How my friends and I pumped our third-party project to a business with an income of $ 17,000 per month
In 2014, my friends and I decided to create as cool web design tools as possible. We created UI kits , Admin Dashboards , Templates and Plugins .
We always dreamed of making web products useful for the development process, which we could use ourselves to create client sites.
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In terms of revenue, if we disregard Black Friday with its sales (which helped us double the profit of November 2016), we grew to about $ 22,000 in revenue per month. Part of it goes to pay commission on the affiliate program, VAT, supplier tax and other expenses. As a result, we currently have about $ 17,000 in monthly net income.
Today I want to share with you how we created our products and how we have developed this side business a little.
We will touch on the following topics:
What motivated us to start working on Creative Tim, and how we created the original product
We started work as an agency of two people in Romania without any investment from outside. We did not have the means to rent a room for work - even just the tables in the collective office - so we just worked at Starbucks. We barely managed to find money for our daily needs by fulfilling customer orders.
Creative Tim was a third-party project that, as we were sure, would be useful for developers like us. We noticed that when working with clients, we always “reinvent the wheel” and use the same elements for their sites over and over again. Therefore, we wanted to create several standard components, such as modal login / registration windows, calendars, headers, tips and footers.
For several months, we devoted our time to implementing the platform and some free downloads (all this against the background of the main work). At the very beginning, we had no Twitter followers, no Facebook fans, no email subscribers. We posted a lot of information about our free offers on the forums for designers and used the “tackle to web developers on Twitter” technique to let people know and start sharing information about our products.
How we attracted / got the first users
First of all, no one really understood what we want. They did not understand the full value of our ideas and what we can offer them for the development of their business. We decided that it would be better to create a more comprehensive product that could help people understand what we are doing.
We launched Get Shit Done Kit , a UI-kit based on Bootstrap . We covered this event on the Designer News website, which made the product more or less famous. We received 11,000 users from this resource, which was a great support for our business.
Two weeks later, our startup appeared on Product Hunt . This brought us more than 5,000 users. After that, the situation became stable: we moved from the point of “0 users per week” to constant 2-3 thousand in the same period of time.
After another couple of months, inspired by the success of our free product, the Get Shit Done Kit, we released Get Shit Done Kit PRO - a premium version of GSDK with a large number of components and turnkey websites.
At the beginning we got 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 gallery for showing websites created with Bootstrap. This was another impetus for the development of our business. Since everyone who visited the gallery for inspiration, already knew what Bootstrap was or already worked with it, so they became an ideal target audience for our business.
Later, we discovered that the receipt of traffic to the site is not enough to build long-term relationships with our users, and most of them forgot about our existence after the first interaction. We did some research and found out that most marketers have probably known for a long time: people forget things,
Therefore, we have implemented a system of email reminders, following the rules of the forgetting curve .
We wanted to remind our users that we exist and offer useful tools for working on their projects or projects of their clients.
At the moment we send letters on the following schedule:
The marketing strategies we used to grow.
Most of our marketing strategies came down to content placement in various communities, such as Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News and Github. Here are some of the important subreddits that work well for our business:
/ r / web_design , / html5 , / r / frontend and / r / webdev .
We also paid about $ 100-200 a couple of times to send out email news campaigns. And although the investments turned out to be quite correlated with the amount spent, this method did not meet our expectations. However, perhaps this concerns only our specific activities, and in other cases it may be justified.
Then we paid $ 400 to get Shit Done Kit PRO in the Sidebar.io newsletter, as part of a list of the top five links for designers made by Sacha Grief. This newsletter was very successful for our project: we received about $ 1,500 profit from sales.
Then we paid for the “Review and Mailing” package (package $ 550) from eWebDesign . As a result, we received 5,000 users who made purchases for $ 2,800.
We continued to think about where else we could find web developers who might be interested in our products, and realized that hackathons are exactly what we need.
Subsequently, we began to communicate with people who organize hackathons in order to offer them free licenses for our “premium products”. We have sponsored about 20 hackathons in different cities around the world: you can find a list of them here .
All developers were happy to get free licenses, which we were happy about: we could help people create good products faster, and besides, they learned about us, so this cooperation can be called mutually beneficial.
In addition, being presented on some hackathons, we learned a lot of information 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 agency contracts and switched from the “agency” mode to the “start-up” mode. With some savings in the bank and sales revenue over the past few months, our team has switched to full-time work on our startup. Since we spent more time working on our projects and were constantly developing new products, our sources of traffic and revenue grew.
