Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue
My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month.
Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling about every 18 months, reaching its current level of around $8k/mo.
Over this time we redesigned the website, and found a company to create an explainer video for the service (both through 99Designs).
We have not spent much on paid user acquisition, we experimented with it a bit a few years ago without positive results. I think the difficulty is that some user education is required for them to understand what the service does and the value of it.
The website is called 33Mail (https://33mail.com/).
My plan is to spend the next few weeks focussed on trying to accelerate 33Mail's growth, in particular I want to try Google and FB advertising, and we've also been thinking about setting up an affiliate program through something like Commission Junction.
But before diving into that it would be really helpful to get some feedback and suggestions, it can sometimes feel like we're too close to it to see it objectively.
I would be super grateful if you guys could take a look at it and see if any suggestions come to mind.
217 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadThis idea is excellent, useful, and very timely. You have a huge potential customer base out there.
I don't like your pricing structure, but that's just my opinion. Don't want to go too in depth on this.
Good luck.
Do you have any thoughts on how to find someone like that? I've had mixed experiences with marketing people.
Another shortcut is ask other business owners who are similar to you. Hopefully you have a small network or community. If you don't, it's worth finding 2-3 people who run businesses similar to yours to regularly connect with.
You might not even need to find a marketing "person" - there are agencies that do full service. You can talk to a few, listen to the pitch, and ask them for references. Few people do this, but you can and should, and its a great way to meet other business owners like you.
If you do not understand what a marketing or advertising professional is telling you and you ask them to explain it further and it still does not make sense—lots of jargon, buzz words, and “secret sauce”—do not hire that person.
There is nothing in marketing that is so conceptually difficult to understand that it cannot be explained at a high-level to a lay person. If they do not explain it well they either A. Do not understand it well themselves, or B. Do not want you to understand it.
Also be wary of big promises up front. No one can actually promise XX% increase or XXX more leads without having advertised your specific product before. They might be able to provide a general estimate based on past experiences, but that is it.
Best of luck.
Please, don’t listen to this person.
You’ll lose all of the ground you have gained, in the hopes of attaining something that does not exist.
They're making 8k a month with a product that their own customers are saying is criminally underpriced. How can you possibly entertain the idea that there's no market for this service?
What I said is that there isn't a market which will support the recommendation.
I need API access to obtain sender and destination address of mailbox item and then decide how to dispense with it, either delete, retrieve or forward to a different destination. "Destination" may involve dozens of addresses. Reply address may be changed.
To minimize storage and costs, any item over 24 hours old can be deleted.
Thank you for the suggestion.
My clients have a lot of hourly employees that they need to communicate with but for privacy reasons, they don't necessarily want to use a corporate or private email address.
For example, a manager may want to use his private phone to send an email to a group of employees. Any replies would be routed to his secretary at the office --- with all addresses remaining semi-anonymous. My software will handle all this with the help of your service.
I currently have several hundred clients with a total of over 20,000 employees.
In other words, this all strictly opt in --- no marketing.
There is an open source product called IMAP API which is available under 2 licenses depending on your needs: AGPL & MIT. It recently had its own Show HN [2].
[1] https://github.com/andris9/imapapi
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372987
https://twitter.com/rikkipitt/status/1338790202463182848
Let me know if you have time to link up over Twitter or email.
Best, Rikki
This is in your home page, under "It's as simple as one, two, three!".
Should there be a space between them, and tribble@joesmith.33mail.com?
I just went through the top 40 comments on this post and I couldn’t see nothing but praise and congratulations (with a couple suggesting to raise prices, which I think are with good intent).
The world doesn't revolve around you!
I understand the misunderstanding and the urge to correct me. I don’t understand the need for your accusation of egocentrism. Why did you do that?
I wouldn't take it to heart though. The (!) was an attempt to make the accusation light hearted. I guess it failed.
Anyway, I'm no authority here. Just here for potshots!
I agree that accusing you of egocentrism is uncalled for. It does nothing to raise the quality of the discussion here, in fact it lowers it. Thanks for not taking the bait and staying reasonable in response. I hope you get an answer to your question.
Maybe I couldn’t find the “funny” comments because I am not sure what “funny” means. Dismissive? Negative feedback? Aggressive? Accusatory?
They will just go to a contracting firm for a few hours of work, or not
The question is how far past $12/yr are they willing to pay for email, considering free email addresses are ubiquitous?
PS. Doing same thing over a long period of time is pretty good way to succeed. I maintained an app for last 7 years and fetched $750 or so every month with around $100 costs. All organic growth.
Notes: I really like the theme, the barbershop candycane aesthetic does cry out "mail's here!" ... I think that the text on steps 1-3 is a bit dense and could be thinned out, or reduced somehow. The comparison chart on the price page is nice and clear except I would suggest adding some sort of icons to each of the row descriptors to make it clearer to understand at-a-glance. Great idea for a product and proud of your success!
Agree completely re: the steps 1-3 text being too dense, I'm going to try to make those much shorter just as soon as my current A/B test is done.
I also like that it's easy to navigate. I know it's not fashionable to have actual clickable links right at the top for "Home" "Help" "About" etc. Thank you for not hiding the navigation below an annoying full screen slideshow or behind a hamburger.
I think HN having a "Show HN for revenue making products" would be cool...Like "Indie Hackers" but doesn't necessarily have to be "indie", but both would be good. Could be like founders share
"Hey, my VC-backed startup is making 2K a month and growing at 800% yoy, here's some info about the journey so far..."
I think current show hn captures a good set of new things, but a section specifically for "we're earning money" could be really cool I think.
