Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed

As a solo developer who has built B2C software in the past, 1600 sales in your first year is outstanding.

But I have to say your pricing is terrible - from all perspectives.

For you, unless you sell in the hundreds of thousands (which I've never heard of for B2C software) it's unlikely to ever be a day job replacement.

For the consumer, before they even decide to try your software you're telling them it has the lifetime value of a cup of coffee and a donut.

Price is one of the things consumers look at to determine something's value. You've priced your product so cheaply and many will view your product in the same way.

It's not much harder to sell a $99 product as it is to sell a $9 product to consumers. And the users you get at the higher price point will be better users.

But that 1600 user sales figure - for a one man shop in year one - is fantastic.

What would your yearly profits have been if your price was $49 or $79 or more?

Cool, I might give it a try considering that Moom is having issues with Sonoma on my MBP m3 :/

I think your pricing is great but I would personally do a different tier system. Smaller yearly cost for yearly subscriptions for future updates (6,99 maybe) plus lifetime for a higher price.

I think lifetime value at that price is unsustainable for you if you have to give support and updates with no extra income coming from it. If you consider lifetime as a 5x yearly you’re giving yourself a good time window to make the product grow sustainably.

Interesting. Congratulations on your achievements.

I was wondering, what channel did you use to initially get the 2,000 customers?

Did you post in in some forums or buy Ads of some form AdSense, Facebook or Twitter.

I kind of find it sad that you still need an app in 2023 for these features as most of these are built into Win10 for like 8 years now.

Wins looks really good, and congratulations on having sold so many licenses! This is just my opinion, but I think you’ve priced too low. It’s an interesting balance and I don’t know the magic formula to pricing but before I looked at the price I looked at the features and my first guess was $30 and was surprised to see $6.99.

I would change your licensing to be something along the lines of 1 year of free updates, pay again for future updates (seems like the standard pricing model in the space if you're going to be adding more features). This small tweak can massively swing your total earnings over a couple years.

Other people have mentioned pricing and $12 doesn't seem unreasonably low. Especially early on when you're building word of mouth. Long term maybe you could double it.

Opinionated Technical Notes:

Shake to hide, I wish it only acted on one screen (or a setting to enable that).

I have my dock setup vertically, it'd be nice if the previews were also arranged vertically.

Love that this just exists in my settings instead of adding a millionth app to my top nav.

Overall great work, congrats on the progress. It's exciting to build something people actually find useful and more importantly pay for. You just got yourself another customer.

Do you think it might do better in a group of similar Mac Mod products, like Steam?

Is there a way to recruit another kind of user or customer? Who are they and why do they need Wins?

Any word on the need for similar managers for all UNIX systems? Have you tried working on any Linux OS with your current product? I know this is for OSX but a ton of users of Linux systems might purchase the product as CSE undergrads? Educational software?

Congratulations on your success so far, I hope you have an even better 2024!

As an aspiring Apple ecosystem developer myself (I haven't released anything so far, but I am working on learning SwiftUI and the related Apple technologies), I have a couple questions...

How have you marketed this so far? Word of mouth, social media, ads?

What shopping platform powers your website and what are the other channels that you have used in addition to the official website?

How are you tracking the usage data for your software?

Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue.

Are you selling on the mac store?

Looks pretty cool!