Audjust

When I posted on Reddit and Hacker News, Mofi was completely free. I got a lot of users that tried out the product and received some good feedback in the comments. But I also wanted to try out my hand monetizing something. After seeing that the product is helpful, I decided to implement user accounts and monetization. I decided to use Lemon Squeezy to handle payments since I had seen positive reviews of them online and they take care of some of the tax burden that comes with selling to users in different territories.

One thing that I struggled with (and am still trying to figure out) is how much to charge and what is reasonable. Almost all of the features on Mofi are still available for free and without an account (which helps draw in users), but to increase limits and use the results for commercial usage, a subscription is required. My logic behind this was that professional users who earn money can afford to pay and I tried pricing based on that.

I turned on monetization on July 10th and got my first paying user the next day! I felt ecstatic that someone valued my product enough to pay for it and this motivated me even more to continue working on Mofi. I am now continuing to work on new features but also user acquisition to increase revenue.

I posted Mofi on Reddit on the 23rd and on Hacker News on the 26th. The posts were fairly well received with the Reddit posts both getting to the hot page of their subreddits and the HN post making it to the front page first place!

How did I do that? I don’t think there’s a secret, I would attribute it to some degree of luck. But it helped get a lot of traffic onto the website (~14k visitors) and caused ripple effects of the website being picked up by other newsletters, news, and aggregators which are still proving small spikes of traffic now, two weeks after.

When I first posted the site, I just wanted to get the word out and hadn’t implemented monetization yet which might have been nice in retrospect, but also might have looked too aggressive. In my case, the costs to run everything were low enough that I felt comfortable eating them to focus on getting traffic.

Something I’m glad I did was having analytics and diagnostics in place from day 1. This allowed me to quickly detect issues as the traffic rapidly went up. My services didn’t go down, but did at one point some instances did run out of disk space (forgot to clean up temporary files, whoops) which I got an email alert about. If you are thinking of posting to HN or another website with a lot of traffic I would highly recommend adding some tracking so you can “babysit” remotely as the site scales up.

I had come up with the first version of this project five years ago and made a simple version of it. I hadn't advertised it much, but it got some traction through a Reddit post and has gotten a couple of users each month, less than 100 for sure. In this first iteration I included a feedback form which prompted users to share their thoughts when they exported a file and through that, I discovered a lot about what was missing or broken on the site. I had thought of making changes several times, but never got to it.

Fast forward to early this year and I decided to take the plunge and finally rewrite the app from scratch, making sure I addressed some of the issues from the start this time. I finally got everything working and deployed the website online!

I will now work on acquiring more users, so far I have posted on Reddit and added a link to the new site from the old version and will see how that goes. I also plan to post on Hacker News and other forums to experiment with user acquisition.