Uhhh, WOW! This is actually really well done. I love the labels anchored to the objects in the image. That is so crucial. And the frame editor, the label position editor, I mean this is seriously well done. I think it might be a bit too powerful for average users though.
It was my bachelor's thesis project, so I just kept adding features. There is a simplified version on mobile, in which you just choose a template and change texts.
I'm also interested in the GIF export. Right now I'm only exporting videos using canvas record stream, but I'm thinking about using ffmpeg.js to support different formats including animated gifs
I work for PaperlessPost.com, and for our Flyer product we export mp4s from ffmpeg compiled to WASM, which is similar to ffmpeg.js but optimized for our use case which sounds similar. We have this WebAssembly method working well but iOS 15 (and the other major browsers) now support MediaExporter which might be a better way to go if you have something else to convert these files. This becomes and issue because you can't control the format MediaRecorder is recording to but the management of memory, the image quality, the compression, the performance hit will be more ideal than these other methods. OMGgif is very slow and will produce large files or very bad looking ones. Keep in mind that GIFs limit the colors so something that looks nice on the screen might not look the same after it is saved. The other thing to look out for is the WebCodecs APIs which should be the ultimate way to handle all of this in the future but it is only working in Chrome I think https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs
It looks nice, but some people might be instantly turned off by the new meme dialog.
I was pretty tired so I didn't read everything that carefully, and just pressed the "upload gif" button expecting file picker, but instead I got an error message that the upload failed. I actually thought your webpage was broken.
Only when I when back and read everything carefully did I realize what had happened. Two and a half suggestions: In my mind upload means its transferred from my device, so consider changing the text to "fetch" or something. Handle empty url as a special case. Like maybe just highlight the url box in a red border or something. And finally the half suggestion: measure whether uploading (my guess, but idk) or fetching is the more common usecase, and emphasize that one visually.
Great job, especially the UI, which is clean and simple. I like the Tools section of your thesis - not being up-to-speed on web dev, I understood the which? and why? of your tech stack in under 5 minutes.
Neat. I have a real business problem to solve using very similar techniques if you are interested to discuss. Not memes specifically, but with the image and text mix.
I've tried pretty hard to get it to work with ffmpeg and mediaRecorder, but both of these options are quite limited at the moment and the results just weren't good enough. Other option would be to go server-side which I don't want to do.
I was unaware the rendering could and was being done client-side! Given the limitations I can see why gif would indeed be suitable format. You've tooled a compelling amount of functionality into something very lightweight and convenient, and that's a more than acceptable tradeoff.
How? Of course asking OP to add features for a site he offers for free is wrong, but I don't think he's wrong about gif. As far as I know all the "gif" sharing sites like giphy and stickers in chat apps like discord, etc actually use webms/webps.
Twitter for instance automatically converts gif to h264.
However there is a point to be made that iOS only grants VP9 decoding to Youtube, certain colourspaces fail to decode on Android etc. ergo gif is a safe default.
> The total cost of this tool is: 60$ (yearly, domain) + 60$(yearly, hosting) + more than 150 hours of programming (which would be about 4000$ from where I live). Revenue is non-existent. I've decided to leave the site ad-free because ads suck but now it's only eating money so please donate. My current plan on getting a payout is getting Elon Musk to use it and hoping he will buy me a Tesla.
That is a seriously good result for 150 hours give or take. I wonder if Elon peruses HN...
Good job, may I ask , what was your marketing strategy? Did you engage a lead generation company, SEO? How did you gain visibility in the virtual shops?
Used social media for promotion?
Pricing structure?
If those questions are too profound, feel free to not address them, but either way, this is impressive for a solo Indy dev.
And what is the tech stack?
Do you listen to users feature requests and bug reports?
I have a project in mind myself and all the above questions I wouldn't know how to handle.
I have not engaged in any outside marketing consultancy, lead gen or SEO. I have done some stuff myself, written blog posts and tried my hand at basic marketing tasks, but honestly i don't have much time for it. For gaining visibility, i mostly rely on app store optimization or paid ads.
