W3rocks

W3rocks is now making $4000 a month, enough to cover my rent and expenses!

Probably the biggest thing that helped me get here was charging more. I charge companies around $400 a month, so I only needed 10 paying customers.

This is super exciting, because it means that I can theoretically afford to quit my job and go full-time on W3rocks. But I'm not sure if I'll make that jump just yet…

It's been a long slog to get here, but W3rocks just passed 200 signups! This has been the result of several efforts, including blogging, social media marketing, press, and podcast appearances.

We were stuck around 100 signups for a long time, but what really turned the tide for us was press. I emailed 30 different bloggers and journalists this past quarter, and two of them ended up writing articles that drove a lot of traffic and signups. Now I'm just hoping that a lot of them will convert to paying users soon. 🤞

As of today, W3rocks costs 4x more. I raised prices from $100/mo to $400/mo, and emailed existing customers to let them know. Fingers crossed this goes well! This will definitely a major update in my journey path and this will definitely be contribute more.

Yesterday we launched W3rocks on Hacker News and got to the front page! Overall it resulted in 6,000 page views and almost 100 new signups. Here are three lessons I learned:

Refine your website before launching. There were several typos and errors on my site that I could've fixed beforehand if I'd asked a few friends for their opinions.

Submit multiple times if you have to. This was my third time submitting attempt in two weeks. The first two didn't make it to the front page, but this one did.

Don't pay attention to the haters. There will always be some negative commenters. Ignore them, try not to take it personally, and focus on the positive.

I'm excited for what comes next!

Today one of my first trial customers for W3rocks converted to paid. I noticed when I got the email from Stripe that said "Payment of $99.95". It felt amazing! Just 99 more of these and I'll be exactly where I want to be with my business. Massive hit.

It took 6 weeks, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product for W3rocks. I worked mostly nights and weekends, and I coded the whole thing in Ruby on Rails since that's that I'm the most comfortable with. In hindsight, there were a few features I built that probably could've waited until later. But I'm excited to start talking to customers and see what they think about the product so far!

I've read so many times that you should solve your own problem, and so last week I sat down to think about all the problems in my life.

It turned out that I had quite a few problems worth solving, and the most interesting one led me to the idea for W3rocks!