Original link: https://lutaonan.com/blog/my-extension-sold-1k-yuan/
Writing this article is the third day since my plug-in Notepal was released. So far, dozens of paid users have been harvested. In just a few days, more than 5,000 WeChat reading notes have been synchronized to Readwise, flomo or Obsidian.
(There is no data on the 28th because there was an accident that day and the log did not come in.)
I am very grateful that you who clicked on this article did not choose to ignore it because 1,000 yuan is a small amount. This amount is indeed very small. It is not even as much as many programmers who sit in the office for a day, but the meaning of “someone is willing to buy” is far more The size of the number is more meaningful to me now, and I have learned a lot during the whole process of development and launch, and I have also practiced a lot of books I read about start a business. After this process, I re-read these books, and my experience is more profound, so I really want to share with you what I have learned and some of the methodologies I have adopted in this article.
initial demand
Almost half a year ago, I wanted to synchronize my WeChat reading notes to the note software Readwise , so I wrote a very simple website (the predecessor of Notepal), which can parse the notes copied from the WeChat reading app into a custom format. It can also be parsed into a csv format that Readwise can implement.
Although this method is still a bit cumbersome, and the csv format is actually very unstable, it is easy to cause the import to fail due to some characters in the notes, but before that, I think that basically no one can do this “automatically”.
I posted it to V2EX, wrote a little introduction, and the code is open source.
However, at that time, I vaguely felt that someone would be willing to pay for this demand, because I believe that I am definitely not the only common user of WeChat Reading and Readwise who has this demand. But I was just reading the book The minimalist entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia (I will mention this book many times in the following content), and there was a point of view that touched me a lot——start with community, starting a business from a community .
What do you mean, if you think you can solve a need that many people have, the first thing to do is not to rush to make software and products, but to find this group of people and help them in this group.
So when I vaguely thought that I could solve the needs of some people and they might pay for it, I did something that had nothing to do with development at all—build a user group and put it on the website. People who need it gather first, and one day when I make this tool more stable, there will be a chance to sell it.
A total of more than 50 people joined the group later, and these people didn’t really talk much. Some people raised some usage problems, and then the group basically died.
Most of the problems reported by people are csv problems. This problem is difficult to solve. I think that if you want to be stable, you must get the notes in json format by calling the WeChat reading interface, and then synchronize them to readwise through the API. So I I have always wanted to use a browser plug-in to solve this requirement. I also mentioned “I am going to write a browser plug-in” in the group, but no one responded.
So I put the development of plug-ins on hold.
turning point, cold start
It has been half a year since the release of this tool, and suddenly a tweeter sent a tweet, expressing his gratitude to me for this tool:
This is not enough to surprise me, what surprised me the most is the data of this tweet: 113 retweets, 6 quotes, 373 likes, 237 bookmarks.
This gave me the motivation to write the plug-in I wanted to implement. I decided to make an MVP quickly, as long as the books with notes are displayed on the WeChat reading page, and the notes are synchronized with Readwsie API with one click, and finally the synchronization is displayed. To the notes after Readwise.
Why do you want to do this? Because I need to do a “semi-cold start”, I know that the workload of polishing the plug-in until it can be launched and charged is not small, but I need to make a smooth video to show this idea and it is a real implementation. Throw this little rock out and see how big a splash it can cause.
After posting the video, there were quite a few replies:
At this time, I decided to make a product that is really worth buying by these people, solve their needs, and make them willingly pay for the problems and experience that the product solves.
From cold start to official launch
Before writing a formal product, I asked myself a question, to what extent can I release the first version. The answer in my mind is this:
- In order to go online as soon as possible, only the function of synchronizing to Readwise
- You will start charging when you go online day one, and you can provide a free trial, but there must be a charging entrance
- The experience must be the most direct – fill in the API token -> book selection -> synchronization -> view the notes synchronized to Readwise, all in one go
- To record some non-privacy logs, such as the amount of synced notes, error logs
release as soon as possible
The first point is that many people will definitely think that if Readwise is so small, and those who use WeChat to read books and Readwise at the same time are even smaller, will too few people use it. This is a correct judgment, but I think my top priority is to ship out the product to solve the needs of less than 10 people I can actually see, to see if I can make money from such a niche (niche) circle, and then Talk about expanding the number of users (and I will soon support flomo and obsidian in later versions).
Day One charges
The second point, some people will say, can such a niche demand really make money? In my opinion, yes, but it depends on whether you want to make big money or small money. It is difficult to make big money for niche needs, but the smaller the crowd, the more willing to pay. I already have expectations for this product – I don’t think this is a product that will make a lot of money. My goal for this product is: to solve the needs of a small number of people and make them pay for the value provided by the product.
Why make money? In fact, I can release it for free, and I can’t rely on this product for a living. But unlike me many years ago, I now think that “users pay for your product” is the most useful way to verify the value of your product, whether it is cheap or expensive, even if it is 1 yuan, it is completely different from free meaning. Just like playing Texas Hold’em, playing with your real money is completely different from playing with game money .
Since there is a fee, there are two questions: one is how much to charge, and the other is how to charge.
Regarding the question of how much to charge, first of all, there are two options, one-time buyout and subscription system. But for a product like this, I don’t think any reasonable person would think it is suitable for a subscription system. Who would subscribe to a plugin for a low frequency need?