Tech stack is swift, and python on the backend. I do listen to user requests and bugs, in fact I get tons of great feedback from my users with how quickly i respond to their issues, usually resolving issues within an hour, all on my own. It takes up a decent chunk of time, but I do care a lot about the customers, so that makes it worth it.
Tried signing up, but (presumably) your configuration is pointing the signup link in the email at your local Dev environment...
I tried replacing localhost with wax.run, but it didn't do anything.
Lastly, considering you are all about marketing and growth, you'll need a landing page that demonstrates this. As in, your landing page needs to be better than most landing pages. While I'm all about minimalism, I found it quite jarring to just land on a page with a half moon on it, which doesn't really do anything.
Some words about who you are would go a long way. There is a "team" link in the navigation and that also doesn't go anywhere (without a login presumably)
Just some pointers. Pm me when we can sign up, because if you are the people who solve marketing for me, that would easily be the biggest revolution in my entrepreneurial journey. I hate marketing so much.
Thanks for the feedback! I clearly made this comment prematurely, but the interest pushed to get a reasonable landing page in place and implement the login in production. Let me know what you think of the extended pitch (click "what is this"): https://www.wax.run/
Can you send me a note mike@wax.run ? Would like to stay in touch as we get closer to launching.
Wax helps you systematically find and implement strategies that grow your company. The system is based on the book Traction[0] by Gabriel Weinberg (founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo) and Justin Mares (founder of Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto). Wax guides you thru process of testing growth channels to find what works for your company. We also offer a "done for you service" where a contractor will execute the the strategies for you.
For some time I wanted to make browser-based utils/time wasters in the same vein (think Photopea but simpler, or .io games) - to generate some passive income, even if it'd be $100 a month or so. Has anybody succeeded in that and can share what was key to achieve income? I mean, most savvy people have ad blockers these days.
Have a client from Turkey who is basically running all Agar.io clones today (600+ online players) in the Web. Google ranks him 1st in search results (even higher than the original Agar.io itself) for multiple competitive keywords, and he makes around €3-4k every month from ads. Target audience is mostly kids, who are looking for unblocked alternatives of their favorite browser games at school.
He keeps saying SEO is everything, and won't drop the tiniest hint about how he's achieving to top Google results.
Go here. https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
Search for his site: agario.tube (probably this)
It lists backlinks. Example backlink is from bostonchildrensmuseum.org
Go to google. Search "agario site:bostonchildrensmuseum.org"
tldr: he is hacking sites or paying someone to hack sites. likely exploiting wordpress vulnerabilities to insert hidden backlinks into thousands of websites.
Woah, definitely saving this tool. Kind of ridiculous how Google still can't manage such shady tactics. I guess using marquee is not without reason ;) Probably due to an omission in some blacklist - I know that Google should detect some "invisible" links or keywords.
I made a web game that has been played by around a hundred thousand people so far and net a few hundred dollars. Now that the idea is validated I'm releasing a huge update soon that will tie in with a Patreon page and I expect it to earn some decent monthly revenue.
Personally I think app would be the way to go, and charge some in app fee or subscription. I don't think anyone would pay for browser apps, and you would require massive volume to be ad supported.
Yes the users are quite active. The main thing people are paying for are the video features and the video scraper. There is some code which allows the app to pull videos from youtube, instagram, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc, and I think that is really the thing that separates this app from other generic image editors.
Oh sure, YouTube forbids that. Once there's enough traffic to care, it'll get cut off. But YouTube is somewhat unlikely to try to sue one's socks off for breaking the ToS. Copyright owners though...
Same, but on the other hand memers do seem to take their craft seriously. While I wouldn't want to pay monthly for this app as I would use it a few times a year (I'll just fire up photoshop), I guess its not too much cash for users serious about creating. Apparently you can make some good cash focusing on a niche user market.
