Dracula PRO
A dark theme for top developers
It's been 7 weeks since the launch of Dracula PRO and I made $17,876.38 in sales.
Here are 5 lessons I recently learned.
#1
When you launch something new there's a lot of hype. The next challenge is: How you keep the momentum going?
What I'm doing now is:
- Participating on podcasts
- Writing about the entire journey
- Constantly improving the product
#2
Refund requests will start to come in, but you need to stay positive.
In the beginning, I'd care more about 1 refund than all the other sales I made. Don't get personally affected by that 1 negative experience.
Focus on the "why" and try to avoid that from happening again.
#3
Keep the expenses low. It's very easy to start investing and adding additional operational costs.
How much you spend is equally important to how much you make.
Stay lean.
#4
Your launch was not the finish line, it's just the start. Listen to your users.
Here's my system:
- A user sends me an email with feedback
- I categorize their request and save their email
- Once I'm done with their request, I contact them directly before anyone else
#5
Don't get distracted. With everything that is happening in the world, it's very easy to get distracted and lose motivation.
If you already have a side-project, keep going.
If you don't have a side-project, what are you waiting for? Today is a great day to start.
72 hours ago I launched Dracula PRO. Here are some thoughts and behind the scenes of that process.
Conclusion #1
It's possible to make money with open source.
Conclusion #2
Here's the geographical distribution of traffic this week.
- 🇺🇸 United States: 5,449
- 🇧🇷 Brazil: 4,303
- 🇩🇪 Germany: 1,060
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 1,021
- 🇮🇳 India: 910
The US alone has 23% of total traffic, that's important to know especially when it comes to distributing content at the right timezone.
Conclusion #3
I tried sharing on Reddit, Product Hunt, HackerNews, and IndieHackers.
Even though they brought some traffic, Twitter still is the number one referral source.
- Twitter: 1,788
- GitHub: 1,279
- Hacker News: 750
- Indie Hackers: 527
Conclusion #4
Net Sales are $5,252.47 (after Gumroad fees, refunds, chargebacks, and affiliate fees);
Total Costs are $120.40 (Mailchimp, Typeform, etc);
Net Profit: $5,132.07
Staying lean is very hard, but I'm focused on maintaining the operational costs as low as possible.
Conclusion #5
Now I'm trying to think of ideas to keep the momentum going.
Any suggestions?
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You're the guy behind the Dracula theme? I've been using that for years :)
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Yeeeah :D
Tha's awesome!
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your cost is low, but it is including your salary? if you work full-time with this, hidden cost will be a lot.
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Ha! Very cool. Not heard of this before - then again most of my shit’s whatever is the default 🤦♂️
Great work! -
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So had already built your audiance from at least 1 one year with free theme and now you introduced paid theme.
In 72 hour of introducing paid theme to already exists customer base you made $5132 net profit.
Am I right ?
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That's correct.
I've been building the audience for more than a year with the open source version. That helped a lot during the launch of the paid theme.
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I'm proud of you zeno!!
Thanks for the detailed overview, like I said on IG, you deserve it!
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Thanks Gustavo!!
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This is amazing stuff man! Congrats on your success! If you don't mind me asking - what was your marketing strategy behind Dracula Pro?
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I first started to collect emails. One month before the launch, I put together a page with a sign-up form. After nurturing that list for 3 weeks, I finally released and got a lot of traction from there.
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Nice! Affiliate links are a very good idea
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In 2013, I decided to create a theme. At that time there were hundreds of thousands of color schemes out there, but none of them were appealing to me. So I decided to create my own.
Fast forward to 2020, Dracula is one of the most popular themes in the world. Still, I felt that something was missing. I wanted to use a premium theme with a premium experience, that's why I'm creating Dracula Pro.
This will be a theme built for top developers who are willing to invest in their productivity.
2 Comments
Wow that's a huge achievement Zeno!
Congrats ✨
The theme is also great...
I don't know, even I still can't figure out what actually happens when we purchase a theme, for example I purchased your theme, now what? How will they work?
I never bought a theme so just asking...
Thanks Abhay! You basically get a package of files to configure your favorite apps. You can check draculatheme.com/pro for more details.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago