Ask HN: how to get revenue from my site

8 points by snyff 13 years ago | 7 comments

I'm the guy behind pentesterlab.com. This site offers free exercises to learn web security (an ISO with a vulnerable web application and a PDF with the course). I'd like to get revenue out of it to pay for all the time I spend building each exercise and maybe be able to spend more time on it. I enjoy doing it a lot and building each exercise can be super challenging but having some reward will help stay motivated.

I started as something similar to Peepcode in December 2011 and was charging around $12 per exercise but I made it free after 8 months during which I sold around 6 exercises (to 3 people). However, I don't want to go back to this after making it free. Being free makes it available to a lot of people and it's something I won't change now (I actually wish I had start with free exercises).

I offer commercial license to use the exercises to run training with not much success so far (even if it's pretty cheap $990). I have around 130 visitors/day on average and up to 4000 when an exercise is released (the average value is 2500). I tweeted about sponsoring but I didn't get any reply so far.

And now I'd like to see if HN has a better idea or what I'm doing wrong... or maybe it's just not something that can be done and I should just accept to do it for the fun of it.

chewxy 13 years ago |

I personally would advise charging money for it. You're providing a valuable resource. Experiment with different price points.

You said you sold only 6 exercises to 3 people. And yet you have 130 people a day. Assuming very healthy conversion rates (say, 0.5%), you need roughly 2000 visitors before you sell 1 item. In short, you need to ramp up your traffic. You can do this organically, or you can buy ads.

You clearly do have an audience however, given your ability to get up to 4000 visitors per day when an exercise is released.

So what to do? Put what I just said to a test: charge for your next exercise. You should get at least 1 sale. From then on, experiment with your price points.

I think you have everything in place, you just need to test things and ramp up traffic. Calculating backwards, you roughly need about 100k people visiting before you can conclude whether charging money works for you as a business model.

Of course you can start with a much lower expected conv rate, and probably should

TL;DR I think you quit too early

revorad 13 years ago |

You're effectively asking, "How do I get money without asking for it?". You can't. There is no secret, so stop looking for it.

Web security is a huge and growing pain for loads of people - loads of people with money. You are teaching incredibly valuable skills to people, who can sell those skills to people with money.

If you get over your hangup of selling, there's no dearth of places or ways to sell and distribute good content. A small list off the top of my head:

1. Write to people you know personally or even just online - asking if they are interested in learning what you teach, or if they know anyone else who might be. It works.

2. Udemy

3. Write a good blog post on security every week and post it here.

4. Build an email list with a weekly web security newsletter.

5. Go on security podcasts to discuss the latest security goofups on major sites. If there aren't any security podcasts, start one.

orangethirty 13 years ago |

Your landing page sucks, and your packaging sucks. This type of product sells a lot. I know because I sell one like it. So re-do those two things. And stop using the standard bootstrap look. It looks really bad. Buy a good heme for a couple of bucks.

thetrumanshow 13 years ago | |

Specifically, why not open with a question that addresses the problem that people want solved?

"Are you certain that your SQL/TomcatInstance/RailsApp is secure?"

Then you can either branch off into teaching them how bad the problem is (e.g. "YOUR STUFF WILL EVENTUALLY BE HACKED FOR CERTAIN!") ala patio11, or tell them how you're going to help them.

orangethirty 13 years ago | | |

Well, the problem is that he doesn't have any type of structured sales path in the page. Its all cobbled up together. To sell something you have to make sure the path to purchase is clear. You also need to get people on that path right from the start. I'd say that giving away the stuff for free right on the page where you want to sell it is just a bad idea. You are conditioning people to not pay for your valuabe product.

chris_dcosta 13 years ago |

What about inviting other people to contribute to creating courses? They will hopefully promo the course for you in exchange for a cut I guess... that should start to bring in more traffic the more people you involve.

ibudiallo 13 years ago |

I think your website is amazing, and I am starting to follow your exercises already. I don't think anyone gives this kind of information for free. You need to rethink your marketing strategy