Something interesting I found is that the many of the 'power users' of the meme world have many different meme making apps and they pay for most of them!
We’ve long spent resources on increasing attention and popularity; might this expense be similarly justified? Having a meme generator at one’s fingertips seems a timely way to increase standing in the online culture participated in.
The Android version seems abandoned, it hasn't been updated in several years and there are several reviews complaining that paid features no longer work. Are there any plans to update it?
I do personally apologize for this. The android app was built by a very close friend of mine as a favor/side project back in the early days, and you are correct, it has been abandoned :( The plan is to just take it down. I need to contact him but don't want to offend him! Let that be a lesson of going into business with friends!
You’re making a healthy revenue, any reason you don’t want to just contract out a few updates? I work full time but I've also run a small contracting business for years, happy to do it at a reasonable cost.
I have considered this, I don't see anywhere near the same purchase conversion on android that I do on iOS. But that could also be due to build quality. Do you have any insight on how successful pay models are on android apps?
This is the norm on Android, and means you have to have huge scale before it's worth releasing a paid or subscription app on Android, which might be viable at much smaller scale on iOS. It's part of why Android's ecosystem has so much prominent adware. Common wisdom (backed up by data) in the industry is that, generally speaking, your "conversion rate" for paid or subscription apps on Android will be a tiny sliver of what it is on iOS, unless your app is very unusual.
There are a bunch of factors that probably cause this, but they're all mixed up and intertwined so it's hard to point at one and go "that's it, that's the reason". Selection bias of the user base (think: socio-economic status, and maybe even average technical know-how or comfort with software); iOS users use their devices way more than Android users, for all purposes (but, is that because of the previous thing? Maybe); it could have something to do with the ecosystems the two app stores have cultivated, causing different levels of trust among the two user bases when it comes time to spend money; it could have something to do with the quality of the experience of using the respective operating systems themselves.
Probably all of those contribute some amount. It's hard to say, though.
Mate - you're making $4k/mo. Budget some Operating Expenditures! Check into "Profit First" to ensure you're handling your business finances in a proper manner. A healthy allocation of OpEx is 30% of your revenue at your size. Start saving $1200/mo for all OpEx, and use some of that to build your Android app. It'll pay dividends!
This is pretty standard - most Apple ecosystem users tend to be somewhere between 2-3x more measurably valuable, whether App store v Play store revenue [1] or as audience segments in advertising.
You may consider a relationship with another developer where they maintain the Android distro in exchange for some significant percentage of revenue.
Curious if you've thought about getting anyone else to take a look at the Android side of things. Seems a shame to just let a working project fizzle for Android.
Do you have a repo or something for the Android app that curious people could look at?
Thank you! It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, mostly side income at this point. But I have put in a LOT of hours on it over the years. I will work on it in bursts, and take a few weeks and work on it 3-5 hours a day, and then not work on it at all for a while. I do need to keep the image library fresh, but that is pretty easy. To be honest, if I worked a bit more on it, I think it could do a lot better.
Yes, many options exist. The big one is Flippa which will take just about any project and allow you to list. There are others that are specific for large businesses (either have a listing price floor or a revenue floor) such as FE International and Empire Flippers. Another new one that is 0% commission is MicroAcquire. I follow the founder on Twitter and they seem to be doing quite a bit of volume.
I've personally sold projects on both Flippa and MicroAcquire and happy to chat about the pro's/con's of each.
It looks like it is a whole business acquisition so all of the business or nothing. My app business for ios has been around since 2009 so I'm less desiring to part with it. I can part with some apps that are basically feature complete, mature and stable income.
I believe I saw Andrew (founder, operator of MicroAcquire) tweet out that some deals are for partial equity of a company. It's really just a listing page and from there the buyer/sellers are free to do what they want. If you had apps that you want to offload, just list and see what type of buyers approach you. Since there are no listing fees it's no risk (other than your time).