How our business model works
We realized that the best business model for Creative Tim is the Freemium model: we create high-quality freebies that help web developers create great websites, and then implement the PRO version for this freebies that contain more elements, sections, modules and ready-made pages "Full construction".
At the moment we have 8 premium products, each of which has its own free buns. Their prices range from $ 19 to $ 599, depending on the license and archive type (HTML, HTML + PSD, HTML + Sketch). Freebies are everywhere - in various communities, blogs, newsletters and social websites - and they manage 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 freebie that contain more elements.
The basic idea is that these buns always appear in the top 10 large communities. Each post that is in the top 10 (depending on how big the community is) brings us between 1,000 and 15,000 target users per day. Imagine how much it would cost if you wanted to conduct a regular targeted marketing campaign?
Some examples are:
Our sources of income
Direct sales of products
Here we have regular sales that are made through our website, and constitute 24% of the total sales. Except Big Bundle .
Big bundle
What is the Big Bundle, and how did we create it? We noticed that some of our users downloaded all of 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 called “Big Bundle”, which gives you access to all our products with huge discounts (over 60%). This large package was bought about 6-8 times a month. Since the Big Bundle prices are $ 299 (instead of $ 500) for personal use and $ 669 (instead of $ 2,127) for a developer license, this is a good source of revenue and a great help for web designers and agencies that use our products for many projects. This is a win-win.
Sales partners
We have created an affiliate network, and our distributors are very satisfied, because they receive 50% for themselves from each transaction. For example, one of our most important partners operates within the framework of the popular GitHub repository: Bootstrap Material Design (17,000+ stars on GitHub). Currently, partners bring us about 25% of total revenue.
Organic Search (SEO)
We noticed that we also get about 22% of our revenue through SEO. Therefore, we decided to invest more in SEO, hired an SEO consultant who is paying about $ 500 a month to improve the position of our products in Google search results.
Other income
The rest of our monthly income comes from Facebook, Twitter, and also via email. Here's how our income evolved over time along with some historically significant moments, so you can trace how it grew in a few months:
But cash expenses that we make:
The biggest lessons we have learned for ourselves
It sounds trite, but owning some really big product is very significant and important.
Many of the founders of the business are struggling to trade, vtyuhivaya what people do not want or that they do not need. If your product is crap, then there is no marketing strategy - and no source of investment - that could keep it alive for long.
At the moment, more than 134,000 web developers around the world use our products. We have users from Microsoft, Ubisoft, Vodafone, Orange, Harvard and Stanford universities and government agencies that download and use our products as various internal tools, we also sponsored over 20 global hackathons from 14 countries.
Do not strive to become the second Facebook. Try solving a real problem instead.
Every step in our development seemed natural, we did exactly what had to be done at that time. Looking back at the path of our evolution, we would not change anything. The only thing we could definitely do is get faster the second time.
We have always created and improved our products based on feedback from our customers, and this is the best way to develop a business. It doesn't matter what you personally like - you need to make sure that you offer a solution to a real problem for a real customer.
Read, read, read.
Over the past three years, I have read more books than in my entire life, and this makes me feel great.
Here are some of my favorite books that I recommend to everyone:
I really think that the secret weapon in the final analysis is the release of truly good products combined with user experience and significant customer support.
The best solution we did was to put our customers in the forefront and make sure they got the complete UI kit / Dashboard, which would really solve their problems. This has been our guideline throughout our journey.
Everything is possible.
We live in a world where anyone can become who he wants, as long as he is willing to invest the amount of time that is needed to achieve this goal. I say time, not money, because we all have time. I would like to recommend two books in which exactly this is said: “Karaoke Capitalism. Management for Humanity ”by Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström and “ From Zero to One: How to create a startup that will change the future ”by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal).
At the moment there are no restrictions. You can go to any place on the planet and connect with any person through social media. Today, even the most ordinary person can achieve more influence than the president of a small country. Think of Instagram accounts with millions of subscribers. If I am a regular guy from Romania, I was able to build a profitable business in 2.5 years, which is 60 times the minimum monthly income in my country.
We always dreamed of making web products useful for the development process, which we could use ourselves to create client sites.
')
In terms of revenue, if we disregard Black Friday with its sales (which helped us double the profit of November 2016), we grew to about $ 22,000 in revenue per month. Part of it goes to pay commission on the affiliate program, VAT, supplier tax and other expenses. As a result, we currently have about $ 17,000 in monthly net income.
Today I want to share with you how we created our products and how we have developed this side business a little.
