Here on HN and IndieHackers I've always looked up to the people who pay their bills with recurring revenue from their tools.
I've tried, many times, to do the same, without much success. A couple of rather successful HN pitches, but none of my projects ever even paid me a beer (let alone my rent).
Until this month! Last year I built myself and my girlfriend a tool. Even though I did build it for other people to use it, I had never thought someone actually would. Long story short, half a year later I provide my service to more than 5000 (fully organic) users.
This month is the first month in which revenue is high enough to pay my rent with it. Disclaimer: I share my rent with my girlfriend, but it does sound cool to say.
Looking back at the proces, it does match with a lot of other success stories I read over the years in the HN community. The main lesson which I can now confirm: build something that scratches your own itch.
So... Thanks you guys, for keeping me motivated and inspired.
Last year June, I built a small online tool for me and my girlfriend to manage our IPTV playlist. I bought a domain name and put it online because our IPTV player needed to access it through a URL. A couple of months later, and 7 users found the tool and were actually using it (keep in mind that that's pretty impressive for a tool as not-user-focused as it was back then).
So I then decided to spend more time refining it. Building more features, introducing paid plans, and making sure everything worked as user-friendly as possible.
It basically all started growing organically from there. This month so far I have a Stripe balance of €620 (roughly 687USD) after fees, which is my 5th full month of running with pricing plans.
As you can imagine, I'm super excited to see if it can keep growing like this!
My only successful product to this date is an app I built because my wife asked me to. It is in an non-technical domain which I knew nothing about. I thought it was rather non-promising, but, since it was a pet-peeve of hers, I gave it a try.
It was an awesome (and very bonding) experience - she explained me the problem(s), and I tried to simplify and structure it (didn't think gardening could be so complicated). Both of us were in their respective element, and from back and forth an app was forged.
To this day I only half-jokingly call her my product manager. The app has brought in 5 digits last year and is rising.
Last week, she briefly mentioned another problem, in another hobby domain of hers...
I really can't say who spent more time (she did graphics, I wrote code) but to this day it's a bit of a sore point to talk about, just that we were both absolutely not happy with the outcome and see it as completely wasted time.
A game is really a tough one though.
This also strikes me - After I live with my girlfriend for a while, I (or she surprisingly) found I have no interest in social media apps, discounts, traveling, eating tasty foods, mainstream movies/TV series...
Being immune to popular things is nice sometimes. But not being able to have empathy with most people is a great disadvantage for product development, since markets which are too niche mostly cannot easily afford rents or just don't worth it at all. It's much nicer to "build ... my girlfriend a tool" TBH.
The ideas generally fall into “my company is paying lots of money for some really powerful, complicated software, and we use about 5% of what it offers. Why not create cheaper software that just does the 5%?”
Suggestions are always welcome.
My friend is also working on an Android version, though it doesn't have feature parity (yet).
eBay started as a website to sell Pez dispensers for the founders girlfriend.
> Pardon my complete speculation, but I bet your success
> factor is "I built ... my girlfriend a tool."
It's used for many reasons, but I personally got a subscription at an IPTV provider to be able to offer my French girlfriend to keep watching her French TV channels while living in the Netherlands.
That said, my service does not offer IPTV, simply an editor to users who already have their own IPTV subscription.
I guess IPTV was coined to adress TV via Internet, as opposed to over the air (we do not have cable here)
With the trend toward illustrations and mocked up interfaces it seems like many SaaS companies leave out actual screenshots these days.
To me that’s an important gauge for whether I’m going to have a decent user experience if I sign up (even if it’s just flat screenshots with no explanations)...
We found doing it per country had a huge impact on rest-of-world LTVs.
Also, keep in mind that these prices apply on yearly plans, and most paid users use monthly pricing, where prices range from $2 to $8.
It seems obvious that as a user I would like low prices, but at the risk of being slightly repetitive, what's apparently not obvious to many subscription service providers is that I consider the total price of all my subscriptions, not just the price of their one service.
I know that I use a TV related site (one of the ones for tracking shows), and as much as I'd be happy to pay them $12/year, their cheapest plan is 3 times as much, and I just don't see them as providing that much value to me.
The following isn't feedback, just personal rambling: Also I can't feel but somehow I would be unable to make a software that has that kind of "playlist protection" as a feature that needs a higher tier of monthly payment. I seem to come from times where things like this sure warranted a one time payment but not an ongoing one. Though it might be that I have my head stuck up my, well, you know and I need to get with the times of SAAS
I am doubly impressed, because your product is B2C. I honestly don't know how to make money on B2C, it always turns out to be a money-losing proposition unless you have a huge market. I hope you will be able to make it work!
