I’ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there’s just too much to do.
So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself.
The Challenge: Building a 0 / mo Product in A Day
For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing?
I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing,
The post How I Built a $600 / mo Product In One Day via @hackernews appeared first on NY French Geek.
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I’ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there’s just too much to do.
So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself.
The Challenge: Building a 0 / mo Product in A Day
For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals. Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing?
I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency. That is, finding a pain point from within the web.
Deciding to Build Something Small
I decided to build some sort of plugin for an Open Source web project. I’ve noticed a real inefficiency here. All the good programmers are out there building the next Twitter, not making life easier for the businesses using Open Source software.
But which Open Source web software? To find out, I pulled up Google Trends, and searched for my potential targets:
As you can see, WordPress turns out to be the great big old winner. It simply gets searched for more often than my other two potential targets combined. And it’s growing like crazy.
A perfect market to search for inefficiencies.
Total Time Spent Finding Market: 2 hours
Narrowing It Down: Finding Unserved Pain Points
The most obvious market for WordPress is within Commercial themes. However, this market is pretty damn competitive, with multiple companies already established making 7 figure incomes. I decided building a complete theme and finding a place to market it in a single day was too obvious a path.
Seems WordPress plugins may be an interesting niche.
So instead, I focused on secondary needs. What is the purpose of WordPress, and what’s a user’s greatest pain point that isn’t being served?
In my case, I decided it was figuring out what the hell to write about. Having run a company, I know that it can be a pain to write content about widgets every day. I mean, how much can a person say about widget x?
Problem Definition: Making it easier to come up with ideas about what to write about.
Having the Aha! Moment
So again, I began researching. How do writers aggregate data relevant to their topic?
The answer was by monitoring RSS feeds, twitter, news sites, etc.
So my product would put that very front end right into WordPress. Grabbing RSS feeds, and putting them directly into the WordPress backend.
This is going to be our product.
Product Definition: RSS feed aggregator integrated into WordPress with the ability to put excerpts into post automatically
Total Time Defining Product: About 30 minutes
Leveraging Existing Technology
So we’ve defined our product roughly. The question now becomes:
What existing technology can I leverage to solve this problem?
It turns out, there’s an incredible library for manipulating RSS feeds in PHP called SimplePie. It’s dead simple to use, and it’s got great examples. I build upon one of the examples and get my RSS feeds working in under an hour.
Plugging into WordPress
I don’t want to say WordPress is poorly documented, because it isn’t. However, it is pretty dry to read technical writing. That being said, my next job was to bring my nice SimplePie based RSS reader right on into the WordPress backend.
To do so, I needed to create a plugin skeleton for WordPress, and add a plugin for TinyMCE. These two meant I had to go back and forth between the WordPress and TinyMCE documentation to figure out how the two fit together.
But once it was all plugged in, I had a working prototype another hour and a half into my actual work.
Total time to build the actual product: 2 1/2 hours
Finding a Marketplace
This was the real opportunity for efficiency. As part of my experiment, I didn’t want to spend a dime on building a market or processing sales. As the day wore on, I decided this could make a great example for someone with absolutely no monetary resources.
So I began researching markets to publish my Commercial WordPress Plugin to.
There was my old favorite, the Envato Marketplace, but they charge a ridiculous commission structure. Something like 50% if you decide you want to retain control to your own product.
That’s just a little too high, even for me.
So I kept looking, and found this great site, wpplugins.com. Turns out they only want a 10% commission to add your software to their marketplace.
However, they insist upon all plugins being released under the GPL, and so I needed to go back and make sure all my code had the GPL inserted into it. However, I signed up for an account, created a zip file, and began writing the documentation for my plugin.
All told, creating some screenshots, writing up a description and cleaning up code probably took more time than writing the actual software.
Total Time Finding Marketplace, Writing Copy: 3 hours
Success! The product has been built and sent out in under a day!
Finally, Watching the Money Roll In
With the marketplace I chose, there was a delay in waiting for my plugin to be approved. However, from the very first day I had sales.
I chose a very low cost for my product, because I believe people don’t have a problem paying for something if it’s less work than pirating it.
That being said, my product is being sold at .95 per copy. If you’re interested, you can see a video of it in action below:
You can check out the final product, Content Avalanche here.