If it is a buyout, how much is the right amount? I didn’t do any research, so I just thought that 30 yuan is a price that is neither high nor low, and it is a one-time fee. If the user finds it easy to use, there is a relatively high probability of choosing to buy it.
The most difficult problem is actually how to charge, especially this product is aimed at domestic users. As we all know, the access threshold of payment channels in China is quite high. It may take a few days to make this plug-in, but it will take several weeks to access the charging channel. This is unacceptable. As Paul Garahm said: Do things that don’t scale .
I thought about it for a long time and came up with a solution. This is also inspired by Sahil Lavingia in the book The minimalist entrepreneur. He said that the first version of Gumroad was that he manually sent money to the creator every month.
I was greatly shocked. I thought, whether my product can be sold is still a problem. Even if it can be sold, it is impossible to sell a lot, and the transactions are very frequent. Why don’t I hang a payment code like a roadside beach to solve it? , I just put the payment code on a “purchase page”.
So there is this purchase page .
However, even if I can collect money through the payment code, how can I link it with my plug-in to unlock the function after the user pays. I thought of the most traditional way of selling software – selling activation codes, and the user uses the payment code to note the value of the mailbox. When I receive the payment, I send the activation code to his mailbox, and it’s done.
The process is complete, but how do you get the activation code? There is no way, this still needs to write some code yourself. It took me half an hour to write the simplest activation code generation and verification API service using Next.js + PostgreSQL.
There is also an activation code mechanism, but it is still troublesome to send the activation code manually. So I wrote a “shortcut command”, just fill in the email and send it to my activation code API service, and it will automatically complete the whole step from creating the activation code to sending the email. Although it is still manual, my job has become to receive money and run “shortcut instructions” to fill in the mailbox.
After reading this, readers should be able to deeply understand what Paul Garahm said about Do things that don’t scale. I think that when making products, we must aim at the most important thing – what value do you provide to customers, and don’t spend too much energy on other places, where you can even do some things manually first, in success Automate him later, not from the start.
Readers should have seen a meme picture, an ATM machine, but behind it is a person manually stuffing money out. This picture is a bit funny, but this is a perfect example of Do things don’t scale. What customers need is to get money, and users don’t care how simple or complex the process behind you is. When a new product is launched, the most important thing is to solve the customer’s problem, not how to solve it more elegantly. It is easy for many engineers to fall into the temptation of “automation”, wanting to make everything the most automated, and then ignoring what problem is really being solved.
Automation can and must be done, but not from day one.
user experience
For the experience, I have emphasized the notes of “view synchronization to Readwise” above from the cold start video to the online version. Many people may think that this is a function that can be done or not, and it is technically very important. simple function. But I think this is the most important aha moment of the whole product. I want the user to see how the note is put into the note-taking software with one click, instead of just prompting that the synchronization is successful and let him go to the note-taking software to check it himself. For this experience, there is not much difference in technology between doing and not doing it, but there is a world of difference in terms of experience.
record log
Recording logs is also very important, especially the error logs. After going online, there were some cases that I did not cover in my own scenarios, and they were all successfully resolved through user feedback and I saw the error logs. In addition, the behavior log is also very important. You can see whether your product has been used and how much it is used, so as to help you make some product decisions, which is also an incentive for yourself.
go live, sell
If it was me in the past, I would definitely have a kind of myth, thinking that after the product is released and launched, I will wait for it to be spread. If no one has this demand, the product will fail.
But after reading The minimalist entrepreneur (I mentioned this book again), I have a very different understanding of sales. It is mentioned in the book that for most of the products, the first 100 paying users are talked about one by one, and word of mouth will only appear after there are enough users. And advertising is useless (if it is not a traffic-centric product).
Eventually strangers will buy your product, but mostly because your customers are spreading the gospel of your business and product, not because they saw an ad. But it will take time to get there. It’s not something you hit on day one.
So I didn’t wait passively when I went online this time, but took the initiative to search for keywords on the Internet, find people who have the same needs as me, comment and private message them, tell them that I also have the same needs, and made a very convenient plugin, ask them to try it out.
When I first started doing this, I was still a little ashamed and felt like I was spamming the internet, but objectively speaking, I was sharing a tool that I made to solve their needs as someone with the same need, as if Not even spam. And to my surprise, many people responded kindly, and thanked or finally bought the products I made.
This also reminded me that when making a product, the first thing to think about is not how to do it, but who to sell it to. This is the most important question. If you don’t even know your target users, what about marketing?
Summarize
I wrote a lot in one breath, and it’s only been three days since it was released and launched. One day, some accidents happened, but I still taught myself a very important lesson. I believe that what I shared can also give you some inspired.
Although I didn’t make a lot of money, it was a very meaningful experience for me. As I wrote on the homepage of the blog, when I was young, my ideal was to change the world. Now that I have grown up, I find it is not easy to make products that provide value to users that users are willing to pay for. This is the first paid product I have released, and I have gained some users who are willing to pay. I’ve read a lot about entrepreneurship, products, UX, marketing, and I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.
I think I will never forget the excitement when I heard the notice of 30 yuan in the account for the first time. Getting 30k in the factory means that I performed well in interviews and can write code that the company is willing to pay for, but getting 30 for selling products means that I have an insight into the needs and face the market directly (this is easy to say, but it is done) Difficult times), and solved the problem for paying users.
Big thanks to these users, it’s a big motivator for me. I would like to take this article as my return to everyone.
This article is transferred from: https://lutaonan.com/blog/my-extension-sold-1k-yuan/
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.