
Took me more than 2 years to get 200 paying customers for my Web App - barmstrong
http://www.startbreakingfree.com/1640/universitytutor-races-past-200-paying-customers/
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user24
congrats! It's always inspiring to see people having success doing what they
love. 200 users seems almost laughably smalltime compared to some of the
companies who get featured on here, but to me, and I'm sure much of the HN
readership, it's a dream; if I can get 200 paying users of my business when I
launch I'll be ecstatic!

It's really good to see a success story which doesn't focus on "hey wow, I got
a million users overnight through sheer luck". It reminds us that 99% of the
time, companies are built slowly and surely, not astronomically.

~~~
JarekS2
People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers (not to
mention 200!!). It's one thing to get people to say "I love your product -
will buy premium plan for sure!" and the completely other thing to actually
receive a payment ("I'm sorry I was busy", "Will buy, just waiting for my
customer to place an order" etc.).

Best of luck to everyone trying to persuade their customers to pay. I'm also
one of you!

~~~
patio11
_People have no idea how hard it is to get first 10 paying customers_

I'm kind of conflicted on this. Yes, it is hard to get ten people to pay
money, in that you have to have a mostly-functioning product, a website which
markets it, and some way to charge their credit cards. But this is not really
_that_ hard.

BCC 1.02 ("Like 1.00, but with less crash bugs and the brand new ability to
print to non-default printers") got to ten customers in six weeks from 1.0's
launch, entirely on the strength of organic search marketing on two pieces of
content. That was when I was young and stupid. Y'all can do better.

I think software (let's scope it to B2C software for the moment) is like
lemonade stands. You know how you get ten customers with a lemonade stand?
Your price? Doesn't really matter. Your stand's design? Doesn't really matter.
Your taste? Doesn't really matter. Your location? Probably matters for getting
hundreds or thousands of customers, but for 10, pretty much any street will
do. The key hurdle you have to get over is _charging money for lemonade_. I am
worried that people think it is really really hard to run a successful
business, and that stops them from ever charging for lemonade.

~~~
wlievens
But how do you get over charging for something that competitors offer for
free? Even if your product is better in different ways, that's a hard sell.

~~~
parfe
3/10 cent a gallon for water delivered straight to the home.

$1.50 gallon for a jug in isle 13 at your super market

or $1.75 for a 20oz bottle at the checkout counter.

Are these all the same product? Do they even compete?

~~~
patio11
That example is going in my playbook. (And the product is available for free,
in nigh-infinite quantities, in every occupied building in America. You don't
even have to ask for it. In fact, asking for permission to take some would
have whomever you asked immediately question your mental state!)

------
jasonkester
This is actually a significant milestone for any entrepreneur. 200 * $10/mo ==
enough to pay your rent.

$2k/month is the tipping point where you're no longer bleeding money and
eating into savings. Sure, you're not getting richer and you might still need
to take the odd freelance job for spending money, but it's a great place be,
no longer watching your bank account on its slow & steady march toward zero.

From here, it's all profit!

~~~
etm117
Remember, not everyone lives in the Bay Area. ;-) Depending on where you live
and if you have roommates, the $2k per month may be enough to pay rent, bills,
college loans and leave some left over for spending money.

~~~
jasonkester
Don't you mean "not everybody lives in Honduras"? There aren't many places in
the US where you can live for $2k/month all in, and the Bay Area would be the
last place I'd expect to do so.

I meant "pays your rent" quite literally. As in, taking the biggest of your
financial worries away and leaving you only needing to deal with the spending
money part. So you still can't live on your income, but you can coast along
for an entire year on $10k savings.

Up to that point, $10k in the bank meant you'd better start scrambling to pick
up a contract in the next couple months before you run out of money.

~~~
patio11
_There aren't many places in the US where you can live for $2k/month all in_

$2,000 / 160 = $12.50, which is substantially higher than the minimum wage in
all fifty states of the Union, so I'm guessing that there exist at least a few
people who are somehow making do...

~~~
bkmartin
I'm guessing you've never tried to live on $12.50/hr. And if you take that as
a gross number not a net number its even worse. Sure, people are "making it
work" but if you aren't single without kids and have zero college debt then
you aren't doing it without some sort of assistance. Just because the minimum
wage is $7.25 or up to $8.55 (depending on the state you live in), doesn't
mean you can live on it.

~~~
bkmartin
Really? negative points for a post that simply points out the fact that
$12.50/hr is a lot harder to live on that what the majority of people on here
want to make it sound? I'm not trolling, just offering a different point of
view from different observations. I live in rural PA not a metro area or
anything like that. I'm not saying it can't be done, but its not the norm.

~~~
Dove
_Really? negative points . . . ?_

Well, you opened with,

 _I'm guessing you've never tried to live on $12.50/hr._

I consider this aggressive and personal. Rather than stating your position and
evidence, you've attacked the credentials of anyone who disagrees with you.
Aside from the fact that it's naive and almost certainly false (there are
folks on this site from _all_ walks of life with _all_ kinds of experience and
opinions), it is distracting. I do not care at all whether someone has the
particular credentials you think are necessary to comment on the topic; I care
only about what evidence and experience they _do_ have.

Above all, I want to hear about ideas, not people. If you speculate on
people's motives or qualifications (especially if you're suggesting downvotes
are the result of disagreement or censorship), or any time in general that you
attack the person of other commenters, you won't interest me. You'll annoy me.
And unless you say something particularly redeeming, I'll probably downvote
the comment.

