Hello HN friends!<p>Today is a special day. My solo side project has hit 100K in sales, which is absolutely insane. When I started this thing, I never thought this would happen.<p>Monetizing an open-source project is very difficult, so I decided to share my personal journey and lessons learned.<p>This is a visual timeline showing all the lessons learned from $0 to $100k in one year.<p>I hope this can be helpful and inspire your own journey :)<p>Let me know if you have any questions! I'm here to answer every single one of them.
I commend you for getting people to pay for a color theme - something that people think of as a freebie.<p>I would just think that no one would ever pay for this and not even try. You tried and you are succeeding. There's a lesson in that.
I checked out the theme itself, and immediately a message showed up saying that it detected my country and offered me a discount code to make sure that the theme is still affordable for my country.<p>It's simple things like this that probably help a side project like this get to where it is, great job!
I watched Brandon Li's video yesterday on how to turn a shot into a scene. I feel like it strangely applies to marketing for solo developers. You packaged your disperse config files into a cohesive product, with a unified look, and your website even has an emotional response to it.<p>Here's his insight.<p>How to turn a SHOT into a SCENE - Travel Video Storytelling<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCTjxk33juo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCTjxk33juo</a>
> I never had time to work on my open source projects, but now that I was monetizing, I was able to spend more time doing something I love.<p>That's pretty cool, but also only is true because he appears to love creating marketing pages, blogging, writing a book, creating themes for applications he doesn't use himself, etc.<p>I'm happy that he (/you, I see you're reading along Zeno - thanks for sharing), but it's not exactly what I'd have in mind for my "working on open source" daydream :)
I am truly amazed and impressed with how many different software you bothered to create a consistent design language for with this theme.<p>From Ableton, one of my favorite DAWs to Blender, one of my favorite tools for modeling.<p>Like seriously, WELL DONE, friend. I'm happily making my way to checkout right now, thanks for sharing this with us
The refund part hits close to home. I've experience this too. What were some of the reasons for the refunds? I think theres so much to learn there. Some people are just jerks (they don't read what they're buying, and then blame you), but some people just didn't get what they expected due to some miscommunication, or product experience issue. I'd love to read more about this from this project!
From reading the name of the project I wouldn‘t have guessed it‘s a color scheme for a lot of apps.
I wouldn‘t even thought of that as a viable market. Congratulations to you. This is amazing.<p>I think the most valuable lesson here is, that there is a market for a lot more things than we would have thought a few years/decades back. Kind of how Spotify enable niche band to have successes outside the mainstream, just by allowing people to listen to every fringe corner of the musical ecosystem.
Are you generating the configs for all these apps? Having a method of turning a universal theme spec into specific app configs might be worth more than the theme itself.
Congrats. Instead of thinking in the line of "Wow $99 for a config file with colors and fonts". My reaction is: So there is a premium market for this things. Good.
Congrats to the OP! One lesson in these graphs that is very important to internalize is how spiky they are. When you're small, you'll make most of your money on a few special days, based on events that might be out of your control.<p>Given that dynamic, it can be hard to distinguish cause from effect, let alone layer on things like A/B tests or other statistical analysis that might hold for things at bigger scale.
Question.<p>In this tweet [1] you mentioned that Dracula PRO was in the works for 7 years.<p>1. Would it possible to start monetizing the product earlier?<p>2. If yes, how much earlier in the case of Dracula PRO?<p>While $100k looks like an impressive number, in the grand scheme of things, it's just 14k/year, which is about $1150/month, which equates to an hourly wage of $6,50. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you were to maximize revenue?<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1227622330731335686" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1227622330731335686</a>
An amazing body of work.
I’m beyond impressed. Thoughtful, well designed, and well researched.
I never liked the Dracula theme much, but I’m going to snag this just to support great stuff being put out into the world.
Just want to say I am a very happy customer! Used the regular free versions for a long time and bought Pro the day I heard about it, in order to "give something back" both the free and pro versions are wonderful products that makes my work so much more pleasant so thank you.<p>I like to consider myself a bit of an amateur asthete, and I see tangible value in this kind of stuff so I have no problem spending a little bit of money to make my work day more pleasant. It's just as important to me to enjoy what I'm looking at, as much as it is to have a useful tool.
>> I believe in Purchasing Parity Power, and I want to make this affordable.<p>Saw this on clicking the pro link. Really appreciate the gesture. Wish more products/creators thought this way :)
Congratulations on your achievements. Very nice idea and good website.<p>Having said that I noticed on your demo that the difference between selected text and non selected one it negligible. It is very unergonomic I would say. Funny thing I did notice the same trend on practically all dark schemes from other offerings. Themes for VS code for example. Curious why is that as the inability to clearly emphasize selected text would make my get rid of said theme immediately.
Dracula is a treasure! I like light themes better but I’ve been using dracula since I can have a consistent theme across emacs, kitty, and firefox without having to figure out their individual configs. I’ve started to use Dracula themes as reference designs, it covers so many configs.
Congrats! Really minor observation noticed when looking at your site, image for Aseprite is broken - <a href="https://draculatheme.com/aseprite" rel="nofollow">https://draculatheme.com/aseprite</a>
I remember my first refund. It actually mattered much more to me than the first sale.<p>Congratulations on this. You’re doing a stellar job on all of this - your hard work is paying off.
Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .