I signed the contract on 1st of April and almost seven months later my web app, Netcrumb, is ready.
It’s been a long journey, with a lot of ups and downs, but my big minimum viable product is live.
Netcrumb is a web app that helps people to create one page Wordpress websites faster and easier.
Probably, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but if you want to read my complete journey, I wrote a few parts:
If you don’t want to read the previous posts, let me tell you the story in a few words.
Last year I had an idea to create a web application that will help people build Wordpress websites faster and easier.
On 1st of April, this year, I hired a small agency from Bucharest, Romania, to create the app in three months for 16,000 EUR.
It took them almost seven months to complete what we discussed initially, and I was asked to pay 4000 EUR more.
The app looks and works great at this point, but would I do it again? NO.
I’m a mobile developer, and before starting this project, I thought that for me to learn the technologies required for this project, it would take at least one year.
I don’t want to complain, but I will write a post where I will try to help people understand how to choose developers to build their projects.
I’m a developer, and it was very hard for me during these months.
I imagine that someone with no technical knowledge has fewer chances of paying and building something they dream.
About the App
It takes hours or days to search for a Wordpress theme, buy, then learn to customize and finally launch your website.
I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that after they buy a theme, it doesn’t look as promised. That’s because you have to do more customization.
If you ever built a Wordpress site, I’m sure that you know the struggle.
With Netcrumb I’m reversing the above wrong process.
How it works?
- Select the design, colours, assets and add text.
- Once you like what you created, buy the design. Netcrumb will convert everything in a Wordpress theme.
- Download and install on your Wordpress panel
Being an MVP, you will still have to download and manually install it on your Wordpress panel, but once you do that, it will not require more customization.
It should take less than 30 minutes to build a one page Wordpress website.
What are the PROs and CONs?
I will start with the PROs:
Fast ( Saves you at least a few hours )
Easy to use
Beautiful designs
Unlimited edits
The CONs:
Only one page Wordpress sites
Limited designs
Manually download and install the theme
The BETA pricing for a theme it is $49.
Thinking to look for a co-founder
Being a solo founder is hard. I have a lot of ideas in my mind, but I don’t think I can do everything.
I started alone and I will continue alone in the next period, but I’m thinking to find someone that can help me with the non technical aspects of the business.
I’m wondering where do you find a co-founder?
Friends are the first in the list, but what if none of my friends are interested in Netcrumb?
How do you find someone that wants to put the same amount of work as you or has the same passion or desire to succeed?
If you have any suggestions, leave me some comments.
Raise money, bootstrap or learn the Netcrumb’s stack
To take the app to the next phase I need more money ( $50,000 - $100,000 )
Firstly, I need to see how people will respond to the MVP, but I have to think in the future, no?
If I will have customers, bootstrapping will not be an issue, but what happens when you have clients, but not enough and you discover that you need to change things or add new features.
Without money, raising or boostraping, the only solution will be to build everything by myself. In this case, who will promote the business? The answer is: a co-founder.
I will try to get as much feedback as possible in the next months and based on that I will decide on the next move.
You never realize how many decisions you have to make, even in a not launched start up.
New article published
The most significant achievement in twas publishing an article on Hackernoon.
I know it’s not much, but it was my most read article to date.
I have 2800 Views and 1100 reads.
It’s a story where I explain how I worked on a mobile app for ten months and I made less than $ 70.
You can read the story here
I focus on why monetizing a project from the beginning is very important and what mistakes I did during that time.
Free $1,000 Aws Credits
I don’t know if you are aware, but if you have a startup that requires any AWS stack, you can apply for a $1,000 promotional credit that is available for two years.
I applied for the Builders package, but they have two more packages which can give you more credits.
For example, the Portfolio package can give you up to $15,000 credits.
Anyway, I applied, and I received a fast response from Amazon that I was accepted to receive $1,000 in free credits that include a lot of areas.
My expenses with AWS were in the last months around $150 in total, and the bill went to around $65 in August.
Now I know that if Netcrumb will not scale too much in the next year at least, the hosting was paid, but who doesn’t want to scale?
Total Subscribers and Readers
In the last few months, I wrote some posts with the idea of making people aware of Netcrumb.
