So pricing is not necessary to follow other major services like Evernote even if it feels like too expensive for some people. It's just a modestly profitable niche where big companies won't invest. Since it's not a startup trying to build the next Google this time, I don't need to catch hundreds of millions of users.
#Inkdrop frames free#
I decided to sell it with $4.99 per month or $49.9 per year with 60-day free trial. With the app based on the subscription model, you just need to provide an ongoing valuable service. Lifetime pricing requires you to keep upselling them by adding more and more and more. The most important thing is to make sure everything is sustainable.
Beta users gave me lots of suggestions and bug reports and they helped me evolve the app to be ready for the official release. On the private beta launch, I posted a link to Hacker News and it fortunately got covered on the top page and it resulted in over 1,000 beta entries. If it’s not good enough for public consumption don’t give it to the public to consume. If you’re not confident enough about your release then how can you expect the public to be? Private betas are fine, public betas are bullshit. I never have released public betas as DHH said in his book, Getting Real:ĭon’t use “beta” as a scapegoat … Beta passes the buck to your customers. Once I built an MVP which seems to be great enough I would have liked to get feedback from people, so I decided to roll it out as a private beta. Getting early heavy users during private beta So I started off by forking Kitematic, an open source Docker container manager (Apache License) because they have already struggled over many problems to get good practices instead of me. It was the first time I used Electron and ReactJS. When it comes to UI design, I greatly got inspirations from Airmail's beautiful UI. Thanks to CodeMirror, I accomplished to make a great Markdown editor with no effort. If you are in offline, it will resume syncing automatically when you go back online. To accomplish the quick sync I used CouchDB and PouchDB because they provide built-in sync. ReactJS was great choice because I use React Native to build a mobile version later. I chose Electron for building cross platform desktop app. I repeated scrap-and-build until I love it. If I couldn’t truly think “this is it!” when I’ve built an MVP, it isn’t really solving the problem. In an minimal viable product(MVP) I could add other features nice to have but I excluded them all becauseit should be for validating the core value. SoI ended up making my own note-taking app because I was tired searching for the perfect one.Ī core value of the app would be abilities to solve the problem. It looks like personal preference issues though these were very important for me. I couldn’t even adopt apps with lack of features, too complicated features, or not beautiful looking for my daily use. Apps using cloud storage services like Dropbox are too slow to sync and consume many CPU resources because I’m storing lots of files on it. Web-based services like Wiki are usually hard to find from lots of tabs and not usable in offline. I tried numerous Markdown based applications over the years but I couldn’t find a keeper.
#Inkdrop frames software#
So I always make a service that would solve my problem because there’s my market.Ībout two years ago I was very frustrated with taking notes regarding software development. If I’m having a problem, it’s likely hundreds of thousands of others are in the same boat. Writing down what you learned in your project.Focusing on providing good user support.Focusing on sustainability with pricing.Getting early heavy users during private beta.Inkdrop’s monthly revenue is now $1,361 (1 USD = 110 JPY) If I could keep the growth I will surely be able to quit my freelance career next year. I started developing it last year(2016) and the monthly revenue was $360 this July. I managed to make plenty of time for my project and recently wrote about how I did it with project-based fees. I made this app while I’m working as a freelancer in Tokyo. Here I’m going to share my experience on creating a multi-platform app called Inkdrop alone and making it earn $1,300 per month. From idea to first sales and growth strategies.
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