What can we learn from the Dracula success story hitting $20k?
As an open source developer who has been hacking away for decades in my code dungeon, Zeno's story of making $20k in two months off his open source project has me completely obsessed. Open source ethics and sustainable sales. What a hero!
I want to do this too, so I have distilled the salient points from the @zenorocha's comment replies so we can learn from them. Here's what seems to have led to his success.
- Make something very good that is free and open source. I think it's obvious that Zeno has totally nailed the execution and created something simple, loveable, and complete. Taking a look at his GitHub one can see that he is a prolific developer. 120 repositories means 120 opportunities to create something great like Dracula or clipboard.js. For me the takeaway here is you might have to build a lot of things before you find one that you can execute and that people love and that people will pay for.
The open source version of this project was definitely the biggest driver.
The open-source version of Dracula has been up and running since October 2013. Because of that many people wrote blog posts and linked to the site over the years.
- Collect email addresses. There doesn't appear to be a newsletter signup on the home page. Open question for @zenorocha: how did you collect those 1,400 emails?
The other channel that was really effective for me was email. I can't stress how important having an email list is.
I have around 1,400 contacts nowadays, but when I launched I believe it was around 900. However, I don't think you should use those numbers as a comparison for anything. Email list sizes are not the right metric to look at. How engaged people are on the list is the true metric.
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Great sales copy. I mean just look at that page. Does it not make you want to buy the damn thing immediately? Open question for @zenorocha: what kind of process did you follow to arrive at the design and copy of this page?
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No cold calling or direct outreach (although Zeno does say he wishes he'd done more outreach marketing).
I never did an outreach myself to try to get backlinks.
I didn't reach out to my potential customers directly. The only people I reached out directly were a couple of friends that I wanted to try the product before it was released to the public. My only marketing channels were the existing site and my personal social media accounts.
- Email is better than Twitter for this product, but he also says that having social media accounts did help.
Only 7 sales (3.7% or $289.93 of total) have been made through Twitter.
Having an audience is really important, but it can be made through other channels.
Most of it is organic traffic that comes from the open source version and people coming from my personal social media accounts.
- Doing high impact marketing pre-launch. Zeno also mentions one book in particular that helped him craft his launch. There's a short summary of the book available online. Open question for @zenorocha: would love to know more details about which activities you did to build hype, how you crafted your emails, frequency, etc.
Doing a pre-launch campaign and generating hype was also fundamental to generate initial traction.
- Fixed pricing instead of subscription.
I think there's one important aspect to consider which is related to pricing. Most tools use a monthly subscription model which everybody is already tired of. This product I created uses a one-time purchase model, which definitely has a LOT of drawbacks. Still, I think some products can perform better with it.
What I looooooove about this story is that Zeno didn't have to spent a lot of time on emotionally taxing marketing activities like cold calling. In fact he says he didn't really do any of that kind of thing.
What he did do was build things. He built the product, built the email list, built the landing page, and built hype during pre-launch. Great work sir! 👏 👏 👏
First of all, I just want to say thank you for this compilation, Chris. I can genuinely empathize with your enthusiasm. I feel the same when I hear about other cases of open source monetization.
Open Source as a Distribution channel: Building a great product is definitely a vital part of a successful project. However, if you create a great product and nobody finds it, you have a big problem. I believe that open source can serve as a great distribution channel for any product. You can think of it as the free tier on your pricing table. Besides that, it generates a mental trigger of reciprocity. The more you give, the more they will want to help you.
Email List: Answering your question, the signup section is not on the homepage anymore. It's only available on the theme pages (https://draculatheme.com/visual-studio-code). I didn't do anything fancy, I just added that box on every theme page, and during the pre-launch, I had a box on the homepage to tease people about Dracula PRO.
Sales Copy: I think this goes back to knowing your audience. I'm a developer and developers can smell products with fluffy marketing buzzwords. I knew that if people were going to take me seriously, I had to be serious about the technical details of the product.
Outreach: There's a lot of power in direct sales. Even though this was not the strategy used on this product, I still believe this can be extremely effective, especially on the B2B space.
Social Media: Having a strong social media presence is arduous work, but it definitely helps when you need to launch something. The reason why I like email better than any social media channel nowadays is that it gives me direct access to my audience with zero (or almost zero) filters. I don't have to worry about any algorithm deciding if my content will be shown or not to my followers.
Pre-Launch: People underestimate the power of a pre-launch campaign. I'd strongly suggest spending time in this area since it can not only help with sales but also be the start of a relationship with your audience. Here are all the emails I sent before launch (https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0ub70Ak).
Pricing Model: I believe that the SaaS market is saturated. That doesn't mean that SaaS as a pricing model is not good. In fact, the SaaS model is, by far, the best pricing strategy ever created. However, I see people using SaaS without even thinking if that's the best pricing for their type of product.
In my case, I spend a lot of time writing a theme and then very little on support. In a way, this is similar to a book, where you spend a lot of time writing, and then very little time after launch making corrections and adjustments.
When you think about revenue, think like a programmer. Imagine 3 variables:
C (Number of Customers) x F (Frequency of Buying), T (Average Ticket).
In January, when I was planning this product, I put together this projection (https://share.getcloudapp.com/d5uv4K1P).
(C = 500) x (F = 1) x (T = $49)
I planned to make $24,500 in the entire year of 2020. At the exact moment I'm writing this I made $24,445.06 in sales (https://share.getcloudapp.com/wbu0yE9m).
Amazing, thank you so much for sharing all of these details.
Agree the copy is good. And the story is similar to tailwind. But it's not 2 months of work. He has been spending years working on Dracula. If u have a SaaS app hitting pmf and work for so long, u can get tremendous result too.
Yes absolutely, it's not 2 months of work. As @Primer says below it's years of work and then 2 months of sales.
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Your perspective is wrong. This is not a one-off. This is not a story that's ended, but a story that is just beginning...
Most people build a product first, have a big launch, and nothing happens (e.g. no to little sales). They didn't build the audience, first.
This is an example of audience building. He created an audience over time, he earned his audience trust, and when he had something to sell, he had an audience to sell it to.
He front loaded the time to build an audience to get to the point where he could sell a paid product.
Now, he can capitalize on that front loaded work. He can sell new paid products over and over again to this (ever growing, and trusting) audience. Like most anything in life, it just took time to get to the starting line.
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I don't think you can answer this for somebody else. It entirely depends on the goals of the person doing it.
For me personally if one of my open source projects generated $20k I would be super happy. It's icing on the already tasty cake of getting to make cool stuff that other people benefit from.