As others have pointed out, I'd recommend:
- please rename "amateur" to something more positive. no customer wants to be called an amateur
- Increase prices for the pro tier
- Improve your "pricing plan" page, take a look at other (more successful) SaaS products and change button labels accordingly. Just take the best things from their landing pages!
- create a proper comparison matrix / table for all the plans
- visually de-emphasize the free tier, and focus on the 3 paid plans in your comparison table. people will always buy the middle option, so you can increase the price of the "best" option by a lot in order to anchor your value
- add features which are available only in "pro" and "pro plus", e.g. support, direct email to developer, etc!
- maybe build a mobile app for this? it seems like something that could be nicely integrated into a mobile-first experience. you could make it exclusive for pro users
And the pricing page (https://m3u-editor.com/#pricing) looks pretty good to me - nice horizontal feature matrix, easy to locate buttons...not sure OP wants to use dark patterns like de-emphasizing the free tier. I do agree that the top plan should probably be more than $5/mo.
https://twitter.com/search?q=amateur%20hour&src=typed_query
I would definitely use "enthusiast" over "amateur" (or other variants, e.g. fan, fanatic, lover, or a label that's specific to in-group members of the genre, if one exists). I'd also suggest a-b testing all the things to end the speculation.
As an alternative to amateur, I like "Hobbyist".
Fewer negative connotations, and users can self-categorise between Hobbyist/Professional easily to find the right package. If I'm using a product for serious work, I know that 'Professional' packages are likely targeted at my use case. If I'm just messing around with something, Hobbyist is going to resonate pretty clearly and I'll start there.
Maybe avoid the dark UX pattern if you can avoid it. Though it's accepted in industry at this point that customers will need to actively fight against the producer not to get swindled - it's still nice to respect your customers.
Microsoft figured this out years ago.
Possibly "starter"
Looking forward to your future update that says, "My SaaS paid for my yacht."
I assume you're negative towards yachts like Larry Ellison's - giant fuel chugging beasts that the owner flies in to port to go on once or twice a year and that requires a crew the size of a small company to operate.
Then there are small craft with a sail that are completely environmentally guiltless to operate, and that can introduce kids to the joy of sailing and to the wonders of the ocean.
The second kind are awesome.
Honestly, can we agree it is 50/50? The "Mom test" is a good way to make sure you are not wasting your time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hla1jzhan78 (3:16)
Scraping other people's content and then watermarking it with your brand while showing ads?
You're just buying time until someone big enough cares about what you are doing.
Two small comments
- Adjust your pricing. The difference between 1, 2.5 and 5$ is almost nothing. I'd suggest free - 5 - 20, or something along those lines. - The buttons in the screenshot below: the ones on the second row should have some spacing above them. It's a typical responsive layout thing.
Does that mean you would need to get an equivalent number of new users to pay your rent next month? Or is your monthly recurring revenue now high enough to cover your rent?
Either way, an exciting day for you I'm sure. Good luck going forward!
Pricing is pretty cheap imo, why don't you try doubling prices? You might double income just like that..
More importantly, I don't think I would pay more than I am currently charging my users, so I think it's just fair. Also, I prefer a whole lot of small payments than a couple of big ones, and for now that seems to be going in the right direction.
If this was my app, I'd simplify the pricing a lot. Get rid of the free tier. People who aren't willing to pay for your service should go somewhere else. Instead, give people a free trial for 30 days or whatever.
I'd make it so:
$2 = mixture of your current Amateur + Pro, maybe call it "Basic"
$5 = "Pro" with all features
Simple is good. You don't need 4 tiers if your target audience is kinda price sensitive. 2 is enough.
If you don't mind then can you please share your tech stack?
Thanks
Posted it on HN a while back as well, but interestingly it is one of my least successful HN posts.
Nitpick: A user who is not happy; users are people, not things.
Awesome advice.
And "itch" is to "problem" as "scratch" is to "solve." The fact that you know or use something doesn't make it a problem to solve. But if you think you can do it better or different, then maybe someone else agrees.
It could just be any household task. In this case, OP's iptv playlists.
Your splash page looks pro.
It'd be more newsworthy if they were like half organic, half machine. Cyborgs are an up and coming niche market!
Kidding aside, congratulations, that's impressive!
