DevSkills
Hire the best developers with real-world coding tests
Until December last year, DevSkills offered a so-called early bird plan where any team could sign-up for a year by paying a small one-time fee.
This was how the product made its' first USD 3000.
After that, it became apparent that the pricing must change to facilitate further product development.
The new pricing meant an order-of-magnitude change across all plans. And even though I felt pretty confident that the value the product created outweighed even the new pricing, I was still somewhat nervous about the change.
However, as it turned out, that was a false feeling because this week, two teams bought an annual plan for one of the new tiers, effectively increasing the ARR by USD 6000.
Also, I want to note that both clients' quality is excellent.
So now I can tell with confidence that this change was indeed essential.
I just want to celebrate a bit that I've encountered it multiple times during the past week when my users said they'd enjoyed using my product even though I wasn't really fishing for feedback.
This Indie Hackers interface doesn't seem to let me attach screenshots but trust me, it happened. 😀
That is not something as tangible as money; however, it feels so reassuring!
That's the update. ✌️
It's time to double down on marketing for devskills.co. 📢
There are multiple approaches to tackle it, but the most budget-friendly yet efficient seems to be SEO. 🌐
I realize it's a long-term game. However, it's also the one that's hard to copy if done right. 💡
I'll be mainly focusing on the following two things:
🔗 Generating high-quality backlinks. The idea is that I write something good, sneak in the desired link with the text I want to rank for, and distribute my content across well-known platforms (remembering to set up the canonical URLs).
📈 Publishing marketing pages for search keywords with low difficulty and good average monthly traffic. To find those, I'll need a tool. Planning to give KeySearch a try as the pricing seems to be within my budget.
Three months ago, when I went full-time with devskills.co I had the following goal in mind:
"Either get 5 teams sign with the Early Bird annual plan OR make $2000."
It's December 21, and here are the results:
- 7 teams are on the Early Bird annual plan
- $2300
So I can check off both points, and I feel like it's time to move on to the next stage, i.e., $10k MRR by the end of 2021.
Three are on a free trial, and the other two bought the annual subscription.
What makes it exciting is that they are all either inbound leads or referrals. So it looks like auto-discoverability started to kick in.
Also, the amount of the collected feedback together with the newly discovered work to be done makes me consider ending the early-access plan with an annual one-time fee soon.
Yeah, it happened. 💫
To give a bit of background, I decided to start with early-access pricing, where folks pay once and can access the product for a whole year.
I do believe I kinda leave money on the table with this offer, but I also get much more such as service usage and real-world feedback, which is crucial for the product given its' current stage.
Anyway, happy! ✌️
I'm proud to launch a brand new DevSkills landing page! 🎉
The landing page is not about shiny design. I see it as a chance to communicate how the product can be helpful. Figuring that out is a whole different problem, though.
For me, it has taken several iterations, and I'm sure it's still a long way to go. However, thanks to all the people I had a chance to speak and work with over this time, I've gained the necessary insight into defining how DevSkills is different and how it can help, which I've now consolidated on this little HTML page: https://devskills.co.
This page summarizes the work I've put into DevSkills so far.
It's surprisingly exciting how many opportunities are hidden at first and get revealed as you keep experimenting. 💡
That's what's happening to DevSkills. I discovered two out of three use-cases through conversations with people who were just curious about what I do.
It's been one month since I went on working full-time on DevSkills.
Good time to do a small retro and list down the numbers that are worth tracking.
So here we go. ✨
💸 Revenue: $67
🕺 # of meetings with prospects: 9
📝 Published content:
🔗 LinkedIn
🐦 Twitter
Nothing to show off yet, but the trend is in the right direction. 📈
Getting back to work now. 👨💻
It took me eight hours of writing to finally put down a complete piece, however, it was totally worth it.
Since I'm working on DevSkills solo, I rely a lot on high-quality content which spreads the word for me.
This blog post consolidates the approach DevSkills takes when it comes to evaluating dev competence.👇
Today I received an email from a customer of mine who used the MVP pre-COVID. The email said that their team had resumed hiring and that they want me to help me with tech interviewing!
What a gift to see a customer returning!
This makes the first $60. 🎉
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