

Starting The Web App Challenge: From Zero to $5,000/month In 6 Months - stickhandle
http://nathanbarry.com/starting-web-app-challenge/

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chime
My suggestion for ideas - make simple tools for team/organizing for normal
people. Not yet another collaboration/project management suite but apps to
help teachers, baseball coaches, and scout leaders. My free tool
<http://chir.ag/projects/team-maker/> gets over 10k hits per month, mostly via
Google search and a single MakeUseOf post. I did no advertising and yet I get
emails every other day from someone trying to do more with the tool and
offering me money to build a pro version.

Another free app of mine that does great is <https://zetabee.com/icaljs/> \-
it's a simple calendar that takes an iCal feed and inserts it into your
website via JS and lets you style it with CSS. People have written me many
times to make that into a more feature-rich app and charge $x/mo for it. I'm
still busy with my KType project (that we emailed each other about a while
ago) so I'm not in a good place to build these apps but you might be in a much
better position, especially with your awesome marketing skills. Patio11's
found success with apps for normal users too. So definitely consider "simple
tools to make someone's life super-easy" as a viable candidate.

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jsilva
Nice suggestions. What was the main reason for you to keep those projects/apps
free for all? Just curious, thanks

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chime
Just my way of giving something back.

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redguava
Getting a successful web app is tough, why add unnecessary constraints to make
it harder?

One example is "I can only spend $5,000 of my own money in this entire
process". If you could get an awesome programmer for $6,000 to build the whole
thing, would you really say no just to stick to the arbitrary rules?

I think you need to go into a startup with the idea that you need to overcome
all the obstacles that get in your way, not start with some arbitrary
obstacles to make a game of it.

Good luck, but I think you are making a tough task even tougher, and
unnecessarily.

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dlehman
I think that defining your constraints ahead of time is the only way to go. If
$6,000, why not $10,000, then $20,000, then you're suddenly at $50,000 because
you "had to".

Designing within constraints is really what the essence of design is all
about. If you set limits, you must work hard to stay within those limits. The
idea that "given unlimited time/money/people I could design the ultimate
_whatever_ " is a myth anyhow.

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pbz
What, no way to sign up for an email list? Patio11 will not be pleased...

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rbchv
He doesn't even have an idea! People that sign up for any/everything aren't
too valuable as potential customers.

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bdunn
I think he's implying having an email list for people who want to follow
along, not necessarily actual customers for the ultimate product.

I agree. I love the idea of a mailing list where progress updates are
routinely sent (even if just links to new blog posts.)

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nathanbarry
Just added it.

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dmix
Good luck Nathan.

I'm aiming for the same goal for my existing startup. Except in 3 months and
the app (<https://carelogger.com>) has been running for a few years (almost
entirely part time or while I was employed).

My app had been free for the majority and an earlier attempt to make it
profitable was half-hearted, before we made it free again.

Now, we have a B2B version, a large email marketing list, and multiple native
mobile apps coming out next month. We hope these will push it to profitably
($4-5k/month) by then.

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watmough
Nice! That's a super-pretty (web) app.

Of course you are up against a lot of people in the iOS space, I hope you have
some unique angles to compete.

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dmix
When I entered the web app space, there were quite a few existing diabetes
trackers.

It's been 3 years now, I've watched 75% of competitors fold while we kept at
it, kept improving our product, growing our SEO rankings and figuring out ways
to monetize it.

I hope to do the same for our mobile app :).

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jbrooksuk
I started writing a RoR application at the beginning of December, my first
application at that. I'm a PHP developer by trade however for the type of app
I'm developing Ruby and the Rails framework is better for me.

I too am Bootstrapping my project but with only a little, not $5000 but it can
be done. Costs are: domain, Heroku/AWS hosting and advertising.

SaaS seems to be the route everyone is taking with these kind of things. Bring
in the UK makes this harder though, no decent payment providers such as
Stripe, so I'm going with Paymill.

Best of luck Nathan!

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jcase
Did you look at Braintree?

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jbrooksuk
Yeah but it didn't look or make me feel as comfortable as Paymill did.

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chaowentan
One of the lessons that I learned recently from my own web app project is
that, a successful project requires a lot more than just having the right idea
and execution; marketing is equally important as well. I learned this the hard
way when I finished my project and realized I didn't know how to reach out to
my target audiences. Oh well, I guess this will be my goal for 2013, to learn
how to better understand and communicate with the market.

And good luck to everyone who will be taking on new challenges in 2013!

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TimLeung
Same - for most of us, the technical execution is the easy part. Whenever I
have an idea nowadays, I try to figure out a couple distribution points and
also get some early market validation before getting started. Read more about
the Lean Methodology :)

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slajax
I took on a very similar challenge in 2012 although I gave myself a year to do
it mostly because I didn't have the benefit of market penetration to validate
my idea before starting. Because I'm a developer I started with my idea, then
went after the market which I think may have cost me a few months in the
beginning. I also very much under estimated how slow the real estate market is
to adapt to new technology so I didn't fully reach my goal but I'm 2/3 of the
way there and think I'll get the rest of the way plus some in Q1. I really
wish I had of documented the journey the way you are. It would be a super
valuable retrospective. Maybe I'll do one of those fancy year in review blog
posts that all the cool kids seem to be doing.

I think it'll be important for you to learn as much as you can about RoR so
that you can accelerate to launch as quickly as possible and start getting
those clients in the door. Anyway, good luck with reaching your goal!

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jpdevereaux
I like this idea a lot, I think I'll try it myself. You already have some well
dug marketing channels though, as made evident by your book sales - any advice
for the rest of us? Better yet, any interest in making this a community
challenge?

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jamesdeer
Good luck Nathan.

If you need any help feel free to email me james@gathercontent.com.

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stickhandle
After the results of the last few months, I wouldn't bet against ya Nathan.
Give 'em hell!

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TallboyOne
Good luck Nathan! Keep us posted on what you decide to do, I'd like to see it
progress :)

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guynamedloren
Very cool. I just might be inspired enough to give this a shot as well.

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rbchv
Why not an open challenge? I would be interested!

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benwerd
Tempting. Very, very tempting.

And good luck!