~~~
bkmartin
Understandable, I agree I came off a bit strong. It struck me the wrong way a
bit, and I overreacted. I certainly mean no disrespect. I hope that what I
said after that was on point with what I was trying to get across. I'll be
better, thanks for the heads up.

------
JangoSteve
Congratulations on the 220 paying customers, that's certainly no small feat.
I've been running RateMyStudentRental.com for about 3 years now (well, really
I stopped actively working on it about a year ago), and it only reached about
half that in revenue.

Then, LeadNuke sprang forth as an internal sales tool for RMSR barely a year
ago and it's approaching that level already. In hindsight, I'm really glad I
didn't have this kind of success the first time around, because I have a much
more realistic perspective now and I can appreciate it that much more.

In summary, mad props and respect to you.

~~~
steveklabnik
> In summary, mad props and respect to you.

Totally off-topic, but some of my friends lately have started joking around
about making a subgenre of Nerdcore devoted to startups. There's so many good
names and parody opportunities...

> I got 99 problems, but my pitch ain't one.

> whatddup, founda?

> An east vs west style rivalry between the 'Limited Liability Crew' and
> 'S-corp'.

> Names: 'Series C', ... I forget the rest. There's others.

~~~
trafficlight
That's awesome. Have any of them been so brave as to actually record a song?

~~~
steveklabnik
Not yet, but this is pretty close: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the-
solo-founder-startup...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/12/the-solo-founder-
startup-rap/)

Patrick doesn't know about what I'm talking about though, this is unrelated.

------
adamt
Congrats. As other people have said - it's refreshing to see some stories like
this rather than just the 'here's my web app I built in 48 hours'. Hopefully
it will help people reliase the difference between building something and
building a business.

At 200, you are close to what I consider to be a major inflexion point. It's
often as easier (big separate post that I won't go into the full reasons why)
to go from 200-2000 then it is to go from 20-200.

Well done and good luck!

~~~
barmstrong
Yep, I think you're right on that - the first 200 was just figuring out the
right place for everything. Should get easier from here...

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rubyrescue
congratulations! when barmstrong was down here in Buenos Aires, we talked a
lot about universitytutor.com and it's cool to see him just make little tweaks
to the site and let it grow slowly and steadily. very inspiring!

~~~
barmstrong
Yep - those were some good discussions, learned a lot from you down there!

------
ryanb
How did you get 16,000+ tutors signed up? That's an impressive number.

~~~
barmstrong
Tried a bunch of ideas, but the most successful was posting jobs to university
websites. Can email me if you want more details.

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stretchwithme
Congratulations. A great idea and an important niche to serve. I just told two
friends that do tutoring about it.

~~~
barmstrong
Awesome, thanks!

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tnorthcutt
I may be assuming too much based on my reading of your post, but it sounds
like you could really stand to implement some (or more) A/B testing. The fact
that it took two years to reach 200 customers but in only a week or so you've
added another 20 customers after making some changes makes me think you should
have been making (and testing!) changes like that all along. Either way,
congratulations, and best of luck in the future!

~~~
barmstrong
Yur right - I just didn't have the idea to do this test until recently :) Have
done some split testing on price etc, but could def stand to do more.

~~~
tnorthcutt
Hopefully you'll continue to see a faster increase in signups. Good luck!

------
spencerfry
Congrats! With 200 paying customers, you now have more than enough information
to start tracking churn, CPA, life time value, life time profit, etc. You can
turn those 200 paying customers into a lot more by accurately tracking your
metrics and building from them.

I recommend reading:

[http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-
metric...](http://thinkvitamin.com/web-apps/how-to-track-six-key-metrics-for-
your-web-app/)

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mrbird
Maybe I missed this in the post, but are you working on this full time? If
not, how many hours/week would you estimate you've invested, on average?

~~~
colonelxc
read his about page: <http://www.startbreakingfree.com/about/>

Shows he's started a few other sites, including working on a YC funded
(stealth) startup.

~~~
barmstrong
Yep, I have a day job. Right now it takes very little time to run the site,
maybe a few hours per week. But I definitely spent a lot of time building it
up front, and occasionally still do when I add new features. As a strict
hourly ROI I could have made way more at a job or doing consulting work, but
it's an investment that may pay off long term (or not, but either way it was
way more fun :)

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senthil_rajasek
Not to nitpick but your about page shows that universitytutor.com was started
in 2004 but your post shows that you started the site in 2008? Also the
dashboard shows decreasing timeline which means you are either losing
customers and below the 200 (can't guess the scale) subscribers or there is a
simple error somewhere...

What are we missing ?

~~~
barmstrong
Good point - I actually first registerred and built a site back in 2004 but it
was a different business (matching people manually in Houston only). 2008 was
when I switched it over to a directory site that was open to anyone and let
tutors and students contact each other directly (also rebuilt it in rails).

Not sure what you mean on the graph though - it seems correct to me.

~~~
senthil_rajasek
The dashboard graph shows just a months worth of data and for some reason I
thought the timeline was decreasing. Congratulations on your success.

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dfischer
Congratulations. That's a great milestone.

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antidaily
The site is beautiful. Nice work!!

~~~
barmstrong
I did the programming, but hired this guy to design it:
<http://www.jackherbert.com/>

I'd recommend him, he was good and fairly priced. (Found him on 99designs).

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qq66
Nice job dude! -Amal

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ohashi
Congrats :)

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cinimod
That's an AWESOME dating service.