The issue I had with Flippa when I listed a business there is that there are a TON of tire kickers. Flippa has a lot of users, but I'd say many aren't serious buyers. Flippa will prepopulate "inquiries" to sellers with some standard questions (ex. "How much time are you spending on the business each week?" etc). I learned to just ignore any message that contained only those prepopulated messages after a while. At first I spent time crafting responses to them only to be ghosted after that. If a potential buyer can't take the time to write their own opening message, they aren't serious.
If they are generating even the slightest bit of revenue, you'll likely find a buyer and will probably be surprised at the multiples people are paying.
Would it be a 2, 5 or 10 year multiple? None of my apps have subscriptions. They are all purchase for $.99 or $1.99 and supported for ... well, 10 years now. I've moved about 144K
Units in all.
So everyone is free to set their price, but here is the top 5 listings when I filter to those with >$1000 ARR.
$1k ARR --> listed for $20K
$240 ARR --> listed for $8K
$892 ARR --> listed for $9K
$99 ARR --> listed for $6.5K
$500 ARR --> listed for $15K
Now obviously people can ask for whatever they want and negotiate down, but you can see that multiples are crazy. To put it in perspective, my little app I sold I had made $5 TOTAL, and sold it fo4 $1500 USD and I had people telling me they would pay more after I had sold it. I think there is just a glut of people that want to get into small side gigs/startups that don't have the skills to code one. They see this as a kick start and lots of people can cobble together a few thousand.
You could try listing them here. May or may not favorably influence the price, in the same way private forum sales can sometimes go more interestingly than eBay et al.
Thank you! The early users came from me buying instagram ads, and recent users are primarily from App Store ads. Amazingly there is some organic traffic as well. I spent a lot of time trying to improve my app store ranking, and that makes a HUGE difference for getting new customers. If you can rank in the top 3 for a couple of important keywords, you can do really well.
This is very cool and inspiring! Would you mind sharing how you implemented the object tracking feature? It seems very complex, I've seen it on big apps like Snapchat or Instagram but you made it all on your own. Would love to know how!
That's about platforms where memes are posted to though, not a meme generator that creates templates (i.e. other people's pictures etc) for you to post and takes money specifically for providing that service.
What would you suggest for a small independent entrepreneur looking to come up with his own SaaS? I'm pretty comfortable with a broad enough frontend and backend stack from my day job. Where I lack is market research.
Depends on where you live. In some cities in Europe, after paying taxes and living expenses you might have money left only for a couple of beers a day. In the developing parts of the world, $4k a month is 10x the average developer’s salary. But if that’s a passive income I don’t see a need to live in an expensive city so your comment makes sense.
Piggybacking off of this to come back to it later. I'm also looking for some side project to start that'll encourage me to learn more about programming while I'm still in school for CS.
I've launched some hobby projects online in the past but none of which are monetized in any way, and almost all of them ended up costing money to run or still continue to do so. I'd love to build something for practice (to start out), with the intent of it eventually being good enough of a service for others to use too. I'm just blank on ideas at the moment.
Heh, seems to be something with the wifi because it works fine with android+mobile network. Suspicious! Looks like a misconfigured dns server in the coffee shop. Sorry for the false call .
no no, it's not false! My friend on at&t has also noticed some really weird dns or server configuration issues with my server. It's a digital ocean cloud instance. I need to get to the bottom of it.
Did you change the original paid app to the free/subscription model? How did the original users who paid for the app react to this? Considering to change one of my apps to a subscription model, but unsure if this is the best approach.
When apps I use switch to subscriptions, I stop using them and switch to ones that don’t. When I’m considering an app and I see that they’re demanding regular payments, that app is out of consideration. (I’ve also convinced my friends and employer to avoid subware as well; people often back away from it once they do the math and realize how expensive it really is.)
I have no problem paying $50—or even $100—for good software, once. Thousands of dollars over the course of years is simply not reasonable.
If you use copyrighted content to parody something else, you aren't protected. Penny Arcade had to pull a comic back in the day when they misunderstood this.
