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Is ideal and bread not compatible?

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Editor’s note: Open source makes the software world thrive. The developer was satisfied with the growing number of stars in GitHub – until one day he received a bill from the landlord. Kitze, the developer of Sizzy, a browser customized for developers and designers, has experienced this kind of mental journey, and the stars can’t eat. So after a period of thinking, he decided to withdraw his project from GitHub, and then made the product a subscription fee, although there were some spray attacks in the middle, but the real user response was surprisingly good. So he wrote an article on Medium to describe his own experience, and the lessons are worthy of reference by other developers. The original title is: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

Hey, man, hello.

I have been writing here for a long time, but I don’t want to write an article for “let this blog have a sigh of relief”, I got it, I won’t.

Okay, now I have a story to tell. Last month I finally launched a new version of Sizzy. It has evolved from a simple web application to a sophisticated browser for designers and developers. I want to say that this month is very exciting, but in fact, this is a long journey of 2.5 years. During this time, I made a lot of mistakes, but I also learned a lot of lessons, so I want to share this whole story with you.

Solve your own problems, everything else will be solved

Tweet I wrote after I thought of this in 2017

As I have done before, I try to solve my own problems. I was a freelancer at the time, and previewing the same website on multiple devices was a big problem for me. Customers want the app to work flawlessly on every device. So every time I make changes in my app, I have to switch 20 device variants in Chrome, which drives me crazy. I am obsessed with automating things. I will spend a few hours automating a task that takes only 3 seconds, so I don’t have to repeat these steps in the future. My sister is not the same. In order to be too lazy to buy a second pair of batteries, she can alternately swap a pair of batteries to two remote controls every day, 10 times a day, and insist on not buying batteries for 10 years. She is absolutely okay to do this. I think everyone is different.

In fact, you can check out the article.

It’s far away. After only one day of work, I have saved a lot of time when working for future clients. I released the app and opened it on GitHub so everyone can use it and make their own contributions. Everyone likes it very much. This project has received more than 5,000 stars. Analysis of the data is crazy. I can’t believe what happened.

Everyone likes it so they will be willing to donate some money, right?

I opened it on the Open Collective (open source project financing platform), and the total amount I raised for me in the 2.5-year period was $93. After I told Tweet about this, several people said, “Okay, maybe everyone doesn’t use this.” I know, they just want to let me down, but the data has something to say. There are 7,000 to 10,000 people using this app every month. Donation links are everywhere, so it’s impossible to miss them.

The problem is here: When you give away something completely free of charge, everyone is less motivated to pay for it. People think so, it’s nothing new. When was the last time you gave an app a “pay for your willingness” slider to select more than $1?

I made a huge mistake

It took me a long time to realize that launching Sizzy as a web application is a big mistake. There are a lot of restrictions that prevent me from exploiting the full potential of the app. I have too many ideas, butIt is impossible to implement all in the web app. I want to make a real browser. So I buried it in Electron. Soon after letting the first 0.0.0.0.0.1 (for example, not the real version) the Electron version available, I published an article so that others can avoid the pits I have experienced and let React works with Electron. I am making progress.

Obviously I want to make a paid version of the app, because the donation doesn’t quite suit me. But I don’t know what to do.

• It seems to be a fucking move to close an open source project in order to collect money.

• It seems very complicated to do both the open source version and the paid version.

I called Greg and asked him how he had suffered from insomnia. He was very enthusiastic, but when a goal seems too far away, we can’t imagine a clear path to achieve, we always think of the same Drawer:

Our favorite excuses drawer

I was born in Macedonia and lived in the Netherlands. Both countries cannot use Stripe. I contacted Stripe and they told me that the Netherlands would soon be available (it was indeed a few months after Stripe landed in the Netherlands), but it was difficult for me to accept an excuse for not having to pay for the app.

I mean, every cool developer is using Stripe, right? They have a cool website and a dashboard that everyone likes. I want to see my $$ numbers appear on a beautiful, colorful dashboard. In fact, there are 108,351 other payment service providers available for me to choose. But no, payment is difficult. This is impossible. Also, I have to find a way to let this app update automatically? How can I do this? Where do I go to store all the installers? What if I have to spend a lot of money? How can I clean up all these messes? There are also those licenses, registrations, e-mails, newsletters, etc… I know, in fact, I better forget these “problems” and let them dry for 2 years.

Transfer focus

After launching the app, I stoppedFreelance, I launched React Academy, and then I was busy with the seminar, so I didn’t have to use Sizzy at all. I completely ignored this application and stopped paying attention to the problem. Although its usage is still high, and usage is even rising. This shows that the application is very useful to everyone, even the most basic form. There are several companies that want to buy it from me, but I don’t want to sell it. I know that one day I will correct my mind and then return to the original point.

