PageBlox (https://www.pageblox.com/) earns about $300 a month and is growing steadily... The hardest part has been SEO and marketing, something I am still quite new at.
I created a simple SaaS app, https://www.pageblox.com/ that makes $300 dollars a month. I think that in a year or slightly more it could break a thousand a month if I market aggressively. I think I was able to pull it off by targeting a very specific problem and its accompanying keyword phrase: "css layout generator". Over-simplifying, the steps are: 1. find a problem that people and have and its niche, low competition keyword that get about 5000-8000 searches a month 2. build a web based app that solves that problem 3. grow your traffic 4. a/b test and iterate
Have you thought about charging $3 / month, or maybe $12 per year for this instead of a one-time purchase?
If you're saving / hosting the layouts, in which users can come back and create new ones or alter old ones, it jives nicely with charging on a recurring basis.
Throw in another service or two on top of what you already do, and the value proposition just keeps going up.
If you've got it working well, there are (smallish) hosting companies that might be interested in white labeling it, assuming it can support templating as well.
Can anyone explain European rubber stamp-fetishism? Has there ever been a study done showing that rubber stamping practically everything (20 euro purchase at an electronics store) is effective in preventing forging of documents? To an outsider visiting continental Europe the practice looks redundant and almost comical.
- A bloated public sector that is protective of it's jobs and represents a large percentage of the electorate (also very motivated to go on a massive strike if you even think about reducing the complexity of the system)
- An aversion towards real capitalism. Europe is still pretty much a class system. It's ok to want to have a better education and job than your parents, but wanting to do something more spectacular is almost equated with "being up to no good"
- You cannot be fired from a public sector job, so you have absolutely no incentive to care (some people still do, but they're not the norm)
It's just a way of identifying that a document is 'officially' from the company.
Ideally you just lock up the stamp in a drawer. You can probably forge it just as easily as others, but at least with the stamp multiple people can "sign" for the company. In my experience it was more useful than anything.
also: it's not euro-only. Go to Japan for a laugh if you want.
Getting the stamp on the 20 euro electronics purchase is in the customer's best interest as it is a proof that he purchased the item there and so can get warranty service from the seller (I don't know if "warranty" is the correct term here, in German we have two words for two concepts that wikipedia both links to the English "warranty" and that most people confuse anyway: "Garantie" (cognate to "warranty") which is a voluntary service offered by the producer, and "Gewährleistung", which is a legally mandated service by the seller. The stamp documents your right to get "Gewährleistung" from the seller who puts his stamp on your receipt, and usually the producer's "Garantie" requires that stamp, too).
It is more difficult to forge a stamped receipt, true. As to whether it proves that you purchased the item is debatable because both a receipt and a stamped receipt can be easily forged. The question is: is it necessary? Tally up all the man-hours a country spends stamping receipts. Could that time be put to better use? North America seems to function fine without them. Perhaps we've come to realize them as redundant - or are we too gullible to not demand rubber stamped receipts in the first place?
I was working on my niche web app, http://www.pageblox.com for many months and was at times (when feeling overly optimistic) extremely delusional about how much I would make when I turned on payments. The truth is, you have _no idea_ what your conversion rates will be until you actually turn on payment processing. I thought it would be around 2% but in fact was less than .1%
Even though I only made $95 my first month (a lot less then what I had hoped) I now have a clear idea of where I stand and what needs to be improved and tweaked. It'll be a slow and at times painful process (SEO, A/B testing, blog posts, re-design, features) to make the profitability worth all the hours put in so far...
We have an extensive JavaScript codebase at the large corporation I work at and by simply enforcing the use of ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode and verifying with JSLint we are able to catch most potential issues but then again, nobody there is writing large systems in JavaScript, only flourishes of browser-side interactivity...
Seems like an attempt to drive traffic to the Jelastic site through content farming (blog posts targeting keywords, etc.). As least they could use authors who know what they are writing about. Doesn't cast Jelastic in a good light...
Impressive, but be very careful going up against established players such as Balsamiq because you will have a difficult time competing. I am not sure if you want to one day make this a paid app, but if you do, think about developing and marketing it to the needs of a specific niche. Remember, there are thousands of similar "projects" and clones of existing software that died a very slow and painful death because they were not profitable enough to continue developing.
Thanks for taking the time to play with Mocktails. You are correct in that it's difficult to compete in this space. As of now, we are thinking of having our marketing emphasize our strengths such as publishing and built in version control.
To be quite fair though, the day where we have to worry about marketing is quite far away. For now, we just have to buckle down and keep building the product.