We will touch on the following topics:
- What motivated us to start working on our startup, Creative Tim , and how we created our original product;
- How we got our first customers;
- The marketing strategies we used to grow;
- How our business models work;
- The secrets of our sources of income;
- The most important lessons we have learned.
What motivated us to start working on Creative Tim, and how we created the original product
We started work as an agency of two people in Romania without any investment from outside. We did not have the means to rent a room for work - even just the tables in the collective office - so we just worked at Starbucks. We barely managed to find money for our daily needs by fulfilling customer orders.
Creative Tim was a third-party project that, as we were sure, would be useful for developers like us. We noticed that when working with clients, we always “reinvent the wheel” and use the same elements for their sites over and over again. Therefore, we wanted to create several standard components, such as modal login / registration windows, calendars, headers, tips and footers.
For several months, we devoted our time to implementing the platform and some free downloads (all this against the background of the main work). At the very beginning, we had no Twitter followers, no Facebook fans, no email subscribers. We posted a lot of information about our free offers on the forums for designers and used the “tackle to web developers on Twitter” technique to let people know and start sharing information about our products.
How we attracted / got the first users
First of all, no one really understood what we want. They did not understand the full value of our ideas and what we can offer them for the development of their business. We decided that it would be better to create a more comprehensive product that could help people understand what we are doing.
We launched Get Shit Done Kit , a UI-kit based on Bootstrap . We covered this event on the Designer News website, which made the product more or less famous. We received 11,000 users from this resource, which was a great support for our business.
Two weeks later, our startup appeared on Product Hunt . This brought us more than 5,000 users. After that, the situation became stable: we moved from the point of “0 users per week” to constant 2-3 thousand in the same period of time.
After another couple of months, inspired by the success of our free product, the Get Shit Done Kit, we released Get Shit Done Kit PRO - a premium version of GSDK with a large number of components and turnkey websites.
At the beginning we got 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 gallery for showing websites created with Bootstrap. This was another impetus for the development of our business. Since everyone who visited the gallery for inspiration, already knew what Bootstrap was or already worked with it, so they became an ideal target audience for our business.
Later, we discovered that the receipt of traffic to the site is not enough to build long-term relationships with our users, and most of them forgot about our existence after the first interaction. We did some research and found out that most marketers have probably known for a long time: people forget things,
of which they are not reminded.
We recently published a translation of an article on interval memory , which was created to help keep important information in your memory.
Therefore, we have implemented a system of email reminders, following the rules of the forgetting curve .
We wanted to remind our users that we exist and offer useful tools for working on their projects or projects of their clients.
At the moment we send letters on the following schedule:
- After 3 days since the first download, we send an email with a recommendation of our other products;
- On the 10th day we send an email with a request for feedback and a suggestion to help if you have questions;
- On the 15th day, we remind you that the product can be upgraded to the PRO version;
- On the 30th day, we are again asking for feedback and with a suggestion to promote the products of our users in our gallery or social networks;
- We send the final reminder on the 60th day.
The marketing strategies we used to grow.
Most of our marketing strategies came down to content placement in various communities, such as Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News and Github. Here are some of the important subreddits that work well for our business:
/ r / web_design , / html5 , / r / frontend and / r / webdev .
We also paid about $ 100-200 a couple of times to send out email news campaigns. And although the investments turned out to be quite correlated with the amount spent, this method did not meet our expectations. However, perhaps this concerns only our specific activities, and in other cases it may be justified.
Then we paid $ 400 to get Shit Done Kit PRO in the Sidebar.io newsletter, as part of a list of the top five links for designers made by Sacha Grief. This newsletter was very successful for our project: we received about $ 1,500 profit from sales.
Then we paid for the “Review and Mailing” package (package $ 550) from eWebDesign . As a result, we received 5,000 users who made purchases for $ 2,800.
We continued to think about where else we could find web developers who might be interested in our products, and realized that hackathons are exactly what we need.
Subsequently, we began to communicate with people who organize hackathons in order to offer them free licenses for our “premium products”. We have sponsored about 20 hackathons in different cities around the world: you can find a list of them here .
All developers were happy to get free licenses, which we were happy about: we could help people create good products faster, and besides, they learned about us, so this cooperation can be called mutually beneficial.
In addition, being presented on some hackathons, we learned a lot of information 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 agency contracts and switched from the “agency” mode to the “start-up” mode. With some savings in the bank and sales revenue over the past few months, our team has switched to full-time work on our startup. Since we spent more time working on our projects and were constantly developing new products, our sources of traffic and revenue grew.
