congrats! It's always inspiring to see people having success doing what they love. 200 users seems almost laughably smalltime compared to some of the companies who get featured on here, but to me, and I'm sure much of the HN readership, it's a dream; if I can get 200 paying users of my business when I launch I'll be ecstatic!<p>It's really good to see a success story which doesn't focus on "hey wow, I got a million users overnight through sheer luck". It reminds us that 99% of the time, companies are built slowly and surely, not astronomically.
This is actually a significant milestone for any entrepreneur. 200 * $10/mo == enough to pay your rent.<p>$2k/month is the tipping point where you're no longer bleeding money and eating into savings. Sure, you're not getting richer and you might still need to take the odd freelance job for spending money, but it's a great place be, no longer watching your bank account on its slow & steady march toward zero.<p>From here, it's all profit!
Congratulations on the 220 paying customers, that's certainly no small feat. I've been running RateMyStudentRental.com for about 3 years now (well, really I stopped actively working on it about a year ago), and it only reached about half that in revenue.<p>Then, LeadNuke sprang forth as an internal sales tool for RMSR barely a year ago and it's approaching that level already. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't have this kind of success the first time around, because I have a much more realistic perspective now and I can appreciate it that much more.<p>In summary, mad props and respect to you.
Congrats. As other people have said - it's refreshing to see some stories like this rather than just the 'here's my web app I built in 48 hours'. Hopefully it will help people reliase the difference between building something and building a business.<p>At 200, you are close to what I consider to be a major inflexion point. It's often as easier (big separate post that I won't go into the full reasons why) to go from 200-2000 then it is to go from 20-200.<p>Well done and good luck!
congratulations! when barmstrong was down here in Buenos Aires, we talked a lot about universitytutor.com and it's cool to see him just make little tweaks to the site and let it grow slowly and steadily. very inspiring!
I may be assuming too much based on my reading of your post, but it sounds like you could really stand to implement some (or more) A/B testing. The fact that it took two years to reach 200 customers but in only a week or so you've added another 20 customers after making some changes makes me think you should have been making (and testing!) changes like that all along. Either way, congratulations, and best of luck in the future!
Congrats! With 200 paying customers, you now have more than enough information to start tracking churn, CPA, life time value, life time profit, etc. You can turn those 200 paying customers into a lot more by accurately tracking your metrics and building from them.<p>I recommend reading:<p><a href="http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-your-web-app/" rel="nofollow">http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metric...</a>
Not to nitpick but your about page shows that universitytutor.com was started in 2004 but your post shows that you started the site in 2008? Also the dashboard shows decreasing timeline which means you are either losing customers and below the 200 (can't guess the scale) subscribers or there is a simple error somewhere...<p>What are we missing ?