What I've learned so far earning over $100 with Screenshot Creator
A few months ago, I started Screenshot Creator, which is a web app that helps mobile app developers create beautiful screenshots for the App Store and Google Play.
Here's what I've learned so far:
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It's hard to start a company in a very competitive space. Better UI is often not a good enough differentiator. You need to have a very strong value proposition.
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B2C businesses are hard. People don't have much money. You're marketing and selling to people who will only pay you a few bucks a month. Also, churn tends to be high.
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Let people get value from your product as quickly as possible. On my homepage, I actually let people play around with the editor without even needing an account. And if they do create an account, they essentially have an unlimited free trial until they export screenshots.
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Monthly pricing isn't always the best way to go. People are reluctant to pay monthly for something that they might only use once in a while. After adding a pay-as-you-go option to Screenshot Creator, people started buying more.
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Most users aren't ever going to talk to you. I've had a feedback form since day one in my product and no one has ever used it. You have to reach out to your customers. By sending an email to every paying customer, I've gotten great feedback I wouldn't have had otherwise.
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If you get popular enough, people are going to abuse your product. I initially offered free exports to every new account that signed up. But I had to stop that because people kept signing up with temporary emails and never paying. Make sure you stay on top of abuse.
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You don't need to have feature parity with your competitors. Just build what's important at first. Even today, I only offer five layouts with my editor. But these are the five that people are most likely to use. Validate your core idea first. Then build other stuff.
Thanks for the insights Richard, about #5, what was the percentage % of customers that replied to the emails and gave feedback? and what feedback questions did you use? I'm started emailing my users so I'm looking for these kind of insights.
I'd say only around 10-20% of my customers responded. I kept it pretty light by just asking them to reply back if they had feedback, as I didn't have much success with feedback forms.
As for feedback questions, if you have specific things you're looking to get feedback on, you can always ask about those. I wasn't looking for anything specific so I kept it open by asking a more general question.
Have you thought of any way to mitigate 6?
I was thinking to allow only major emailing systems as they require phone number validation and it's very hard to make multiple accounts.
Edit: after reading another topic i remembered another way - Credit Card verification, to make sure two users can't sign up with the same CC and those are also difficult to get.
I did a bit of research into it and from what I've seen, it's very hard to mitigate it.
You can try blocking temporary email address providers or only whitelisting major email providers, but it's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game. You'll likely exclude legitimate users who want to use your product, and people who want to abuse your product will still find ways to get around it as new temporary email address providers pop up all the time.
Credit card verification sounds like an interesting method and it could probably work if you're asking for their credit card upfront when they create an account. However, that would also drastically reduce your conversion rate as opposed to asking for it at the end of their free trial or when they're ready to pay.
So ultimately, I decided to just remove the free exports as it was the easiest solution. It has obviously stopped temporary email addresses from abusing my product and doesn't seem to have hurt legitimate sign-ups either, so I'm pretty happy with this solution.
Just a note: traditional SaaS products with free trials probably don't really run into this issue. They generally accrue value over time the longer you use it, so users aren't really incentivized to keep signing up with new accounts in order to take advantage of the free trial. For example, if you're using a customer support tool, you wouldn't want to start over fresh every 7 days or so. So abuse seems to be more of a problem if you're implementing a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Nice lessons learned, especially 6 is one I think many people tend to overlook.
So the 100$ is that only for the pay-as-you-go option?
The $100 is from a combination of both the pay-as-you-go and the monthly options. I think I've actually made a bit more money from the monthly option just because a lot of people tend to want to export a lot of screenshots at once, so they tend to go for that option.
Nice, thanks for the insights!
These sound like lessons learned directly from the trenches. Thanks for sharing. So much of what I believe proved to be true in this case. 4, 5, 6 are pretty much everything that happened to/are happening to me.
I just checked the website. How about BOLD ITALICS font styles and pre-made font combinations or text templates?
I haven't really heard anyone ask about adding bold or italics, but adding templates could definitely help people get started more easily.
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I think keeping the app simple is a good way to entice people to use your product and make it easy to use. However, if you want to eventually target a larger audience, then it's helpful to add the major features that your competitors have such that you're on par with them if people are comparing your product with them.