SnipSave

I hadn't worked on SnipSave since the end of 2019 so I decided to sell it.

I've had a small amount of MRR for a while but haven't been able to motivate myself to invest more time into it.

It feels nice to pass SnipSave on to a developer who can bring fresh energy and perspective to the app. It's also great to make some money from an app I've been running for over 10 years.

I modernized the technology stack by rebuilding the front-end in React and upgrading the back-end from Python 2.7 to Python 3.6. This upgrade will make it easier for me to continue to build upon SnipSave and add new features and functionality.

I also built a new organizational feature: Folders. You can now create custom folders and drag code snippets into them for quick organization.

Search and filtering speed has been dramatically improved as well.

But only ~$40/month revenue 😓 (the paid plan is only $5/month).

SnipSave gets 200-250 new user signs every month, with about 8,700+ total accounts created to date. Users create 1,200-1,500 new code snippets every month as well.

The product is very simple, but I'm working on adding some more advanced features to increase it's value to users.

After years of completely ignoring SnipSave (while it continued to gain users), I rekindled my original passion for this product. I really wanted to modernize the app add a paid plan to see where it could go.

The app was originally built with PHP and MySQL on the CodeIgniter framework and hadn't been updated in years.

My tech stack for all new client and personal projects was now Python/Flask/MongoDB/AngularJS, so I decided to redesign and rebuild SnipSave from the ground up in that stack, including a paid plan utilizing Stripe.

I launched SnipSave v3 in October 2017 and got my first couple of paying customers within the first 30 days.

Smashing Mag tweeted about SnipSave as a useful tool for web developers, which led to thousands of visits in a short amount of time and about 370 new signups, the first real wave of new users.

The following couple of months saw higher than average signups, albeit much lower than the initial surge. Then things died down for a few years as I moved on to other projects.

I didn't update SnipSave again until June 2015.

I built a very simple v1 of the product and launched. To my surprise, people slowly started to find it and began signing up.

I was using the app myself almost every day at my job, so I was content to keep it running even with very little traffic and no monetization plan.