Why your side project makes $0

0:00I built 24 project in the past 2.5 years at the beginning only 25% of my project would make money now in the last year 100% of my site project made money and for that I had to fire the developer in my head to become an entrepreneur now I only launch product that people use love and pay for so that I can work on any project I like from anywhere in the world without having to worry about paying the bills so in this video I'm going to share the five developers mistake I made that kept my site project from making money mistake number one adding a free plan to your product

0:30sounds like a good idea but it's killing your Revenue I used to spend about a year on a habit tracker that had a free plan and a Premium plan the reason for the free plan is that I wanted people to try the product to see if it was a good fit and eventually if they like it they would upgrade to the paid plan I spent over a year working on it before I sold it last year around October and I managed to get 140,000 visitors to the website and back then I had zero audience so I was basically working day and night for that out of those 140,000

0:56visitors about 10,000 signed up for habit tracker and at the end of the year I made $6,000 knowing that I spent my entire year working on this that's a really minimal amount of money so here is the red pill only 3% of free users will upgrade to the Premium plan let's take an example let's say you have a free plan and a $10 per month plan that means your average user is worth 30 cents to your business now let's say that you need about $3,000 per month in order to maintain your lifestyle that means you will need 10,000 new users every month or about 75 5,000 monthly visitors I

1:31don't know how about you but that sounds like an insane amount of work for a solo entrepreneurs especially if you have a 925 and you have to handle everything for your startup from the legal the customer support and all that so why do we keep seeing free plans everywhere on the Internet is because all those startups are usually VC backed they have a lot of money so that they can spend hundreds and thousands of US dollar into marketing so they collect a bunch of user feedback and they can build the next unicorn but if you're like me you might want to stay solo and you might

1:58have a limited marketing budget if any and you cannot afford to spend thousands of US dollar to gather feedbacks so having a free plan is literally slowing you down in your journey to get profitable there are three alternatives to free plans in case you somehow need to show a part of your product to customers before they purchase the first one is offering free credits you basically let your users try your product but for a very limited usage just so that they know what the product is about without getting any benefit from it the second alternative is having a short free trial with a credit card ahead so as for the credit card because

2:31you want your users to commit email is on a commitment a credit card is and make sure your free Tri is short 7day maximum in order to people to commit and the third alternative which is my favorite as a developer is to take a standalone feature of your app and make it as a free tool you could see this for instance with ahref tool their keyword research tool is free and if you want to dig more into it you have to purchase their membership this is also what I do with one of my product called logo fast people can generate logos for their startup for free and if they want to

3:00build a startup by coding it they would have to purchase ship fast building free tools is amazing especially as a developer because first you fulfill your developer need of creating things the second part is a good way for people to try the product without having to sign up and everything and the third part is good for marketing and building a little audience because you can launch all those little free tools on product time tradit hiker news get some traffic and things will happen you'll learn how to launch and yeah overall I really recommend trying out free tools m number two is the shiny Tech syndrome every

3:32week I would see a tweet about the new nodejs killer or a YouTube video about the latest design Trend and the new UI components library to try out and just like as a normal developer I spent a lot of time in the past trying out all those new tools but as I started to make money I had less time to try this tool and spend more time with my users sticking to the same Tech stack and guess what happened I not only ship less bug because I know exactly the tools I'm using I was also way more productive but most importantly users don't care about the invisible users only care about one

4:03thing they want a solution to their problems and the shape or the color of the buttons you're using don't matter at all to them if you're a developer and you're looking to make money with your code all those videos and tweets are pure distraction these new tools and libraries are like an endless treadmill every week there will be a new trendy one or a new better one that improves the performances and it never stops and the only way to be productive is to pick one text Tack and stick to it if you don't have a text tack yet I will link somewhere in the video about the text T

4:31I'm currently using for all my 24 products mistake number three subscriptions that's a little spicy topic back in May 2023 I built a landing page generator using AI people would pay $39 and so that they can type a prompt my software would generate an entire landing page for them it was working pretty well it was making about100 to $200 per day I think back then it was my most successful product and I decided to change and play around with pricing so I studed to charge a $5 per month subscription instead of a $39 one time payment as soon as I pushed the change live all my sales went down like

