I built a SMS marketing web-app. It's basically a contact-management and mass messenger, nothing fancy. Heroku/django/twilio/stripe stack. People can sign up for your list, and you send them deals or events or whatever as regularly as you feel like.
I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.
It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.
Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.
Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.
I made some mistakes:
1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.
2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.
3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.
I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.
I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.
There's a need in the non-profit space for something that does this well and is relatively cheap per-message. Big players like MobileCommons and RevolutionMessaging charge 1k+ per month for SMS blast capabilities based on list size. If you have an API or the ability to import/export CSVs you could probably compete at the low end of the market.
I built it for a niche that is not very tech-savvy, and largely couldn't be targeted by SEO, because my partner was going to handle sales. The partner faded away almost immediately and there hasn't been any real revenue to speak of. It pays for itself.
It was built for my own business as the original customer, and that business still uses it, but nobody else does. At our peak we had maybe 4 paying customers, but our onboarding wasn't great either (we were brand new) and they didn't all see the value in it.
Anyway, I think with more sales and better onboarding we'd have had a good MRR and not much churn.
Heroku has more than doubled their monthly fee since it started. It used to be profitable with one customer, now it is breakeven, +/- a few dollars. I think I'll move it soon to a $5 VM and it should make about $60/month at that point.
I made some mistakes:
1) trusting my partner to make sales. I already knew they weren't a workaholic.
2) No vesting cliffs or anything. We just have 50/50 and that's it, so I was not interested in working on it solo and paying out half the money, nor starting a fight for full control. I wouldn't lose much to rename it and take it elsewhere, but I wouldn't feel right about it. Anyway he quit selling within a month (about 15-30 hours invested iirc) and so we were dead in the water. I'm close with him and so I left it at that to avoid damaging our personal relationship.
3) I used long-codes, which is a nono for mass-texting. We had some dropped texts, or we think we did (it's very hard to diagnose). Shortcodes were very expensive at the time; I don't know what the options look like now. You can probably pay for access to someone else's shortcode. We don't notice any issues with the remaining customer, which has a list of a couple hundred folks.
I haven't touched the code for over 3 years and it still runs. That's pretty impressive, probably my most solid system. Also some kudos to heroku for not breaking it somehow in that time.
I've never shipped any personal project since then, although I'm getting close on one now. I continued to make the mistake of picking bad co-founders, so for this one I'm solo. I don't expect to get rich, as I have no marketing plan and I find most marketing distasteful. So maybe I'll get lucky, or maybe I'll expose myself to some strangers on here or somewhere when it's ready to sell.