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Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

119 pointsby dennywangover 1 year ago
Hi friends,<p>A year ago, I released Wins 1.0 to the world, It&#x27;s a Window manager App for macOS and I got my first batch users back then, which gave me a huge encouragement and I&#x27;m very grateful here.<p>Today, one year later, I want to be open and transparent about the current development status and revenue of Wins to the lovely community, to you<p># About Revenue In total, I have sold 1,612 licenses, with 701 through the Wins official website and 911 through other channels.<p>Yes, currently, Wins has fewer than 2,000 users<p>From all these sales, my total income is $9,485 over the course of one year and three months, it&#x27;s not too much.<p>However, Wins has a high number of active users. In the past seven days, there have been over 1,000 users, and in the last 28 days, approximately 2,000 people have used Wins.<p>I feel incredibly honored that Wins has been able to help you, and I am sincerely grateful for your support in my independent development journey.<p># About Development Status During the year, I received a lot of feedback and suggestions, coupled with my understanding of Apple&#x27;s product philosophy, I want to make something wonderful to bring to the macOS X, so I&#x27;ve added some features that I think are cool in the past year,such as :<p>1. Dock Window Preview. Now you can directly preview all windows of an app you opened<p>2. Shake window to hide other windows. Drag a window, give it a shake, and all other windows will be hidden<p>3. Hide other windows with shortcut key You can also achieve it using keyboard shortcuts<p>4. Move to another display. Quickly move the window to another monitor<p>5. Hide All Windows. One shortcut to hide all windows, and the world becomes clean<p># In the end I&#x27;m not a famous developer, I don&#x27;t have much of audiences, I don&#x27;t know how to market or promote, I just an Apple fan who loves the macOS.<p>it wasn&#x27;t an easy year for Wins, But luckily it&#x27;s alive. I&#x27;m alive haha<p>I currently have a job, but initially, I thought Wins could sustain itself through independent development. However, I later realized that the timing might not be right yet. But I believe that as long as I continue to polish Wins and make it better, it will be able to independently support me in continuously developing new features.<p>Finally, I&#x27;d like to share my app here with those who might need it and let you know that it has a 50% discount during Black Friday<p>If you like it and want to support independent development(thanks a lot), or if you haven&#x27;t tried Wins yet, I hope you give it a try.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wins.cool<p>ps. I hope my sharing doesn&#x27;t disrupt this community.

11 comments

DarrenDevover 1 year ago
As a solo developer who has built B2C software in the past, 1600 sales in your first year is outstanding.<p>But I have to say your pricing is terrible - from all perspectives.<p>For you, unless you sell in the hundreds of thousands (which I&#x27;ve never heard of for B2C software) it&#x27;s unlikely to ever be a day job replacement.<p>For the consumer, before they even decide to try your software you&#x27;re telling them it has the lifetime value of a cup of coffee and a donut.<p>Price is one of the things consumers look at to determine something&#x27;s value. You&#x27;ve priced your product so cheaply and many will view your product in the same way.<p>It&#x27;s not much harder to sell a $99 product as it is to sell a $9 product to consumers. And the users you get at the higher price point will be better users.<p>But that 1600 user sales figure - for a one man shop in year one - is fantastic.<p>What would your yearly profits have been if your price was $49 or $79 or more?
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camillomillerover 1 year ago
Cool, I might give it a try considering that Moom is having issues with Sonoma on my MBP m3 :&#x2F;<p>I think your pricing is great but I would personally do a different tier system. Smaller yearly cost for yearly subscriptions for future updates (6,99 maybe) plus lifetime for a higher price.<p>I think lifetime value at that price is unsustainable for you if you have to give support and updates with no extra income coming from it. If you consider lifetime as a 5x yearly you’re giving yourself a good time window to make the product grow sustainably.
max_over 1 year ago
Interesting. Congratulations on your achievements.<p>I was wondering, what channel did you use to initially get the 2,000 customers?<p>Did you post in in some forums or buy Ads of some form AdSense, Facebook or Twitter.
jefozabussover 1 year ago
I kind of find it sad that you still need an app in 2023 for these features as most of these are built into Win10 for like 8 years now.
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rgrmrtsover 1 year ago
Wins looks really good, and congratulations on having sold so many licenses! This is just my opinion, but I think you’ve priced too low. It’s an interesting balance and I don’t know the magic formula to pricing but before I looked at the price I looked at the features and my first guess was $30 and was surprised to see $6.99.
serjesterover 1 year ago
I would change your licensing to be something along the lines of 1 year of free updates, pay again for future updates (seems like the standard pricing model in the space if you&#x27;re going to be adding more features). This small tweak can massively swing your total earnings over a couple years.<p>Other people have mentioned pricing and $12 doesn&#x27;t seem unreasonably low. Especially early on when you&#x27;re building word of mouth. Long term maybe you could double it.<p>Opinionated Technical Notes:<p>Shake to hide, I wish it only acted on one screen (or a setting to enable that).<p>I have my dock setup vertically, it&#x27;d be nice if the previews were also arranged vertically.<p>Love that this just exists in my settings instead of adding a millionth app to my top nav.<p>Overall great work, congrats on the progress. It&#x27;s exciting to build something people actually find useful and more importantly pay for. You just got yourself another customer.
bobaoboeover 1 year ago
Do you think it might do better in a group of similar Mac Mod products, like Steam?<p>Is there a way to recruit another kind of user or customer? Who are they and why do they need Wins?<p>Any word on the need for similar managers for all UNIX systems? Have you tried working on any Linux OS with your current product? I know this is for OSX but a ton of users of Linux systems might purchase the product as CSE undergrads? Educational software?
dlachausseover 1 year ago
Congratulations on your success so far, I hope you have an even better 2024!<p>As an aspiring Apple ecosystem developer myself (I haven&#x27;t released anything so far, but I am working on learning SwiftUI and the related Apple technologies), I have a couple questions...<p>How have you marketed this so far? Word of mouth, social media, ads?<p>What shopping platform powers your website and what are the other channels that you have used in addition to the official website?<p>How are you tracking the usage data for your software?
steemcb_irlover 1 year ago
Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue.
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JCharanteover 1 year ago
Are you selling on the mac store?
udev4096over 1 year ago
Looks pretty cool!