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Ask HN: Out of beta with paying customers. What's next?

19 点作者 vital101超过 9 年前
Hello HN,<p>I&#x27;ve been working hard on a side project for the better part of a year. After a 6 month alpha and a 2 month beta, it exited beta with 160 users and around 20 actual paying customers.<p>The question I have is what do I do next? I&#x27;ve bootstrapped this far just by working on weekends and in the evenings after my day job, but my ultimate goal is to work full-time on this and grow the product and business. Is this enough traction to take to angel investors or am I better off taking the slow road of continued bootstrapping?<p>Some more info that might help you understand the situation better.<p>- Kernl - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kernl.us<p>- Private Wordpress Plugin &amp; Theme Updates, continuous deployment, and purchase code validation<p>- Processing roughly ~200k update pings a day.<p>- Hosting around 175 plugins &amp; themes<p>- Averaging 1-2 new sign ups a day.<p>Any kind of insights, thoughts, critiques, or questions would be helpful.<p>Thanks

3 条评论

kjksf超过 9 年前
You have paying customers - that&#x27;s more than most people achieve, so congrats.<p>You mentioned possibility of angel investing so I&#x27;ll address just that part.<p>Do you expect that, in your best case scenario, this business will ever reach $100M of yearly revenue?<p>If not, then venture capitalists (including angels) will not be interested in investing.<p>Business model of VC is based on 1 out of 10 companies getting really big. If a company has no chance of ever getting really big, VCs have no reason to invest in it.<p>You seem to have what might, at some point, be a small business.<p>The chances you can grow it into a big business is small (on one hand, WordPress market is huge, on the other hand you&#x27;re only solving a small pain for people creating themes and plugin, which is relatively small number of people).<p>So it seems like bootstrapping is the way to go.<p>Given that you have a working product that people are willing to pay for, you probably have a marketing challenge at this point.<p>A small tip: you have a decent website but your copy could use some tweaking to focus on the product and what it does for users. Remove the parts about you (&quot;We&#x27;ve worked hard to make Kernl awesome and affordable.&quot;, &quot;We take development seriously at Kernl.&quot; - nobody cares), superfluous parts (&quot;so give it a whirl.&quot;).
评论 #11106603 未加载
charlesdm超过 9 年前
Am I understanding the business model right?<p>Say I&#x27;m company X, and I develop a custom Wordpress theme, then I can remotely update my theme using Kernl?<p>If that&#x27;s a yes - I think I dare say you&#x27;re undercharging by a factor of 40.<p>If I pay $50 for a wordpress theme (as a user), I&#x27;m probably getting a grand or two worth of value. That&#x27;s why some themes are able to sell 200k units at $50. In your pricing structure, that&#x27;d be 1 theme? Currently, it seems that a company that made $10m in gross revenue from their theme is able to pay just $5 a month.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it make sense to split pricing up between a theme or a plugin? Plugins are usually niche, lower priced and lower value. Themes are generally higher priced, and higher value. How about charging $200 or $500 per month for a theme, and $50-100 for a plugin? Clean and simple.<p>If I&#x27;m a WP company, there&#x27;s no way I can roll that out for &lt; $200 a month in a reliable way.<p>Forget VC - find 50 customers at $200 and take it from there :)
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gburt超过 9 年前
I&#x27;m glad you&#x27;ve got paying customers and absolutely do not wish to interfere with that. This might be a bit of a faux pas, but, it is good for the community: I developed some code to build a service like this back in 2012. It is released GPLv2 if anyone is interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gburtini&#x2F;Private-Plugin-Updater" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gburtini&#x2F;Private-Plugin-Updater</a>