Great job you're doing. Would be really interested in seeing the Wordpress product when it's out. Haven't found anything for perfect conversions as of yet.
You're currently using Paddle that takes 5%, in my opinion this is far too much, you could save 2.5% a year by going to Stripe or even more by going to GoCardless. Besides the clump sum you get at the end of each month, what is your motivation behind using Paddle compared to other, cheaper services?
Thanks
In EU accounting rules are quite strict, so you have to enter every single transaction into your accounting books. A lot of this work is still done manually. Having one lump sum frees us from that as well.
The last time I checked Stripe is not available to merchants in Slovenia.
And Paddle works with PayPal also. Many people prefer to use PayPal instead of credit cards.
@askinakhan: While Stripe's base fees may be lower, Paddle is more of an all-in-one platform that simplifies the process of selling digital products.
As well as handling all of the VAT admin work for Pinegrow (which is a huge burden for sellers), Paddle also manages customer support and allows customers to pay via PayPal with a seamless checkout experience. We also offer analytics and developer tools that make it easy for devs to offer trial versions of their apps/games, in-app purchases and more.
Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions! -- Fabio from Paddle.com
It is easily worth more than $49 to use this software. But $49 is the kind of price where a professional may just buy it from themselves without bothering to hassle their boss to buy it through the company.
This means less of a hard sell and more copies will be sold to people like you or me who discover it through HN or a tweet or something.
I do think they should increase the company price though, because once a company has decided they want to buy it, the sale is done. The difference between $79 and $199 isn't such a big deal, and something like $999 for 10 licenses could be done too.
AppCode is like that - there's Xcode and it's free, but AppCode is just way better, and since it's only $50, I bought it.
Turns out a license is only for a major release, so if I buy 1.0 and they come out with 2.0, I have to pay to upgrade. But all upgrades in 1.x are free. So it's a fair deal. They seem to come out with new big releases every year so I end up paying them $50 every year.
I think it's a great model for selling software, and for continuing to make money off of it. It works for them, and for me as a customer, too. I get added value, and I don't mind spending extra on it.
Whereas, I avoid anything subscription like the plague. I want to buy, and own, not rent. Even though I now know that AppCode will always have a new major release every year, I don't mind paying the upgrade. First of all, I don't have to, I could just keep using the old version. And secondly each version packs tons of new features so I feel like I am getting something for my money.
This looks like a very polished application - well done!
Then I found node-webkit. I had PG working in a couple of hours. Using Node.js fs module for file access is almost trivial. In general I try to keep core JS code not tied to Node.js or anything else. PG uses Node.js part of node-webkit only for file access, menus and clipboard. Everything else happens in a browser (embedded Chromium in this case). It would be easy to port PG to another JS-based platform, like atom shell.
Hope this helps.
From the sounds of things, you've worked around this by making it a web app that just so happens to be in a node-webkit container.
Cheers for the insight!
I gave y'all my money a two or three months ago, and I've been very happy with your product. I had been flirting with a few other mostly-online solution for over a year (looking through book-marks they were layoutit.com and jetstrap), but always felt the features offered were half-hearted and clunky in a browser.
"You can’t come out to a saturated market with just a couple of useful features. Pinegrow had to have all the main features from the start: ability to open any HTML file, full range of configurable Bootstrap components, CSS editor with integrated LESS parser and the ability to edit multiple pages at the same time. After all, that is what distinguished Pinegrow from the rest."
You had me pretty well sold with stand-alone software, lifetime usage w/ 3 installations for commercial purposes, and element drag-and-drop combined with side-by-side page + code view. Access to edit CSS was a feature I didn't know I needed, but I definitely did. I was very impressed with the "Open From URL" feature when I found it, but it certainly wasn't a purchase point for me.
If the market was providing these things elsewhere, props for capturing my queries first.
Kudos for an impressive product that does the thing it's supposed to well.
That's turning a negative situation into a positive, which is what a good entrepreneur does.
But back in high school when I was copying software a lot, I actually did not have any money. I'd have jumped on the opportunity to get a legal copy free, and I'd have promoted the shit out of it.
This is the way to do it, for sure.
I've been meaning to do a review of Pinegrow for one website I write for - will definitely get on that now.
Incidentally, if you come up with a simple Wordpress theme solution, as you're suggesting, then you move Pinegrow from "Hmm, interesting" to "OH MY GOD TAKE MY MONEY" in my book :)
Thanks for the review!
WordPress support will be ready soon. In the first step we'll have a solution for converting statis HTML page to a WP theme. A bit later we'll add support for visually editing WP theme PHP files.
I just wanted to point out about the mythical "5000 dollars is a rounding error" companies:
I work for one, but they won't buy your product at U$ 75 because you're not selling it to the people with purchasing power, you're getting sales from internal champions.
I think you should read Jason Cohen's articles on his A Smart Bear blog, your company sounds a lot like his - I'm trying to find a particularly relevant post where he talks about an internal champion for your product, but I can't find it, I did find
http://blog.asmartbear.com/pricing-business-model.html
Also, Joel Spolsky's famous article on pricing:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
You're living the dream :) I've got my own product launch coming soon, and I hope things go even half as well for me as they have gone for you.
I'm interested to hear about your marketing efforts. You mentioned that you have 16000 mailing list subscribers and that this has been effective in terms of growing sales. How did you find these subscribers?
Are there any other marketing hints you might be able to give to a soon to be launching app?
Cheers, Eli
Most of 16000 emails on the list are trial version signups. To activate the trial user needs to enter the email address and a simple activation code that we send to that address.
A lot of times trial users like your app but will forget to buy it because they don't need it immediately. About once or two times per month we send out news about product updates and occassional special offers ($10 off for Christmas, for example). That brings a lot of users back to the product.
Another thing that drowe early sales was giving lifetime free updates to early adpoters. So people bought PG even though they didn't need it yet or important features were missing. We did this for the first three months.
Wish you lots of success with your launch!
One idea: Why not provide the option to buy 2 years of updates at a higher price? It would give you some more cash up front which could be used for ads etc.
So my process is tweaking html, updating the SASS file, waiting for it to build CSS, then reloading the page.. tweaking... it's really, really slow. Can we use this app somehow in our environment?
Until then you can use PG to work with HTML and edit SASS in an external code editor. PG will auto-refresh styles when it detects that CSS file was modified.
100% agree. Measuring one thing has little to do with building it. Under building mode, there is only one path you could go. Under measuring mode, we only want to know the distance from the target to the place reached. In other words, building is a somewhat one-dimension activity while measuring is more often a multi-dimension activity.