I wonder if that protects the person who makes the parody, rather than the app developer who make $4K a month. Lawyers will not typically go after targets that don't have money for payouts.
Since you're essentially mostly repackaging content other people have created, what's your approach to copyright and royalties? Or is the plan to simply hope you never get a DMCA notice or the like?
I love memes. I've always wanted to do some kind of a browser based meme maker I could either monetize with ads or a nominal ($10/yr) payment to remove ads.
I have been building the app for many years now. In the beginning I spent money mostly on instagram and facebook ads. I had pretty decent results on this, and could get installs for around 20-30 cents. However, those users also trashed my app in comments and didn't convert to paying users. Later I moved to App Store ads, it costs a bit more for the downloads, but the users convert much better. I am starting to think of going back and giving IG ads a shot though.
Edit: forgot to mention, I also spent quite a bit of time improving app store ranking, which contributes significantly to getting more downloads and customers.
Forgive me, but if the market responds to OP's subscription model (and $4k/mo is not trivial), no ads is a better user experience and there is less dependency on the ad network for revenue.
It's typically much harder to acquire new users than retain current users = subscription model allows you to monetize your userbase over a broader period of time (let's say $5/mo * 6 mo = $30) to a value that would likely be cost-prohibitive. Most users would not spend $30 for this app. But they might sign up for a free trial, and then the $5 subscription.
That’s the thing—I’d consider a limited version of a one-time $5 app, and very likely pay $30—once—to remove the limitations if I found the app useful. But when I see an app demanding subscriptions, I wouldn’t even try the free version. I’d never consider anything that didn’t offer a one-time payment.
the one time payment for a multi year support of software doesn't grow businesses. We just don't see the business of releasing a new version of the same software every two years with some new features and minor refresh, though it still done. It might support a small dev, but you need recurring revenue and subscriptions and ways to increase the ARPU to grow a real business.
Yes agreed. I used to have a one time purchase, but then I kept improving the app, adding more complex features, and the old price didn't reflect all the new work I had put in.
I don't get enough volume for ad support to be meaningful, and i didnt want to ruin the experience with ads. Before subscriptions, for a long time it was a one time purchase only. Then some VC's suggested i experiment with subscriptions, and I was very hesitant and semi grossed out. But I decided to give it a try, and I was seriously amazed that my conversion was barely impacted, and the same people buying one time purchases were also willing to purchase subscriptions. From there I did price experimentation, and was even more surprised to see the results there.
Ok, that's actually quite an interesting - and remarkably specific - customer segment.
If your core customer base pulls in 4 or 5 figures a month from their own hustle, they might be willing to pay up to $15/month for features tailor-made for their needs.
If you think someone's paying customers are "debasing themselves", it probably says more about you not being the target market than a negative critique of the customers themselves.
I disagree. Many users are simply whales or people with compulsive disorders. Not everyone genuinely "enjoys" the model more so than being stuck to it.
Not saying there aren't people who truly like it. There are. But not everyone who uses it does.
> Many users are simply whales or people with compulsive disorders.
Your comment might apply to addictive games, but you are being extremely dismissive towards a creative app that isn’t designed to be a slot machine. Who are you to tell others how to spend their time or money?
Anyone's perception is $5 is affected by their economic class. Globally, there are a significant number of people who would view $5 the same way others view .50.
For me, .15 a day is negligible. I can easily imagine someone who creates memes for social media choosing to pay that, especially if they feel there is value in supporting the creator. Memes aren't frivolity any more than other content - they're one of the most popular forms of communication on the internet.
A successful meme page with thousands of followers can generate substantial income. “Fake internet points” sometimes correlates directly with real cash.
Wait, what's the conversion rate of HN karma to ducks? I haven't received any ducks at this point. When should I start to expect them? I'm fond of mallards and mandarins. Do I get a choice?
A lot of big ig pages or whatever make decent money, even 'theme' pages that dont revolve around an 'influencer' personality.
This would be a pretty minor business expense if its even a little bit useful.