If it doesn’t work for me, I don’t want to sell it to someone else

Last summer, I tried to use this app again. My first reaction was “Oh, my God, why do you want to use this ghost thing? It could have been much better.” But everyone does not see it like this. When you adjust your brain to this problem-solving mindset, you start to see problems with everything. When I use this app, I don’t like it because I think about other potential versions of it. So I decided to transform it again. I decided to make it happen when I made it what I was willing to use every day. This is my goal.

Second opportunity

I am busy with seminars and conferences and have little time to focus on any other project. I travel a business every week, then I took this out of the excuse drawer:

Unable to concentrate on getting the job done if I stay in one place for a long time – Kitze

But I don’t want that excuse to stop me, so I hired Praneet to get the app for a few hours a day. From a technical point of view, he helped me get Sizzy back to life. We updated a lot of old dependencies, cleaned up some code, switched a few libraries, and so on.

The problem is that I don’t know how to advance this project. There is still a lot to do, I don’t know where to start. Payment integration has not even started yet, and there is no landing page. As he fixed the bug and added new features, I started working on the landing page. Most of the new features don’t appear in the current version because I haven’t considered all of them yet. We took a step forward and stepped back two steps. I won’t say it’s a waste of time, but I hope I can better prioritize and make estimates. Unfortunately, I don’t have one. I have not set any time limit and weekly goals. We are just coding.

Another problem is that I can’t focus on a goal for a long time. I started working on the landing page, but eventually I used a React library to make the landing page. ????

I also hope to solve this problem, but I ended up with a half-way solution. There are too many things to do, the release seems toI have been exhausted and lost interest. Praneet finally decided not to join my project full time, so we parted ways.

Last opportunity

I went back to a business trip, meeting, and hosting a seminar. I started shooting video blogs. I have a lot of fun things, and then I have to use business as an excuse for not having time to process my application.

At some point in the beginning of 2019, we started discussing his full-time job with Praneet again. After a lot of iterations, we reached a one-year contract and returned to the development of the application. If you haven’t made any money, it’s a great spur to me to pay for someone every month. To be honest, I myself think that it is impossible for one person to finish everything by himself. This application will not see the bright day.

The busy meetings and seminars almost came to an end, so I finally had a lot of time to stay at home, and I finally returned to my site. To be honest, traveling and wandering around may seem interesting, but believe me, there is nothing better than staying in the same place and staying focused for a long time. If you see a photo of those who work happily at the pool, just think about how glaring the sun is, and how much fun the kids next to you can do. Life on Instagram is a fake life.

In any case, I finally decided to sit down and do this thing.

If you use any drag and drop tool to develop, the landing page can be done in one day, but not, it is not good enough for the perfectionist living in my heart. I have to do everything from scratch. Everything must be optimized, dynamized, and taking into account the smallest details. I am a believer in #YOLO #JUSTSHIPIT development, but the correct landing page will basically be able to sell apps for you. I used Twizzy to prove this, and I wrote an article on IndieHackers about “just paying for the mindset that is not always correct.” In the absence of marketers, everyone is willing to share and purchase this app only because of its unique landing page with eggs embedded everywhere.

Sizzy’s landing page has been completed, and it’s time to move on.

Oh, man, there are questions about payment

Although Stripe is available in my current Poland, I still choose Paddle as a payment provider because it automatically handles VAT for EU customers. I used Paddle in the Netherlands, but my hand was stuck in an excuse drawer.

Because the app is in Electron, I can’t use Paddle’s SDK to authorize the app. “Add a few lines of code” becomes “Manually calculate everything in a few weeks.” I am not allowedDon’t write everything about payment logic from scratch. From the back end to standalone applications for managing licenses and subscriptions, as well as all Electron code for activating, deactivating, and verifying licenses. When you only look at the functionality of an application, you might think “I can write one myself in a few weeks”, but actually packaging it into something that can be distributed to the user requires a lot of work. Don’t let me get the update and release server.

I learned a lot during this process, but I don’t want others to do it manually. I already have some plans to release the entire infrastructure as a service, so that everyone can easily use Paddle to sell their Electron applications. It only took me 3 years to release it.

Delete the GitHub Codebase

To be honest, it’s a bit bad to delete the codebase and remove the project from my file. I hate this feeling, but I have to shrug. I have to convince myself that I have not done anything wrong. This app has served a lot of people for 2.5 years, but I rarely get any contribution. Now is the time to seriously consider what is important.

Hey, next… I want to mention the M word, and then I will lose a lot of readers.

Money.

Money is important.

