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31 Comments

Reached $4k/mo!

Super excited to reach $4k/mo of sales. Thank you so much to all the Indie Hackers who have supported Gravity over the past 12 months.

Over 50%+ of my customer base came from this site. What was initially a side project to help me build my own products has turned into a business I'm very proud of.

Thank you, your support really means a lot to me 🙏🏻

  1. 2

    Is your code encyrpted? How do you prevent people from pirating your software?

    1. 1

      It's not encrypted, the product is the code. It's difficult to stop people pirating it, but I believe it's unlikely that my users will share it after paying $497 for it.

    2. 1

      The code is in the backend, isn't it?

  2. 1

    Thats absolutely great! Congratulations!

  3. 1

    Well done, Kyle! 👍

  4. 1

    Very cool, will consider for an upcoming project. Congrats on the milestone!

  5. 1

    Congratulations! If you can hit $4k, you can get to $10k, which can get you to $100k. Keep going!

  6. 1

    Congrats! Keep it up. Btw I will signup, sounds awesome for me. NodeJS and React Dev here 👋🏼🙂

    1. 1

      Awesome, thanks Ray! Hit me up if you have any questions :-)

  7. 1

    Congrats, nice work - keep it up! 👏

  8. 1

    Wow! Kyle, congrats! That's a milestone! 🎉

    Would you mind sharing how your pricing model evolved over the last year?

    1. 1

      I started off charging $99 for the first prototype last October, then increased it to $397 in April. I launched v3.0 with the React.js front-end in June and raised the price to $497.

      Stills are still going up, and my competitors charge a lot more, so I think there's still room to increase the price.

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        Who are your direct competitors? I feel $400 is a bit high

        1. 1

          Well, to pay a developer + designer to create the same functionality is going to cost a lot more than $400.

          Or, to do it yourself is going to take a lot of time, which is better spent on building features that customers will pay for.

          Plus, my competitors are charging $1000+

      2. 1

        Thanks for sharing, Kyle.

        One last question (actually two).🙈

        From what I can tell you do include the Sales Tax in your pricing, correct?

        Also, as you use Stripe, how do you calculate the amount of sales tax needed?

        1. 1

          There is no sales tax in the pricing, I'm based in the UK and don't need to charge VAT (yet) :-)

          1. 1

            I’m in Sweden and my thinking was that for both EU and UK VAT is calculated based on the customer’s location, isn’t it?

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              Yes, but only if the company charging is VAT registered and eligible to charge VAT :-)

              1. 1

                Ah, you’re right. And that’s actually good news! 😄

                Thanks, Kyle!

                1. 1

                  @kylegawley On a completely different note, what do you use for your Gravity UI Kit? Is it some lib or everything is custom-built?

                  1. 1

                    Everything is custom designed and built from the ground up :-)

                    1. 1

                      Guess it was a lot of work. 😁

                      I recently jumped on NextJS + Tailwind for my frontend. Works great however I realize that it's so much effort to build more sophisticated elements (e.g. date picker).

                      Btw, Dan Abramov recently asked the community about this (https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1215378405308469253?s=20). Seems like a lot of people are happy with https://ant.design/

      3. 1

        I see. Btw, I guess you never had a free trial. How did you manage to convince your very first customers to pay anything for the first version of Gravity? Did you have a money-back guarantee of some sort?

        1. 1

          I did have a money-back guarantee initially to mitigate the risk, but also – I launched v1.0 on IndieHackers so I had an advantage of customers who have a much higher tolerance for risk.

          1. 1

            Oh, I see. Makes sense, Kyle.

            Thanks for sharing your insight.

            The reason I was wondering is because I'm at that stage now figuring out what the initial pricing model should be for CoreSkills.

            So far I let people give it a try once, and then convert them to paying users, however, most startups I was working with only needed 1 interview so they didn't really convert.

            I'm now thinking to do what you did is start charging right off the bat with a money back guarantee.

  9. 1

    Awesome job! Congrats 🎉

  10. 1

    Well done!

    Been a great journey watching you and Gravity.

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