Placemark
Tool for editing maps
Long time since I've written here. Here's what I've been up to:
Placemark seems like it's going well. It's hard to judge whether things are going well or poorly because so many of my expectations are set around VC-backed startups. From day one, Placemark has made enough revenue to cover operations budgets and then some. It's also a long way from replacing a tech salary, but I can picture that happening on the long scale.
It's been exciting working on the product and the marketing and seeing the steady growth so far. Placemark is now a pretty advanced piece of software - both a blessing and a curse. But building on the initial assumptions I made in the codebase has been generally great - the abstractions have tended to work, and made things like additional formats and new features and operations simple enough to add. There are some parts still where increased complexity is multiplicative, but a lot of parts where it is peacefully just additive.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the VC option, and that's now sort of "known" - if I wanted to do it, I know roughly who would be on board and how it'd work.
What I'm thinking about right now: launching the enterprise plan, finishing the remaining vital features, and all the while starting to allocate more time to marketing and the business level than pure coding.
Hope everyone success on their projects!
Today Placemark is public for signups! I went with a no-free-plan strategy, 14 day trial, and $20/mo pricing to start. Already getting absolutely great feedback and rapidly making improvements to it. The jitters yesterday were intense - furiously fixing last-minute bugs, collapsing on the couch, and repeat. Today's a bit steadier, and pumped to post a changelog with updates next week.
4 Comments
Thanks for the update! I'm glad to hear Placemark is doing well.
It sounds like you're doing a great job of balance between coding and business/marketing, which is essential for any startup.
I'm excited to see what you launch next!
cool! how many paid users you have right now? and what is the channel through which they are reaching you? twitter?
I don't have the guts to link Stripe to my IH account at this point 🤣, but I can give a snapshot - about ~60 paying users, so ~$1.2k MRR. There's no free plan, so that's something to factor in.
Twitter's certainly the first channel for folks reaching me & the site. Besides that, I've been writing & cross-posting to a blog, LinkedIn, and have done 2 podcast appearances. I've done almost nothing so far to analyze which channels are converting, a lot of that is TBD!
interesting. thanks for sharing :-)