Hell, most developers, most people think that money is evil, and that money is not important. This is a taboo topic. Ok, complain to your friends that you are not getting enough money this month or can’t pay your bills. They will like this conversation and everyone will tell their own story. Now continue to tell your friends that you have made a lot of money this month. You can use a knife to cut the tension in the air. Others don’t want to hear that. Money is not important. Let’s go. . I barely saved any money, but I don’t want to think about it now. At least I learned something. One day, the situation will magically reverse, I know. The guy made money because his grandfather was very rich. The girl made money because she was lucky. Now that we are not discussing this issue, please go back to your complaint.

There are so many great developers who have developed such great tools, but they haven’t considered making money, even for a second. A friend once said that I was “greedy” because I left a company to get a higher salary. What the hell. This is a very naive mentality, I am doing my best to spread this information to every developer…

Open source all day, write blog posts, adjust settings, editor themes, these are all fine, until your landlord comes knocking at the door or when you come to the checkout counter. You have to sit on a crazy 2-hour commute every day, and then you tell yourself, “At least I know a lot of SVG parties.”There are things.” Go to hell. We don’t know how long this state can last. No one can guarantee that we can keep our jobs and stay in the most profitable and spoilt for the next 10 years. Industry.

A factory supervisor – a person who is reading newspapers for factory workers

The factory supervisor thought his job was safe until one day the factory owner came in and replaced him with a radio. But the factory director didn’t have Medium and Hacker News every day telling him that the radio was going to take his job. However, developers continue to see the news that AI and ML are gaining momentum and everything is becoming more and more automated. We completely ignore this fact and are willing to believe that we can sit back and relax with the high-paying work of moving boxes with CSS. (The exception is someone who knows how to repair a printer, and your work can be saved forever)

A long time ago I learned not to be obsessed with stars. I still like open source, and I also open source a lot of things, but not everything must be open source. Don’t refute me, don’t misunderstand me. If it is not because of open source, we can’t do anything. There are many outstanding people in the community. Some people rely on open source to make a living, and there are well-funded open source projects such as Babel and Webpack.

But, most developers don’t make a penny from open source. No points at all.

I have a lot of friends (so-called friends who have responded to my tweets twice) have developed great apps or services, they have not made a lot of reasons for paying, now they have been buried in the ocean of problems Inside, basically it is free to solve problems for others. Whether this sounds cruel, it is a sad reality. I really hope that the GitHub Sponsors situation will change, but it’s still far from launching paid SaaS products because donations are optional.

My philosophy is that if I invest a lot of time and money into a tool that can save a lot of time for users and companies around the world, I might charge it as well.

God, what is this article about… Hey, yes, Sizzy.

It’s time to release it. Everything I have calculated, I hope that at least a small number of existing users can be converted into paid users.

It is time.

The 0.0.1 version of this app is ready to be downloaded.

Everything has been properly tested.

I created a professional video that showed all the features of the app.

Twitter posts are also ready.

Product Hunt article is also ready.

It’s time to press the button, but it’s too hard.

I am very afraid that all the original users will grab a pitchfork and wait for it at my door, because this tool is no longer free.

But, Scorpio… I am completely prepared for what is going on next.

Grand release

It must be the sacred monkey ball (things that attract attention) across the sky! I did not expect that everyone will be such a reaction!

Sizzy earned 2352 votes on Product Hunt. It was chosen for the best of the day, the best of the week, and the third place of the month. It got more votes than Facebook’s Libra and Raspberry Pi 4.

I decided to use the gifts on Twitter to encourage everyone to forward, and the results really worked! After the gift, I couldn’t find a suitable tool to pick the winner, so I made another Lucky Retweet. You may wish to give a gift to your product, you will be surprised by its effect. I donated 30 lifetime licenses and not just three. Although some of your friends may complain that they will not forward it for you, all the winners will be happy and grateful. Overall this is a very positive experience.

The initial feedback was amazing. When I started to harvest the first batch of subscribers, I couldn’t believe it. It’s been 1.5 months since the release, but I still feel the same when I harvest new users.

The sound of the spray is always louder

I believe that saving a few dollars a month can save you and your team hundreds of hours a month without having to think about it. In retrospect, I should set the price high. It’s too hot to sell. If you go to the list of companies on the landing page, you will find Samsung, Bentley, Comcast, Toyota, Sketch, Hallmark, Basecamp, Algolia, etc.

What the hell is going on?

Those who realize that a tool can save themselves and even help him make money, they will buy it without hesitation and continue their lives.

However, those who are clearly pricing experts for SaaS products are much more vocal. If you just look at those external reviews without knowing the actual statisticsOn the argument, there may be a completely wrong impression, as if the product is not performing well.

The most common complaints are:

• I just want to pay once!!! 111! 11 !

