3D Book
Give some perspective to your book cover.
I wasn’t able to find a web app to generate a CSS 3D book cover generator, so I created my own one. And I realized I was not the only one to need it, so why not offer it to other people as well?
The first version of the website was quite minimalist, so I refreshed the design a little bit, and created a new landing page. Hopefully, it will improve the conversion rate and engage more visitors to sign up.
The pricing model is new too, I switched from a one-time $9.99 purchase to a $3.99/month subscription. I’m thinking of a way to pay for a whole year (something like 19.99$/year).
It has been 24 hours now that I posted the application link on HackerNews. Some numbers:
🔼 75 upvotes
🤖 3,200 unique visitors
✍️ 27 signups
❤️ 1 premium purchase
So a mostly positive day! I can see that people enjoy the home page a lot, and play with the demo, which is very nice.
On the other end, the conversion rate is very low, and I think most visitors just consider that it is a fun application, but not useful to them.
But the fact that one person bought the $9.99 premium plan gives me hope. I’ll try to contact this person to thank them and know what their needs are, to identify a niche I could try to reach (I guess self-published authors).
After a lot of hours spend in my code editor, I finally have a version ready for first tests. I developed it using tools I already knew, using cloud services when possible, because my goal was to release as soon as possible.
The basic features are free, and it’s possible to purchase a Premium subscription for $9.99 as a one-time payment. I’m not sure exactly of the final pricing model…
A small overview of the tech stack:
- Node.js/Express for the webserver
- Heroku to host the webserver
- MongoDB Atlas for the database
- React, only for the 3D cover editor
- Auth0 for the authentication
- Cloudinary to host images
- Stripe to handle premium account purchase
I’m looking for some users to try it, and when it is ready, I’ll post it on HackerNews and/or ProductHunt!
For the book I just started writing, I created a web app that generates the HTML and CSS to embed a 3D book cover in a website. I posted it on HackerNews, and big surprise: it was a huge success! It stayed #1 for the whole day and brought me a lot of useful feedback.
From that day, I kept in my mind to create an application to enable people to create a 3D Cover and embed it without caring of the HTML and CSS, just by copying and pasting a small code snippet wherever they want.