I'm embarrassed to say that I never used any formal a/b testing tools. I just fully converted to subscriptions, and ran it for a few weeks, and compared it to the previous few weeks (which were one time purchase.)
You don't need A/B testing tools. Most people don't like being tested on. Trust your gut, listen to your users, and just beware of vocal minorities. It seems like you're doing well already.
That’s a shame because it seems like you did the smart and effective solution without wasting your time. A/B testing isn’t needed if the signal is clear enough (¡parachute testing!), and it is hard to get enough samples for a weak signal. Good on you.
1. You charge what people are willing to pay, not how much your product is worth.
2. When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase, who knows how long it will last.
> When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase, who knows how long it will last.
Funny, for me this is the total opposite: subscription software may end any time and then you got nothing. One time purchased software you can just continue to use.
Well, I guess in the games of rent-seeking, cloud-only, security and updates the viability of this is fading...
It depends on the software. Is it an isolated thing? Then yes, you can continue to use it. But apps that read from APIs or scrape data are one version away from not functioning at all. Hence, regular updates. Hence, subscriptions to justify the ongoing modifications.
Total tangent, I used to have the Office 365 subscription but canceled it, yet I can still use word/excel - I've just lost access to the cloud features which I wasn't using to begin with - I would have thought they'd disable my version of word/excel but when I canceled it did not happen.
> I loathe apps that want a subscription for such a trivial concept. Why did you choose this route over ad support or one time payment?
Not OP but to counterpoint: I loathe apps that want to be supported by ads. Give me a one-time payment or a subscription. Let me choose if your service if worth paying for. If it's not worth paying for then it's also not worth ads. I'll use adblockers and use your service without ads anyway or else not use it at all.
Because I know personal ads were made possible by obtaining private information about me, whereas non-personalized ads likely weren’t. I’m not going to interact with either of them so I prefer the ones without privacy cost.
They're creepy as fuck. Same reason someone might not like being followed around everywhere, even if the person following them just writes down stuff about them but never does anything else. Spying ads are like that, but worse: it's like that person also occasionally runs in front of you to slap an ad-bearing sticker on some surface you're about to encounter, based on stuff they've written down.
Spyvertising is that, but at an industrial scale. If one's creepy and ought to warrant intervention by law enforcement, the other's much, much worse.
I am deeply annoyed by ads with bad context fit.
When I read about something I don't want my attention to be hijacked to other topics.
E.g. when I look at code I don't want ads for photography equipment, but ads for coding courses or books may be juuust acceptable. It also has the nice benefit of not needing personalization, so the sibling comments' points are also included.
I don't trust whatever company is holding their informational profile of me to hold it securely. Or what the extent of the information they've gathered can indicate, no one is going to stop at "just enough"
Well your employer probably doesn't want you to leak work to competitors.
You probably don't want your employer to know that you have cancer, are hiding a fling, and could soon have family problems requiring you to take a leave of absence.
Personally I'm not convinced by those arguments, because
- I think it should be my right to share the details of my work with anyone.
- It's already illegal to discriminate against people because they have cancer, and I don't think that imperfect enforcement of privacy on the internet is going to significantly affect anyone's chances of this happening to them.
- If someone does something and faces consequences for it, I don't think that's a bad thing.
Honestly seeing people's responses here and elsewhere on the internet is kind of a Kafkaesque experience for me because everyone seems so convinced that internet privacy is valuable yet no one seems to actually have thought through their position (no offense to you personally). I guess I can only conclude that my base values differ in this area.
> I think it should be my right to share the details of my work with anyone.
I agree! So why are you letting third parties get that information without you having any ability to provide or decline consent?
> It's already illegal to discriminate against people because they have cancer, and I don't think that imperfect enforcement of privacy on the internet is going to significantly affect anyone's chances of this happening to them.
You think people don't do things that are illegal?
> no one seems to actually have thought through their position
Can you explain that better?
> I guess I can only conclude that my base values differ in this area.