NYC, Startups, Clippings & Musings
Some young couples who are facing varied soundness problem, these individuals can buy remedies from the Web without any problem. Unconditionally, one of the wonderful place where buyers can purchase medicines is Internet. One of the best treatment for failure to get or keep an erection is Viagra. Today sundry articles were published about viagra substitute. You may have heard about “where to buy viagra“. Various companies describe it as “how to get viagra“. Sure, for a lot of guys, bringing up the problem in the first place is the toughest step. The most common potentially serious side effects of such medications like Viagra is headache. Contact your doctor if you have any dangerous side effect that does not go away. The so important point make sure that when you buy medicines like Viagra online, you get real preparation. Some of the web-sites offer really hazardous fakes.
The post How I Built a $600 / mo Product In One Day via @hackernews appeared first on NY French Geek.
]]>Amazon emailed me last week. A product manager for S3 wanted to talk about our use of their services. (Amazon S3 provides the storage for all the images and video on Posterous). It seemed like a great opportunity to talk to someone within Amazon about issues we’ve been having, and features we’d like to see.
Once we got on the phone, it was clear that this person didn’t want to help us at all. He just wanted to pick our brain to get ideas on how to increase sales and keep customers. I have no desire to give my time
The post Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan – Can’t agree more with @a4agarwal appeared first on NY French Geek.
]]>Amazon emailed me last week. A product manager for S3 wanted to talk about our use of their services. (Amazon S3 provides the storage for all the images and video on Posterous). It seemed like a great opportunity to talk to someone within Amazon about issues we’ve been having, and features we’d like to see.
Once we got on the phone, it was clear that this person didn’t want to help us at all. He just wanted to pick our brain to get ideas on how to increase sales and keep customers. I have no desire to give my time or my thoughts to Amazon so they can grow their business. And I told this directly to the person on the phone.
Why not? Because they don’t have great support. Amazon doesn’t care about me, so I don’t care about them. They have a good product, so they have me as a user. They don’t have good support, so they don’t have me as a fanatic.
When we have issues, they don’t want to help us. They force us to pay for support, which costs 0 per month, or 20% of your bill, whichever is greater. As we grow it becomes prohibitive to pay this. Instead of taking care of its largest customers, Amazon penalizes them. We’re incentivized to leave.
I told the person on the phone that what Amazon needs to do to keep Posterous as a customer is offer better support. We need better developer tools to analyze our usage. We need better tools to stop abuse. We need a direct contact within Amazon for when we see issues. The Amazon rep didn’t seem to care, he was too focused on pricing.
The other vendor we use to run Posterous is Rackspace. They take the opposite approach, and offer the best customer support imaginable. They go out of their way to make us happy. Because of their great support, I am a fan of theirs. I intro YC companies to Rackspace all the time. If Rackspace needs my help, I’m there for them. I wish there was more I could do to help them, because they are awesome.
There are plenty of companies that I would fight for. Costco, American Express, Rackspace, and many other companies I recommend endlessly, even though I don’t get a penny from them. I do it because I love these companies, because they take care of me. They offer great customer service. And I am a fan.
To build a successful company, you need more than just a lot of users. You need fans who genuinely want you to succeed. And to do that, you need to give them a great product and great support.
You can follow me on Twitter here.
We prove it everyday at @producteev
NYC, Startups, Clippings & Musings
Some young couples who are facing varied health problem, these individuals can buy remedies from the Web without any problem. Unconditionally, one of the wonderful place where buyers can purchase medicines is Internet. One of the best treatment for inability to get or keep an hard-on is Viagra. Today sundry articles were published about viagra substitute. You may have heard about “where to buy viagra“. Various companies describe it as “how to get viagra“. Sure, for a lot of guys, bringing up the problem in the first place is the toughest step. The most common possibly serious side effects of such medications like Viagra is headache. Contact your doc if you have any dangerous side effect that does not go away. The highly great point make sure that when you buy medicines like Viagra online, you get real preparation. Some of the web-sites offer really hazardous fakes.
The post Make a great product, gain a user. Have great support, earn a fan – Can’t agree more with @a4agarwal appeared first on NY French Geek.
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