Most Show HN products are in the pre-alpha, pre-revenue stage. For them the feedback as well as the eyeballs are of great value. Though there are outliers, the value is usually tilted towards the creator rather than the readers (who are mostly just helping out).
OTOH, products with revenue in Show HN provide at least an equal value to the readers by way of lessons and execution strategies. So I agree that it's a separate class of "Show HN". However, if you put "Show HN: xxx generating $xK/month" it's very likely to bubble up to the top without needing a separate category. In fact, it might be better to not have a separate category since you might get more eyeballs if the links aren't split.
My feedback: I like the site. The video is helpful. The design of the page could be a little slicker, although I kind of like how it isn't super slick. It makes feel more like a small business I might want to support. A couple minor things:
- The text for the 3 steps is super dense. I honestly didn't even bother to read it. I'd try to reduce the copy a bit to one short sentence each.
- The artwork for the 33Mail logo and the icons for the 3 steps look a bit blurry. Higher res images here would make the page feel even more professional.
That's interesting re: blurry artwork, I hadn't noticed it TBH, but I see what you mean. Will add that to the todo list.
Really appreciate the feedback :)
However,
> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition
Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.
I see so many great products on HN that take years to takeoff simply because the founders refuse to market it.
Good products deserve to be more widely known so more people can use them. A founder not investing in marketing is doing their own products a disservice.
It might take $1000 in failed ads before you "get" your audience, but you might quit after spending $100. But the $900 in supposedly "wasted" ad spend will help you understand enough that you can make 10x higher revenue.
If you approach software development as an iterative activity, you should approach marketing the same way too. Expecting great results at first try is akin to expecting completely bug free software at first go without any tests.
> Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.
We did try it, IIRC we had a budget of around $2k - but nothing even came close to working.
It's very possible that our messaging or targeting was wrong, or perhaps we tried the wrong channels, but we did take a whack at it.
The only problem I have is it's too cheap!
I paid almost nothing for it years ago ($12?)
I'm worried about relying to heavily on a service that might go out of business any day.
Can you convert to a SaaS and let happy users like me support you.
We're not going out of business, don't worry - 33mail is profitable even at our current surprisingly low monthly cost :)
If you don't mind, what would you consider a fair price for the service? What features would we need to add to convert to a SaaS?
Here are some of her recommendations:
* Lite should be called Free and it should be lower on the Pricing page compared to the paid plans.
* Paid plans should segment customers by value.
* Premium and Pro plans can be combined into one Premium plan for $29 per month minimum.
* Enterprise pricing should be on request ("Call Us") or $249 per month minimum.
* You should be price testing via list offers.
Now the approach I might suggest would be raise premium to $2/month, if you buy for the year pay $12. Premium, $6/month, $60/yr. enterprise really depends on how an enterprise uses the product, but $50/month might be a little cheap, but again I really don't see the use case for an enterprise (>500 employees) for something like this.
Reach out to your fans and consider offering some incentive for them to sign-up their friends and family if they are not doing that already. Something like get 6 months free for each new account that you refer when they sign up for a year.
All it would cost to implement is a carefully worded email and messaging in the user's dashboard and the time to build in how you want to track the referrals - whether your users each get an individual coupon code they can share with family and friends or have a built-in function (personally I find "share with a friend" emails to impersonal and more likely to be ignored).
And if you are on a free account and want to get paid too... then lol
We do have a referral program, free upgrade if you refer two people - however referrals only account for 2% of our signups which doesn't really move the needle.
We are thinking about trying affiliate marketing through something like Commission Junction, where we would pay affiliates directly for conversions.
Affiliate marketing also attracts a lot of bottom feeders and scumbags. For example they will advertise an non-existent discount for your product, stuff a cookie for anyone who finds that 'discount' via web search and then take their affiliate commission if they buys later. Also your LTV is probably too low to attract any decent affiliates.
I'm not saying affiliate marketing never works, just that it almost never seems to work for small software companies. So I would put trying it very low on your TODO list.
Also don't bother with Google Adwords unless you are prepared to put in some serious effort and money to learning the system. I have also been doing PPC ads for 15 years. During that time the cost per click and the complexity of Adwords has just gone up and up. PPC works best when you have a high LTV and there are clear, unambiguous phrases that convert. Do both of those apply to you?
Have you tried partnership? Try approaching someone who already has distribution and a complementary product. See if they will push your product to their existing customers for a percentage. Perhaps a VPN vendor. That might be a case where affiliate marketing could work.
I like the "86ing" my spam. I wonder if you guys can get 86mail.com Just a fun thought.
Good idea re: 86mail :)
I am impressed by that video from 99designs. How much did you spend? Do you have a link to their profile?
Re: the video, actually now that I look back we used a company called xp-studios.com - we just provided the script. I believe it was around $3k but this was back in 2013.
You mentioned wanting to play with paid ads. I think you'll quickly find that your current LTV is way too low to justify any campaigns (unless your enterprise plan is converting like crazy?)
(Unpopular opinion) Also consider experimenting with killing your free plan if your goal is to increase revenue. I'm not saying you definitely should kill it long-term - just experiment with removing the option in an A/B test and see how it impacts conversions on paid plans. Freemium normally benefits products with network effects. It's not totally obvious to me how your product might benefit from that.
More typical though is Customer 1 signs up in 2015 when the product had features AB. Then in 2018 the product adds feature C. Is it fair to raise prices on them? Maybe, maybe not. In this case, I would still recommend today doubling prices for all new customers. You can go back to Customer 1 and say either:
1) we raised prices, but since you are an early supporter you get the current price for life with features ABC (if feature D is added, don't give it to them for free, they have to upgrade to the new pricing).
2) we raised prices since adding feature C is providing more value, but as an early supporter we are going to keep you at the original rate for 1 more year.