• This should not be made a subscription

• Hey, this should be free! 111 ! 1

• I want to develop my own version and distribute it to everyone for free, greedy companies that are charging users similar fees.

• Is this different from Google Chrome?

• Is this different from the Chrome extension launched in 2007? I can use that too.

Okay, no one forced you to use this?

Imagine if you go to a clothing store and see a piece of clothing and then oh “Oh my Scorpio, this shirt actually costs $20? Are you crazy? I can buy it for $7 next door. One item. I can still buy a skirt, cut two knives, and then wear it as a T-shirt. In fact, I can also sew my shirt!!!!”

Or imagine that you go to a supermarket and start to ask the cashier “What?! This bottle of milk costs $3? Do you know that I can get 1 bottle for $2.50 in the west of the city? I can even Hide your own cow, raise it, and then milk it for free every day!!!”

In both cases, you may be seen as a madman, and then sent out by the security guard. But unfortunately, on the Internet, everyone forgot that they are also talking to real people. Quite simply, if you don’t agree with the pricing of the product, then don’t buy it and leave it here. You can spend the same money on a large cup of latte, and then spend 25 hours a week manually to do something special tools you can do for you. You look at it yourself!

Focus on customers

Fortunately, I learned to ignore negative comments and didn’t waste too much time on meaningless Internet discussions.

I didn’t waste my energy trying to convince people to buy my app, but instead decided to focus on the customers who actually bought it and make sure they get the most value out of it. Since the launch of the app, we have been working hard to improve it, and we have released five new versions with a lot of new features. I also set up an open Trello billboard so that everyone can see our roadmap and vote on the features they want to implement.

Email is piled up and there are too many emails that I need to handle. I tried several tools, but none of them worked. I realized that I can’t do everything.Rely on me alone. So my girlfriend, who was already the QA of the project, took the initiative to work overtime to help me with other management matters such as mail. A week later, I decided to hire her to work part time and compensate her time appropriately. For some people, this may sound very strange. To be honest, it is a bit difficult to separate work from personal life, but we managed to do just that. She is very excited about this project and is fully committed to all kinds of affairs.

Sizzy developer Kitze and his girlfriend

I want to make sure that every customer problem and complaint is resolved as quickly as possible, and her role is crucial. After resolving the customer’s reported issues, we will personally send them an email letting them know that the new update has resolved their issue. Everyone loves this level of customer support. We know that the bigger the scale is that it is difficult to undertake such customer service, but we will do our best to maintain this service.

Next step

Currently, Sizzy has about 1,600 users, which is crazy, because the only marketing I have done so far is to sponsor a newsletter list, which was last week. Most marketing is like word of mouth marketing for this product. Before I start marketing, I want to further improve the stability of the application. It is still far from my ultimate goal. I have too many ideas about making Sizzy a tool that every developer and designer relies on in their daily work. I hope it can achieve a million users. This may sound crazy, but I know I will do it. The only problem between me and that goal is… me. But I won’t lose myself anymore. Sizzy is now my main concern, everything else is secondary. When you know how much you depend on your customers, you really can sleep all night. This is a strange feeling, but I like it!

I don’t know what will happen next. There are 5 large investment companies that contact me directly. I am still not sure if I should take the VC route, because I feel that this will make me have another boss. If someone controls it, I will always work hard. I will try to go as far as I can without investment, because it feels amazing to have a startup company 100% and not rely on anyone to grow it.

Startups? ! Am I talking about a startup? I really hate this word. It hasIt completely lost its meaning, because someone created a hello world project and immediately changed their Twitter profile to “X CEO and founder.” The title of my profile has no meaning at all. I am developing an app, who cares, no matter how you call it, it doesn’t matter. Even if you change your profile, things won’t change magically. You are just lying to yourself. Happiness is good, don’t worry about how to prove to you your three high school friends who you are.

Hey, I should end before this article turns into chicken soup.

Conclusion

1. Solve your own problems

2. Show your solution to others as soon as possible

3. Package and distribute as soon as possible (remember)

4. Don’t be afraid, shy or frustrated to make it payable

5. Don’t let anyone tell you how much you should charge for your work

I’m worried that other developers are only concerned about negative reviews about paid products, and then they are afraid to pay for their next product rather than for free.

Please don’t be on them!

Please pay attention to your work. Believe that despite the sound of the spray, you will still get a lot of customers, and they are willing to pay their money for your efforts.

As a famous legend (Moldew) once said:

Because the gamer (palyer) always plays, plays, plays, plays, and plays

And hater is always black, black, black, black, black

Baby, I will always say, 甩, 甩, 甩, 甩

Communicating and turning off, all through

If you want to talk more about this, my DM door is open.

Until next, goodbye ????️

Translator: boxi.