I have a bunch of projects I built up which I consider "done" as far as I'm concerned, but at the same time they're basically free to run (AppEngine in the free tier) so I'm always reluctant to sell... I do wish there were people who wanted to take one of these and build them out to the "next level".
- http://www.tweepsect.com/ - Gets 300,000~600,000 pageviews per month (about 1/6 uniques), makes a couple hundred bucks from ads each month. Been around for almost 5 years.
- http://colorblendy.com/ - There's also a Chrome app (20k weekly users), website gets about 4,000~8,000 visits/month. I had some ideas for making a "Pro" edition with things like importing/exporting colors from/to CSS stylesheets. Probably need to do some more market research before diving into this.
- http://wedomainsearch.com/ - Few hundred visits per month, brand new (built several months ago). Fairly cool idea that is really valuable for founders/hobbyists, I use it all the time. Needs some love for promotion and monetization, though.
I love working on these little stand-alone projects (a few more here: http://shazow.net/, also my email address if you want to reach out), sometimes I wish I could just whip them out and sell them as a living but the code alone is never as valuable without putting in effort into growing the audience.
I'm not interested in buying any of them I'm afraid, but I just wanted to say that your website (shazow.net) and your projects are all very impressive. You have a readable style of writing and a good eye for simplicity.
Hi Thomas! My sincere apologies for letting you down with SocialGrapple. :(
Unfortunately not much happened with it. I joined Google to work on an in-house social analytics product, but most of it never launched. I've since left Google so I don't know what's going on in that department anymore.
I'm working on https://briefmetrics.com/ now, which is vaguely in the same space as SocialGrapple, sans the social for now. :) I'm considering introducing some social metrics into the email reports someday. I'm also working on splitting up the pieces of the project so that most of it can be open sourced and thereby guaranteeing some kind of continuity for loyal customers.
The fundamental product I wanted to build is done, so it basically runs itself while I do business development and sales. Eventually I'll need to dive back into the code to add more features I have on the roadmap, but I work best when I "switch modes" for spans of several weeks at a time so it may be a while. :)
The current revenue is about $250/mo. I've been trying to focus more on agencies with many clients and offering them custom-branded whitelabel emails reports for their customers. Making some progress on that end.
At the same time, as you can tell, I kind of have a habit of doing other random projects on the side, so things take longer than they should. :)
thats really cool. My first thought was that it could be useful for people like you with several side projects that they dont really spend a lot of time actively maintaining, to get 'at a glance' stats to see that things are ticking over. To that end, you could consider a multi ___domain plan, $18 for 3 domains or something.
I love projects like this, particularly because although the income seems modest, I frequently live in developing countries for long stretches, where $250/month trickling in pretty much pays for the necessities.
You're absolutely right about the pricing. Right now it's still in the "throw a number down on the front page and see if it sticks" stage of pricing. I'm still banging my head against the wall to find a better pricing scheme, but it will likely be similar to what you mentioned.
Here, I'll write it down just so I can get it out of my head. :)
* Hobby: $4/mo (paid yearly), limited to 1 site and 1 recipient
It's a lot of plans but maybe the two-bucket separation would be manageable. Or maybe I need to do a more fluid $4-5/mo/custom-branded site plan, but pay-per-use plans typically doesn't perform as well for non-developers.
- http://www.tweepsect.com/ - Gets 300,000~600,000 pageviews per month (about 1/6 uniques), makes a couple hundred bucks from ads each month. Been around for almost 5 years.
- http://colorblendy.com/ - There's also a Chrome app (20k weekly users), website gets about 4,000~8,000 visits/month. I had some ideas for making a "Pro" edition with things like importing/exporting colors from/to CSS stylesheets. Probably need to do some more market research before diving into this.
- http://wedomainsearch.com/ - Few hundred visits per month, brand new (built several months ago). Fairly cool idea that is really valuable for founders/hobbyists, I use it all the time. Needs some love for promotion and monetization, though.
I love working on these little stand-alone projects (a few more here: http://shazow.net/, also my email address if you want to reach out), sometimes I wish I could just whip them out and sell them as a living but the code alone is never as valuable without putting in effort into growing the audience.