How our business model works
We realized that the best business model for Creative Tim is the Freemium model: we create high-quality freebies that help web developers create great websites, and then implement the PRO version for this freebies that contain more elements, sections, modules and ready-made pages "Full construction".
At the moment we have 8 premium products, each of which has its own free buns. Their prices range from $ 19 to $ 599, depending on the license and archive type (HTML, HTML + PSD, HTML + Sketch). Freebies are everywhere - in various communities, blogs, newsletters and social websites - and they manage 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 freebie that contain more elements.
The basic idea is that these buns always appear in the top 10 large communities. Each post that is in the top 10 (depending on how big the community is) brings us between 1,000 and 15,000 target users per day. Imagine how much it would cost if you wanted to conduct a regular targeted marketing campaign?
Some examples are:
- 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 most peak position - 9th place: with 14,000 transitions to our site in 1 day)
- Material Kit - 860 votes on Product Hunt
Our sources of income
Direct sales of products
Here we have regular sales that are made through our website, and constitute 24% of the total sales. Except Big Bundle .
Big bundle
What is the Big Bundle, and how did we create it? We noticed that some of our users downloaded all of 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 called “Big Bundle”, which gives you access to all our products with huge discounts (over 60%). This large package was bought about 6-8 times a month. Since the Big Bundle prices are $ 299 (instead of $ 500) for personal use and $ 669 (instead of $ 2,127) for a developer license, this is a good source of revenue and a great help for web designers and agencies that use our products for many projects. This is a win-win.
Sales partners
We have created an affiliate network, and our distributors are very satisfied, because they receive 50% for themselves from each transaction. For example, one of our most important partners operates within the framework of the popular GitHub repository: Bootstrap Material Design (17,000+ stars on GitHub). Currently, partners bring us about 25% of total revenue.
Organic Search (SEO)
We noticed that we also get about 22% of our revenue through SEO. Therefore, we decided to invest more in SEO, hired an SEO consultant who is paying about $ 500 a month to improve the position of our products in Google search results.
Other income
The rest of our monthly income comes from Facebook, Twitter, and also via email. Here's how our income evolved over time along with some historically significant moments, so you can trace how it grew in a few months:
But cash expenses that we make:
The biggest lessons we have learned for ourselves
It sounds trite, but owning some really big product is very significant and important.
Many of the founders of the business are struggling to trade, vtyuhivaya what people do not want or that they do not need. If your product is crap, then there is no marketing strategy - and no source of investment - that could keep it alive for long.
At the moment, more than 134,000 web developers around the world use our products. We have users from Microsoft, Ubisoft, Vodafone, Orange, Harvard and Stanford universities and government agencies that download and use our products as various internal tools, we also sponsored over 20 global hackathons from 14 countries.
Do not strive to become the second Facebook. Try solving a real problem instead.
Every step in our development seemed natural, we did exactly what had to be done at that time. Looking back at the path of our evolution, we would not change anything. The only thing we could definitely do is get faster the second time.
We have always created and improved our products based on feedback from our customers, and this is the best way to develop a business. It doesn't matter what you personally like - you need to make sure that you offer a solution to a real problem for a real customer.
Read, read, read.
Over the past three years, I have read more books than in my entire life, and this makes me feel great.
Here are some of my favorite books that I recommend to everyone:
- How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie;
- From zero to one: How to create a startup that will change the future - Peter Thiel;
- It will not be easy. How to build a business when there are more questions than answers - Ben Horowitz;
- The law of success is Napoleon Hill ;
- Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill;
- From good to better - Jim Collins;
- Business from scratch - Eric Rees;
- Charisma. How to influence, persuade and inspire - Olivia Fox Kabain;
- Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster - Alistair Kroll.
I really think that the secret weapon in the final analysis is the release of truly good products combined with user experience and significant customer support.
The best solution we did was to put our customers in the forefront and make sure they got the complete UI kit / Dashboard, which would really solve their problems. This has been our guideline throughout our journey.
Everything is possible.
We live in a world where anyone can become who he wants, as long as he is willing to invest the amount of time that is needed to achieve this goal. I say time, not money, because we all have time. I would like to recommend two books in which exactly this is said: “Karaoke Capitalism. Management for Humanity ”by Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström and “ From Zero to One: How to create a startup that will change the future ”by Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal).
At the moment there are no restrictions. You can go to any place on the planet and connect with any person through social media. Today, even the most ordinary person can achieve more influence than the president of a small country. Think of Instagram accounts with millions of subscribers. If I am a regular guy from Romania, I was able to build a profitable business in 2.5 years, which is 60 times the minimum monthly income in my country.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/323060/
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