fullSnap
Web editor for snap scroll websites
I wanted to do a "private" launch at first and kept fullSnap on the shadows while I still get more feedback and keep on adding features that I consider critical in some way.
So, as fullSnap is directly related with my main product (fullPage.js component) I sent an email to my previous customers who purchased fullPage.js or any of its related products. (and that were still subscribed to my newsletter). They were about 12.000.
I started slowly and I decided to only sent it to 1000 people first and see the reaction.
I didn't want to sent it to all my 12.000 email list and risk having to answer many questions or suddenly find many people who found bugs are were expecting a fast response from my side.
Response wasn't huge. A few emails here and there but not huge.
And....
I got my first customer!! Someone purchased a Business license for $59.88 / year! Yeeey!! 💪
Then I sent another 1000 emails the following day, then another 2000 and finally the rest after a week or two.
5 days after the first customer got 7 more purchases and more than $300 in revenue.
However, result were "just ok".
Out of 12.000 people not many purchased. Perhaps they were not the right audience because they were web developers. Perhaps my audience is more people who do not know how to code or companies who want to create a beautiful one page landing page and do not want to bother the developers for a marketing campaign.
This is yet to see!
I gave access to 15 people who followed me on Twitter and were fast enough to ask for a beta version.
I wanted people to share some feedback with me and I asked each of them privately on twitter.
Thanks to it I discovered some bugs and what people was missing from it.
This time I was working for myself thanks to fullPage.js and its extensions. Now I had the time and the resources for a project of this magnitude.
I even had a small team of people working for me. One full time
developer, one part time and one support person.
The initial idea was not to take the previous project and work on it, but to make a much more simple version of a page builder. Based on a number of available blocks and options.
However, the idea kept evolving in my mind with the attempt of having some recurrent revenue and not a one time purchase product and I ended up going back to the very original idea of having a web editor.
My aim? To have a minimum viable version of it in 2 months.
I was so excited about the idea of creating this editor of my own. However, every time someone asked me when it was going to be ready my reply was always the same:
- "In a couple of months it should be ready!"
But the time passed and I kept on replying the same.
- "A couple of months more!"
Those couple of months became more than 6 months and I started to realise it was going to be quite a big project.
I was only working on the front-end side and I didn't even touch the back-end part. This was gonna take much longer and working full-time this seemed like quite a difficult task to do, and then, once launched, to maintain.
I decided to stop working on the project.
I instead started working on "fullPage.js extensions" which were a much smaller task for me and which could provide me with some benefits in the short term with almost no maintenance at all.
fullPage.js extension worked great and I got more than $1000 in the first 30 days.
6 months later I was making more than $4000/month and I decided to quit my job.
However, the fullsnap project stayed on pause.
After working on fullPage.js, a free JavaScript library, for about 2 years and a half I came up with the idea of creating an online editor for fullpage.js.
Basically, the goal was the same as when I created fullPage.js.
I wanted to make things easier for non developers so they could create this kind of snap scrolling sites that look so good.
At that time I was working full-time as a full-stack web developer and I remember coding at night with the excitement of creating something quite interesting.
I had to force myself to stop coding around 11pm so I could rest and relax a bit before going to sleep.
Then I decided to go to a different coffee shop each weekend and work on the project for a few hours in the morning. I kept doing this for about 3 or 4 months.
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