In 2014, my friends and I decided to create as cool web design tools as possible. We have always dreamed of making web products useful for the development process, which we could use ourselves to create client sites.
In terms of income, apart from Black Friday's sales (which helped us double the profits of November 2016), we grew to about $22,000 in revenue per month. Some of it goes to the affiliate program commission, VAT, vendor tax, and other costs. As a result, we now have about $17,000 of net monthly profit.
Today, I want to share with you how we created our products and how we spread this side business a little bit.
We will address the following topics:
- What motivated us to start working on our startup, and how we created our original product
- How we got our first clients
- Marketing strategies that we used to grow
- How our business models work
- Secrets of our sources of income
- The most important lessons we have learned
What motivated us to start working, and how we created the original product
We started as a two-person agency with no outside investment. We didn't have the means to rent a room for work - even just tables in the collective office - so we worked simply at "Starbucks". We barely managed to find money for our daily needs by fulfilling customer orders.
Our start-up was a third-party project that we were sure would be useful to developers like us. We noticed that when working with clients always "invent the wheel" and use the same elements for their sites time and time again. Therefore, we wanted to create several standard components, such as modal login/registration windows, calendars, headers, hints and futures.
For several months we spent our time implementing the platform and some free tricks (all this against the background of the main work). In the beginning we didn't have followers on Twitter, fans on Facebook, email subscribers. We have posted a lot of information about our free offers in the forums for designers and used the "back-up to web developers on Twitter" technique to get people to know and start sharing information about our products.
How we attracted/received the first users
Above all, no one really understood what we wanted. They didn't understand the value of our ideas and what we could offer them to develop their business. We decided that it would be better to create a more comprehensive product that could help people understand what we are doing at all.
We launched a Bootstrap-based UI-Kit. We covered this event on Designer News, which made the product more or less known. We have received 11,000 users from this resource, which has become a great support for our business.
Two weeks later, our startup showed up at Product Hunt. This has brought us more than 5,000 users. After that, the situation became stable: We moved from the point "0 users per week" to the constant 2-3 thousand in the same period of time.
After a couple more months, inspired by the success of our free product, we released a premium version with a large number of components and turnkey pages.
At first we received only a few sales. The product brought about $200 a week, which was not enough to support our business. At the same time, we were working on a web project for one of our clients.
In December, we published on Bootstrap Expo, the most popular site show gallery created with Bootstrap. This was another push for the development of our business. Since everyone who visited the gallery for inspiration already knew what Bootstrap was or had already worked with it, they became the ideal target audience for our business.
Later, we discovered that getting traffic to the site is not enough to build long-term relationships with its users, and most of them forgot about our existence after the first interaction. We did some research and found out what most marketers probably know for a long time: People forget things they don't remember.
Therefore, we implemented the email reminder system following the rules of the forgettable curve.
We wanted to remind our users that we exist and offer useful tools to work on their projects or projects of their clients.
At the moment we send letters according to the following schedule:
- After 3 days from the first download, we send a letter recommending our other products
- On the 10th day we send an email requesting feedback and offering to help if there are any questions
- On the 15th day we remind you that the product can be upgraded to PRO version
- On the 30th day, we again ask for the Feedback and propose to promote the products of our users in our gallery or social networks
- We're sending a final reminder for the 60th day
Marketing strategies that we used to grow
Most of our marketing strategies were to place content in different communities, such as Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News, and Github.
We also paid about $100-200 a couple of times to send out news email campaigns, but this method did not meet our expectations. However, this may only be relevant to our specificity of activities, and in other cases it may be justified.
Then we paid $400 to get our product to the Sidebar.io newsletter, which is part of the list of five best links for designers. This newsletter was very successful for our project: We got about $1,500 in sales revenue.
Then we paid for the package $550 package from eWebDesign. As a result, we got 5,000 users who bought $2,800.
We kept thinking about where else we could find web developers who might be interested in our products, and we realized that hackatons are exactly what we need.
Later, we began to communicate with people who organize hackatons to offer them free licenses for our "premium products". We sponsored about 20 hackatons in different cities around the world.
All developers were happy to get free licenses, which we were glad to: After all, we were able to help people to create good products faster, and they also learned about us, so this cooperation can be called mutually beneficial.
In addition, being represented on some hackatons, we learned a lot about how developers use our products and how we can improve them to make them more convenient for our users.