A few thousand read my articles, but I managed to get only 173 people to subscribe to the mailing list.
The downside of this type of strategy is that you don’t have a target audience. Most of my articles were published on two publications on Medium: The Startup and Hacker Noon.
I have a mailing list collector inside the posts, but it was not enough.
I guess that the best thing to do is to try and send as many people as possible on your main website and target the right audience with the posts.
One thing that I would probably do different today:
If the MVP is not easy to do, build an audience first.
Let me give you one example for my case.
I could have done a Wordpress themes directory ( free and paid ), or as suggested by an online friend, Nitesh, I could have created the service that Netcrumb is offering manually.
Total Costs
The most important part of building a web application when you are not the developer.
- Building Netcrumb.com - 20,000 EUR; I paid only 18,500 EUR so far as my initial budget was 16,000 EUR, but I will pay the rest in the following months. I will convert the 20,000 to USD via xe.com and the conversion is $23,100.
- AWS ( Before receiving the credits ) - $155.28.
- Mockflow ( I will probably cancel ) - $22.80 x 8 months = $182.40.
- Betalist - $120 ( Had a campaign with them - Read the review ).
I do not remember other costs or they might be small.
Total = $ 23,557.68
That’s a lot of money!
Can you imagine how stressed I’m if Netcrumb will be succesful or not?
The app is amazing, but clients and time will tell.
Conclusion
It was an interesting thing to do the project management instead of the development, but it is only the beginning of the long journey.
The hard part will start now.
I’m thinking to create a goal like reaching the first $3000 or $5000 in sales and explain what I will do to get there.
Nathan Barry’s story of Convertkit is amazing and inspirational.
It took him one year and 8 months to reach his goal of $5000 in recurring revenue, but he did it.
If you want to read it: http://nathanbarry.com/category/the-web-app-challenge/
I might do something similar in terms of writing.
Let me know what you think about Netcrumb and if you have any questions please ask!
Congrats! Reading your blog was inspiring, well done! I appreciate openess about you, your way to work and organize work!
Last year I've done a little website using wordpress and after some work on theming I simply decided to stop and choose a theme and done. I think this is a strong pain point for developers (or agencies) and a service like yours is really interesting.
You should take in consideration also small-agencies or part/time developers: they should be interested in building a quick site and take care of "dev things".
Like many people already told to you (I think) cover the full pipeline from design, to buy domain and upload an go live will be a game changer, you could think to contact companies and try to find a common ground for future collaborations. They will provide a high value service to their customers and you will expand your audience (maybe indirectly?).
I've read here on IH also a guy that made a sort of wizard to create apps (sorry, no link) and he said that put a little gamificaion inside his work help to bring customer from create a quick test to be a real paying customer, something you want to do in order to optimize funnel :D
Note: sorry for disorganized mess of feedback, free thoughts ! :D
This is why I love this community. Thanks a lot as everything you said is very good feedback.
The full pipeline is on my list, but in the next period.
Never thought of the gamification thing, but to be honest I don't even know where to start for that. Have any suggestions?
You are welcome!
About gamification, my idea is you should identify key points in your users journey provide feedback on every step. It's like a videogame, where a step 1 means you reach level1, and so on.
I've worked in a gamification system for sustainable challenges, so if you need more info, there is a lot publications and stuff around, don't lost in it! Keep focused on your objective, that should help users too. For example: a nice achievement should be "create my first wordpress website", another one "I go live with wordpress website created on netcrumb" (with backlink! So you could start to collect success stories too) or "create basic page (CTA,about, etc..)" so user can appreciate that with netcrumb you can do more than one page with one section (to educate users!)
From my experience is amazing how simply set goals can change people behaviour (you can take a look to videogames too to be inspired), even in real life.
Take a look here: https://www.indiehackers.com/@EO/how-i-bootstrapped-my-side-project-to-6k-month-while-hating-everything-it-stands-for-43c35faa25
@EO could provide ideas and support on this
I think it takes some time to create it. Maybe I can do it optional, but not integrate it in the flow for now.
I will take a look and come back. Thanks a lot for all your feedback!
@Vokail : Thank you for the mention.
