "working on open source" daydream :)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I watched Brandon Li's video yesterday on how to turn a shot into
| a scene. I feel like it strangely applies to marketing for solo
| developers. You packaged your disperse config files into a
| cohesive product, with a unified look, and your website even has
| an emotional response to it.
|
| Here's his insight.
|
| How to turn a SHOT into a SCENE - Travel Video Storytelling
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCTjxk33juo
| zenorocha wrote:
| I really like his take on recording a shot vs. recording a
| scene. Thanks for sharing!
| pta2002 wrote:
| I checked out the theme itself, and immediately a message showed
| up saying that it detected my country and offered me a discount
| code to make sure that the theme is still affordable for my
| country.
|
| It's simple things like this that probably help a side project
| like this get to where it is, great job!
| ggerganov wrote:
| I wonder how does one put a price on a product like this. For
| example, if I am paying for a cloud VM instance, I could
| calculate the energy per CPU, hardware costs, etc. and
| ultimately come to a reasonable price. What would be the
| thought process for reaching a certain price for this specific
| product?
| zenorocha wrote:
| I can't emphasize enough how important Purchasing Parity Power
| is. Making it affordable for other countries is crucial.
| quaffapint wrote:
| What do you use to provide this?
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| he mentions in one of the embedded tweets:
| https://twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1349340816964153345
|
| seems a combination of cloudflare worker and a couple other
| tools
| [deleted]
| shaggy8871 wrote:
| This is very cool, I love the vibrant colours even though it's a
| dark theme.
| 0x008 wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks the theme has too high of a
| contrast?
| zenorocha wrote:
| Definitely not, that's why I built multiple variations :)
| Arubis wrote:
| Edit: I misunderstood; see child comment.
|
| Original: Clarification: that's $100K in a _month_, not annual.
| (Very impressive, I might add!)
| zenorocha wrote:
| That's actually annual. It's the total sales from February 2020
| until February 2021.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Hello HN friends!
|
| Today is a special day. My solo side project has hit 100K in
| sales, which is absolutely insane. When I started this thing, I
| never thought this would happen.
|
| Monetizing an open-source project is very difficult, so I decided
| to share my personal journey and lessons learned.
|
| This is a visual timeline showing all the lessons learned from $0
| to $100k in one year.
|
| I hope this can be helpful and inspire your own journey :)
|
| Let me know if you have any questions! I'm here to answer every
| single one of them.
| ed_voc wrote:
| Congrats on the success.
|
| Did you get many repeat customers? I see the licence is limited
| to 3 machines instead of the user. Did this have the effect of
| getting customers to buy additional licences?
|
| It would be interesting to know if people are willing to pay
| again so they can use software on multiple devices or if it is
| more likely to put people off buying the software.
| dvt wrote:
| Huge congrats! Been following Dracula for a while :)
| zenorocha wrote:
| Thanks! Let me know if you need anything ;)
| jqquah wrote:
| Congrats man
|
| Really enjoyed reading the journey, it was long but wow.
| zenorocha wrote:
| I'm glad this was helpful!
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| Just wanted to say congrats on the success and that I really
| enjoyed the post. The timeline outline of it all was a lot
| easier to read and follow than similar posts I have read around
| these types of things.
| grumple wrote:
| Congrats dude! I'm impressed by this project and that you got
| people to pay for it. Any why shouldn't they? It takes time and
| skills to do design work like this.
| rexreed wrote:
| This is great visibility!
|
| But it leaves one big thing out. You didn't launch with no one
| paying attention. You already had a fan base - people you could
| reach out to. I know you had to build your email list from
| scratch, but at least you know who was going to be in that
| list, and those people already knew and had a relationship with
| you.
|
| You should go back farther in time to when you had no
| following, no people who cared, and no one who knew your name.
| As you said below, it's a 7 year overnight success. For those
| who want to replicate your success (not your product), what
| advice do you have for those who want to build a following so
| that later they can capture that following into something that
| will be beneficial?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That's a very good point that people often fail to consider!
|
| I'm far from expert in this, but I'll reply with what my wife
| would say. She's in a completely unrelated, non-technical
| field and has a pretty good online following. In short: post
| things people are interested in, follow up with the ones who
| respond or ask questions and be genuinely interested in the
| people who follow you. Don't be fake.
|
| The theory is simple, putting it into practice for your
| particular field is the hard part :-)
| An0mammall wrote:
| Congrats man, that's amazing
| zenorocha wrote:
| Thank you so much :D
| ct0 wrote:
| Congrats! Im just hoping that you can include Rstudio in your
| list of apps. Thanks!
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Congrats! They is quite the milestone. No questions. Just a
| congrats and thank you for sharing your story.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Thank you so much Taylor!
| snow_mac wrote:
| What was your website traffic before you launched your product?
| How did people find you?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Thank you for sharing!! This can act as an insiration and a
| guide to many who are thinking about making a similar step, but
| don't.
| rwieruch wrote:
| Congrats! \o/
|
| NB: Really refreshing how you created this timeline! You should
| make a (Gatsby) theme out of it :)
| zenorocha wrote:
| Good idea!
| rmsaksida wrote:
| Congrats!
| imwillofficial wrote:
| So special request. Would you consider making a theme for the
| Nova text editor by Panic? It's my go to lately!
| zenorocha wrote:
| The open source version is here https://draculatheme.com/nova
|
| In the next couple of weeks, I should add the premium version
| on Dracula PRO ;)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Awesome, thanks!
| robm50 wrote:
| Good job, sir.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Question.
|
| In this tweet [1] you mentioned that Dracula PRO was in the works
| for 7 years.
|
| 1. Would it possible to start monetizing the product earlier?
|
| 2. If yes, how much earlier in the case of Dracula PRO?
|
| While $100k looks like an impressive number, in the grand scheme
| of things, it's just 14k/year, which is about $1150/month, which
| equates to an hourly wage of $6,50. Knowing what you know now,
| what would you do differently if you were to maximize revenue?
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1227622330731335686
| imwillofficial wrote:
| An amazing body of work. I'm beyond impressed. Thoughtful, well
| designed, and well researched. I never liked the Dracula theme
| much, but I'm going to snag this just to support great stuff
| being put out into the world.
| zenorocha wrote:
| That's awesome! Give it a shot and if you don't like it I can
| give you a refund right away.
| idlewords wrote:
| Congrats to the OP! One lesson in these graphs that is very
| important to internalize is how spiky they are. When you're
| small, you'll make most of your money on a few special days,
| based on events that might be out of your control.
|
| Given that dynamic, it can be hard to distinguish cause from
| effect, let alone layer on things like A/B tests or other
| statistical analysis that might hold for things at bigger scale.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| From reading the name of the project I wouldn't have guessed it's
| a color scheme for a lot of apps. I wouldn't even thought of that
| as a viable market. Congratulations to you. This is amazing.
|
| I think the most valuable lesson here is, that there is a market
| for a lot more things than we would have thought a few
| years/decades back. Kind of how Spotify enable niche band to have
| successes outside the mainstream, just by allowing people to
| listen to every fringe corner of the musical ecosystem.
| zenorocha wrote:
| Totally agree. Niches make riches.
| xmly wrote:
| Great theme! Nice to have it!
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