In March 2015, we finished working with the Agency's contracts and went from the "agency" mode to the "start-up" mode. With some bank savings and sales revenue over the last few months, our team moved to full-time work on our start-up. As we spent more time working on our projects and constantly developing new products, our sources of traffic and revenues grew.
How Our Business Model Works
We realized that the best business model for us is the Freemium model: We create a high-quality freeway that helps web developers create great sites, and then implement PRO versions for this free, which contain more elements, sections, modules and ready-made turnkey pages.
At the moment we have 8 premium products, each of which has its own free plushes. Their prices range from $19 to $599, depending on the license and archival type (HTML, HTML + PSD, HTML + Sketch). Halyava occurs everywhere - in different communities, blogs, newsletters, and social websites - and they control all of our traffic.
Our business model: Create high-quality freebies that help web developers create great sites, and then implement PRO versions for this free, which contain more elements.
The basic idea is that these pluses always appear in the top 10 big communities. Every post that is in the top 10 (depending on how big the community is) brings us from 1,000 to 15,000 target users per day. Imagine how much it would cost if you wanted to run a regular, targeted marketing campaign?
Some examples:
- Paper Kit - 380 votes on Reddit
- Material Kit — 560 votes on Reddit
- Light Bootstrap Dashboard Angular - 210 votes on Reddit
- Material Kit — 180 votes Hacker News (the highest position is 9th: with 14,000 visits to our site in 1 day)
- Material Kit — 860 votes on Product Hunt
Our sources of income
Direct Product Sales
Here we have regular sales, which are made using our website, and make up 24% of the total sales.
Discounts
We noticed that some of our users downloaded all our free products. When I say everything, I literally mean all the products: they shook everything for about 2-3 minutes after they created an account. We also noticed that some of our customers bought all premium products.
Therefore, we decided to test our new product, which gives you access to all our products with huge discounts (more than 60%). This large package was bought about 6-8 times a month. Since prices are $299 (instead of $500) for personal use and $669 (instead of $2127) for a developer license, this is a good source of income and a great help for web designers and agencies that use our products for many projects. This is a win-win option.
Sales Partners
We have created a partner network, and our retailers are very pleased because they receive 50% for themselves from each transaction. For example, one of our most important partners operates within the popular GitHub repository: Bootstrap Material Design (17,000 + stars per GitHub). Currently, partners bring us about 25% of all income.
Organic Search (SEO)
We noticed that we also earn about 22% of our revenue through SEO. Therefore, we decided to invest more in SEO, hired a SEO consultant, who is paid about $500 per month to improve the position of our products in Google search results.
Other income
The rest of our monthly revenue comes from Facebook, Twitter, as well as through mailing.
The biggest lessons we've learned for ourselves
It sounds banal, but owning some really big product is very significant and important.
Many of the founders of the business are struggling to trade, sniffing what people do not want or what they do not need. If your product is shit, then there is not a single marketing strategy - and not a single source of investment - that could keep it alive for a long time.
At the moment, more than 134,000 web developers around the world are using our products. We have users from Microsoft, Ubisoft, Vodafone, Orange, Harvard and Stanford universities and government agencies who download and use our products as various internal tools, we have also sponsored more than 20 global hackathons from 14 countries.
Don't want to be the second Facebook. Try solving the real problem instead.
Every step in our development seemed natural, we did exactly what we needed to do at that time. Looking back at the path of our evolution, we would not change anything. The only thing is, we could definitely do things faster the second time.
We have always created and improved our products on the basis of feedback from our customers, and this is the best way to develop the business. It doesn't matter what you like personally - you need to make sure that you offer a solution to a real problem for a real customer.
Read, read, read.
I've read more books in the last three years than I have in my whole life, and it makes me feel great.
I really think that the secret weapon in the end is the release of truly good products combined with user experience and significant customer support.
The best solution we did was to bring our customers to the forefront and make sure they got a full UI kit that really solves their problems. This was our reference point throughout our journey.
Everything is possible.
We live in a world where anyone can become what they want, as long as they are willing to invest the amount of time they need to achieve that goal. I say time, not money, because we all have time.
At the moment there are no restrictions. You can go anywhere on the planet and contact any person through social media. Today, even the most ordinary person can gain more influence than the president of a small country. Remember at least Instagram accounts with millions of followers. If I - an ordinary guy - was able to build a profitable business in 2.5 years, which is 60 times the minimum monthly income in my country.