5:06literally zero for days I revert back to the one time payment thing and things started to pick up again as a developer or a business owner I love subscription it has a sense of passing income and it's helping me predict what's going to happen the next month but as a user you probably notice that we hate subscription there's some kind of headaches going around is because first you have to think about the future what happens if I don't use the product in 2 weeks what happens if I forget to cancel the subscription there is some mental process that's required for people to pay for subscription that doesn't happen

5:38when you charge a onetime payment and so roughly selling a $49 onetime payment product is as hard as selling a $9 per month subscription the second drawback of subscriptions is that users turn all the time it's not because someone decid to subscribe today for your software that they will be paying in 6 months from now so unless you have an excellent service your users will anyway way churn as a business owner you probably have onetime payments like a book you pay once and you own it forever is pretty uh pleasurable for a customer and it's helping you getting your first sales online and depending on the product

6:12you're making you might have negligible costs of running the service for instance the bandwidth is usually negligible I have half a million page views per month on my app and I'm still on the $20 per month versal plan so even if the user end up costing 1 cents per month you're still Way Beyond profitability for years and if your service EXP Lo and there are a bunch of users coming up you can also grandfather your current users keep them using the product for that onetime payment and start implementing subscription for new users if you have some kind of recording cost let's say you are doing an AI

6:42wrapper around the open AI API then you can try the pay-per-use system just like open AI you would make them pay for the usage of your own product this is really fair for users there's no much mental energy spent on their side because if you don't use the product you don't pay that's very simple and I believe this pricing model is going to replace most subscription in a few years I recommend you to start as simple as you can with a one time payment of the pay-per-view system make $1,000 and then think later if you need to implement subscriptions or not mistake number four the H1 tag

7:13first impression matters when you meet someone randomly in the street how they behave how they look what they say will influence every decision you'll make about this person it's the same with your website when you're selling a product online your headline is the first impression and this is going to be the most influential part part on whether people will decide to buy or not your product in average a website conversion rate so visitors to customers is about 2% if you're getting started is likely going to be more like 1% even less so for 100 visitors you'll get one user that means that most of the people

7:44who visit your website will never see your product but 100% of the people who visit your website will see your headline so make sure you spend enough time crafting a really excellent headline before launching your headline should be short trigger an emotional reaction and answer the question of why would a random stranger on the internet give me 1 minute of their very precious time I wrote a short article about copyrighting for learning Pages you can check in the description the link to my newsletter mistake number five over engineering for my first entrepreneurship project I spent an entire year building a startup I wanted it to be perfect with a bunch of feature

8:19user onboarding and a dozens of screens by the end of the year I burn out and I managed to get zero users and made Zer actually that's this little first project right here that you see we've seen earlier that about 1% of your landing page will convert into paying customers so most people will never use your product and to avoid shipping features that people don't need I recommend you to try the 24 hours startup framework if you had to create any startup in 24 hours how it would look like if we talk about Airbnb it could be just a single spreadsheet and if we are remaking Instagram that could

8:51be a public Google Drive I'm not saying you should Che a sketchy version of your product but I'm saying that instead of having a big master plan for your startup start with a very tiny version the 24 hours version of your startup as a b line and start building from there in my case I remove a bunch of things from the first version of the product there are three categories the first one is that I remove anything that's invisible to the customer so I do not test my code I do not use git branches I ship directly to production and I do not use typescript and there is a big

9:20support button on the website in case if anything goes wrong but that really doesn't open open the second part is that I remove everything that doesn't have Direct Value to the customer so there is no dark mode there is no professional logo there is no reset password form for instance and finally I remove any secondary feature customers come to my website because they have one problem and that problem is usually solved with one feature anything that is not about that feature will be removed from the verse version of my product the goal here is to launch your product fast so you get real user feedback early and

9:53you can build the right features for them and make some money I have been building tiny startups in public on Twitter with 100 of other developers and the five mistakes I just shared is usually what sets apart the solo developers who actually end up making money with a site project and those who don't I hope this video is helpful if it is please let me know if you could subscribe to the channel That would means a lot and if you're one of those developer who overthink their side project I'm going to share a link to a video where I shipped a software in 3 days all right that was it for this

10:20video and until the next one I hope you just ship it