@ivandrag : Really cool story, congrats on getting it done. I can definitely help with gamification, just send me a message whenever. However, since you're not a Dev, this might cost you a bit more money and from what I understand, you've already exceeded your initial budget.
From my experience, gamification can do wonders if you have a complex/long onboarding process ( seems like you do ), but it probably wouldn't be a good idea right now. You need an existing user base and analytics in place to identify bottlenecks that can be removed with gamification.
Writing about it like nathan barry is a great idea, you should definitely do it.
Best of luck!
Hi Dragos, congrats for pushing through and learning a ton :-) We've been in the exact situation with another app, only it was around 20k more and no one was interestedin the project. But what we've learned along the way was priceless.
We're building a new app again right now (hypervault.co), keeping in mind what our pain points were in the previous project. We've got some initial traction and we've landed around 2K in sales in september, with LTD's.
If you want to talk about the process we're going through and what we've done to get in some revenue, feel free to hook me up on Facebook. Happy to help!
Thanks, Glenn.
Let's have a chat. Added you on Facebook.
Thanks for posting Dragos. I checked your link to AWS and couldn't find the builders package. Did it go away just now?
Hi, Philipp,
It seems that they removed it: https://aws.amazon.com/activate/builders-signup/
I'm sorry.
Ah, too bad. Would've been too good to be true :) Good luck with your service. Keep us in the loop how it develops from here.
I received my acceptance email on 1st of October. It's strange they removed it. Try and contact them and ask for it.
Will do. Hope it goes well.
Thanks!
Great idea! I'll get in touch with them and see what happens :)
Congrats on the launch Dragos! Best of luck :-)
Thank you!
Awesome post Dragos! If you were to do it again, what would you change to attempt lowering your development costs or accelerating shipping time?
Thanks, Eddie!
Time was not a constraint to be honest. Obviously, shipping faster is always better.
I would probably try to do it myself or create a simple MVP ( simulate the functionality of the app and do it manually )
Thanks for the info. You're right, I think giving yourself some time constraints forces you to be more resourceful. I am going to set some constraints to reach certain steps in my side project too.
I had a plan to launch in 3 months initially, but the developers were delaying it from month to month.
I'm curious about your process used to find developers to work on this project -- are you a techie at all?
I'm an Android developer, so I guess that makes me a techie. I thought that rather than learning some new technologies it would be better to hire.
Before hiring the agency that did Netcrumb, I looked into Upwork and found some agencies from Ukraine and Russia, but their prices were a bit higher and I was not able to explain what I'm trying to create.
Later I had some Facebook connection who I knew he was a web dev and I asked him and that is how I started working with them.
I don't think is hard to find developers.
I think is incredible hard to find the right developers and then ask them to develop your vision.
To be honest, I wouldn't start again. If you are a developer, it's better to learn and develop it yourself.
If you're a non developer you have two choices, either find a techie co founder or hire someone in house or be sure to test him a lot before starting.
I'm gonna write a detailed post about my experience and how to have more chances to find the right developer.
I was more interested in the how you would validate their expertise if you're a non technical but you're a techie so it's okay :) I too am a techie haha
Congrats on your progress thus far
I think there are a few things you can do, but that doesn't guarantee anything.
Some things that a non-techie can do:
These are just some ideas that come to my mind right now.
Great post! I built, but never published, a page builder similar to yours. Yours look very nice and a lot more digestible with more features :)
Thanks, Andrew! What happened? Why you didn't launch?
It's still an MVP that lacks some features, but it does the first job!
Nothing. It was just a small side project I wasn't sure would go anywhere. I also built a small a-frame (WebVR library that uses HTML elements to build the scene) template and that turned into its own project for a while :)
And then you lost focus on it or why did you stop? Are you working on anything, right now?
Think I kinda lost focus because of the WebVR stuff. I was also a little unimpressed with my own compared to the fancy stuff available. On top of that, I was building a back-side that let you visually chop up a plain template to make it into a configurable page, and it was pretty difficult to use.
Always working on something new, but I want to start being more methodical in the way I decide on projects to work on - find smaller projects with actual demand rather than build based on my ideas.
Thanks for sharing Dragos!
Thanks for your support, Emil!