Thanks for sharing this!

I checked out your pricing plans and the way you differentiate plans based on visitors / day jumped out at me since it goes against advice I read recently from the UserVoice team. They used to price based on number of users who can vote but (in their own words)...

"This was a huge failure. It created what I call a success penalty: the more successful you were in activating your users to give you feedback the more expensive the product became. On some level this made sense but since no one knew how to estimate this future usage it just created uncertainty about committing to a product without knowing the future cost of it. It was especially problematic because we were often working with young companies who didn’t know or were very optimistic about their future active user levels (and equally optimistic about what % of them would engage on UserVoice and give them feedback). It put us in the awkward position of tempering a customer’s enthusiasm about their use of our product (aka “There’s no way you’ll have 300K people on your site in 60 days time”). When we removed the usage limits, which were designed to drive upgrades, we actually saw that upgrades increased 33%!"

Link: http://500.co/the-data-behind-purchasing-behavior-at-uservoi...

Oh wow! My post made it on Hacker News!

Thanks so much for the nice comments. I'm glad my story inspired some of you :)

If you have specific questions about anything or would like some more details about any part of the story, please let me know. I'll happily answer them.

The point in the article that deserves more attention is how creating a landing page was the most useful tool for the author. Sometimes I feel, before writing the first line of code of the project, the more important thing to do is to create a landing page and market it to the concerned audience.

This solves three problems -

1) You won't build something people don't need.

2) You get into touch with people who actually want to use your product and you can steer your idea into a more clear direction.

3) The leads motivate you (as it did with author).

I think this is something much of the HN crowd can relate to, starting projects and not completing. Great work on finally launching a product. Hopefully I can get to the other side of the tunnel. My goal for this year is to just bring in $1 from something outside my full-time job and hope that snowballs into more motivation and a growing business.

This is such an awesome story. I've been two features away from launching my product from April. And that's just launching like an Alpha version of it. Beating procrastination is never easy. Just have to motor through. I'm determined to launch before end of the month. As a side note, I recently got someone who promised to bug me each week on my progress. I've also arranged to have a meetup with him once every month. Casual meetup, not a major deal. But put those two together and the fact that I haven't completed something yet weighs on my mind as an embarrassment. It serves as great motivation till I learn how to kick my own ass. The fact that I'm meeting my friend today isn't making things easier for my mind either :D

I just launched my product in just 2190 days. The interesting thing is that only a handful of key decisions, maybe 3-4 decisions, would save 80% of this period. But this is the (now) expert hindsight. It's not easy to spot it in real time.

Having another person besides you pushing your project forward is the biggest motivator - be it a waiting/potential client, a cofounder, website traffic, any external factor that validates your goal. Internal motivation only gets you so far until you start losing steam.

I think the advice to set up adwords and an intro page before a product is ready really helps with this. My main issue with such a strategy is that you end up having to admit that the product is still vaporware and the time to launch may be too long. Probably worth having an early alpha ready prior to any marketing blitz.

>I’d work on them for a few weeks, sometimes even months, but eventually I’d lose motivation and never get back to it.

I think this post helps demonstrate why having a dedicated co-founder or partner can really help ground you when working on projects like these. There will undoubtedly be lulls where you question the project and perhaps your own abilities. Having someone there to remind you of the original vision can really make the difference.

Honestly, this article really addressed some of the roadblocks I had in starting my own projects. Definitely going to keep this handy.

Urgh. I really need more motivation to finish my current project! Always just one or two more features from finishing, then some bug comes up that throws me back and i get disheartened.

Worst part, i have alpha testers, and damn their patient for a new version, i sometimes wish they would complain to make me get into that 'i gotta get this part updated asap' mood again.

Edit:

Hmm after reading the article, i really need to redo my landing page. Get an option there to get on a mailing list.

Although I have done pretty well at actually launching various projects (5 to date) only one has gotten any traction (200-400 users a day). The one with traction hasn't seen any growth and I haven't been able to figure a good path to spur growth or generate revenue.

That being said, I still really liked this article. Even though I do launch things, I think that there is a more subtle piece I am missing. One thought I've had lately is that I get a lot of satisfaction out of building something and launching it. When the idea initially pops in my head, I ride that feverish wave of emotion throughout the development process. I think if I could spend more time and develop some sort of process or methodology to validate the idea I could take the next step.

I think it's that the thought of "validating the idea" seems less fun than building it and a little murky (as far as I don't have a clear idea about how to do it) so I just skip it and figure the shotgun approach to building products will eventually hit. :)

Complete rewrites are bad. An approach we follow is to rewrite a small section of our product and release that to our users. With React, we can separate everything (repo, tests, architecture) from the core product but still integrate the new version within the app. It is like replacing the parts in a car one by one until you have a completely new car.

Just a quick question about some copy on your website, you might be unaware this is even on there but the text for your VAT stuff (pricing related) is a little hard to understand.

    .... Additional VAT charges are added to purchases made by customers from the European Union, except for customers from the European Union, but outside of Germany, who provide a valid VAT ID. Businesses from outside the European Union are not charged with VAT.

Just wanted to chime in with a few words of support - have been working on my own 'side-project' on and off for some 2000 days myself. Did pick up some 200 users along the way, but finally got the working MVP ready to go this year. A few tweaks required still, but testing can finally get underway now.

Good luck with Stage and to everyone else good luck with your longterm bootstrapped projects!

I have so many unfinished projects - has anyone tried blogging about their unfinished projects list, and did it help or hinder?

The article is fantastic, thanks.

Product makes great impression. Still I have a slight problem with pricing scheme. If for a band 5GB is not enough, and needs e.g. 10GB instead, it needs to put out 120€ per month more. That sounds hostile.

It would be probably better if pricing scheme is more modular, and pure hosting capacity aspects are priced reasonably.

Additionally option of yearly licenses with hosting on side of a client would be a big plus

Can totally relate to this. I have written, scrapped, re-written the code a few times for the past 4 years (1461 days). I am almost there!

Great advice and now I need to get things started again.

Thanks for posting your story its made my day :) I'm studying in Joensuu, Finland. About 70km from Kitee where Nightwish originated.

actually, i only read 2 paragraphs but i liked it...took you 10 years to realize your niche app. love that. i have so many unfinished projects....recently i just started making a list and adding to that instead.