Sinosend
Simple way to send and request for files.
I'm in the supply chain business, and sending large files has always been a pain. Services like dropbox are blocked by the great firewall and force customers to signup. Building Sinosend to solve this.
While it may seem like file storage, egress, object management, CDN 's (to name just a few services) are relatively inexpensive, once you start to scale, you soon think different. Real money has to be made to support these operations, especially when you are transferring TB's of data.
We've always had 3 pricing tiers :-
- Free
- Pro
- Business
And it's been great so far, here are some numbers:-
- 550 Free customers (120 of which are monthly actives' with 60 heavily active)
- 22 Pro Customers
- 4 Business customers
In the early days it was a joy to support everyone, and I mean that. However with a small team we have now decided to drop our freemium offer. The weirdest thing is that we had 2 freemium options! Users could always use our free-free service on our home page without even signing up, it was more of a lead magnet you could say. On top of that, we had our fully fledged freemium plan with some pretty lofty limits. What were we thinking, we don't have basecamp money! 💰
One plan surely had to go, this is how we let 550 people down in a targeted email swoop.
Click on the imgur link, you may have to magnify.
Some contents has been blurred.
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Email let down Image (opens in new tab)
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Results are in...
- 6 people wrote not so nice emails. 😠
- 2 users asked for their account to be closed 😥
- 2 people signed up for our new Personal Plan 😎
- 1 person purchased the Business Plan 💪
- 13 opened up new accounts, and are in our new 7 day full access trial 📈
- 20+ users logged back in and didn't know their password 🤣
- 300+ users did nothing (expected)
- 25% less support emails in the last 1 week 😁
- 70% reduction in new signups since removal of the freemium plan. 🙄
- 90% happier me.
I can now focus and target our Ideal Customer Profile and set our goals higher. 👱♂️
Our new plans
- Personal (the old free)
- Pro
- Business
Time will tell...
Boy, it feels like 5 years in my bones, looking back my IH posts, its only been just two 😲 . This is far from high growth, but I feel like sinosend.com has hitting its stride only very recently things are starting to scale. About 6% are paid customers, rest are freemium.
https://ibb.co/zRvYGd8
Image below shows 500 registered users as of today, and conveniently a nice round 2600 slugs.. A slug is a file transfer that my customers have sent over the years.
Have a work document you want to send and keep track off, give us a try https://sinosend.com
Happy to complete our pricing page. Opinions welcome.
I'll try to post the link to the site very soon, had over 20 beta signups in the last couple of days, 0 paid subscribers obviously since our payment page isn't 100% yet.
We are a dropbox like startup but focusing on B2B , sharing large files between asia and the rest of the world (where most file sharing apps are blocked or not in english)
Not sure how to link this, but this was a breaking point for me.
I posted a question on IH, got a lot of good feedback. Got ill from all the late nights. Pushing Through.
Well, yes truth be told , too much time was spent on advanced features such as
- Folder Creation (focusing on files transfers now)
- Advanced view of file /directories /project folders
- File Requests . Sad to drop this feature as it was a core feature really wanted to launch with, but it isn't ready at this time.
On the bright side, stripping out these features has made my life easier. Pushing for a June 2020 Launch
Launched with limited feature set.
I might have spent too long focusing on the UI for web as still not mobile ready.
Users can download files, single or zipped, emails being sent out when the file is downloaded along with geographic information.
More to come..
Wow, I have nothing to show for it yet, but feel like I've come a long way with my coding journey, atleast one goal has been reached, that I can officially call myself a Full Stack developer, well a crappy one, but none the less, fullstack!
The app is coming along nicely, decided against all the hype of server side and just deploying a Single Page Application.
Also decided to roll my own Auth from scratch the hard way.
Yes I know there are countless tools out there like firebase and auth0, but they get quite expensive when they scale, and calling more third party API's is just another point of failure.
Firebase is vendor lock-in, so decided to stay away especially when googleapis are blocked in China, oh and who knows when firebase will be RIP as google does with their other products all too often.
I am knee deep in Vue JS / Cloud Functions & Mongodb Atlas
After testing all the cloud solutions out there, AWS, Backblze, Azure, we decided to go with Alibaba Cloud as they have the most edge locations closest to my customer base where traditionally other services fail to deliver. The journey continues.
Tired of apps that don't really solve my problem. Me and my other colleagues in the supply chain business need to send documents back and forth to our suppliers and customers, usually 20MB - 1GB on average.
We want to obtain useful stats such as when the file was downloaded, as well as geographic location. We also need a bilingual application (Chinese and English).
Dropbox forces users to signup when you sent them a file and does not work in China (where I expect to get majority of my supply side user base)
At the same time I'm learning to code, its going to be a tough journey ahead at 37.