Tell HN: Me as solo developer – first year revenue revealed
Hi friends,
A year ago, I released Wins 1.0 to the world, It's a Window manager App for macOS and I got my first batch users back then, which gave me a huge encouragement and I'm very grateful here.
Today, one year later, I want to be open and transparent about the current development status and revenue of Wins to the lovely community, to you
# About Revenue In total, I have sold 1,612 licenses, with 701 through the Wins official website and 911 through other channels.
Yes, currently, Wins has fewer than 2,000 users
From all these sales, my total income is $9,485 over the course of one year and three months, it's not too much.
However, Wins has a high number of active users. In the past seven days, there have been over 1,000 users, and in the last 28 days, approximately 2,000 people have used Wins.
I feel incredibly honored that Wins has been able to help you, and I am sincerely grateful for your support in my independent development journey.
# About Development Status During the year, I received a lot of feedback and suggestions, coupled with my understanding of Apple's product philosophy, I want to make something wonderful to bring to the macOS X, so I've added some features that I think are cool in the past year，such as :
1. Dock Window Preview. Now you can directly preview all windows of an app you opened
2. Shake window to hide other windows. Drag a window, give it a shake, and all other windows will be hidden
3. Hide other windows with shortcut key You can also achieve it using keyboard shortcuts
4. Move to another display. Quickly move the window to another monitor
5. Hide All Windows. One shortcut to hide all windows, and the world becomes clean
# In the end I'm not a famous developer, I don't have much of audiences, I don't know how to market or promote, I just an Apple fan who loves the macOS.
it wasn't an easy year for Wins, But luckily it's alive. I'm alive haha
I currently have a job, but initially, I thought Wins could sustain itself through independent development. However, I later realized that the timing might not be right yet. But I believe that as long as I continue to polish Wins and make it better, it will be able to independently support me in continuously developing new features.
Finally, I'd like to share my app here with those who might need it and let you know that it has a 50% discount during Black Friday
If you like it and want to support independent development(thanks a lot), or if you haven't tried Wins yet, I hope you give it a try.
https://wins.cool
ps. I hope my sharing doesn't disrupt this community. As a solo developer who has built B2C software in the past, 1600 sales in your first year is outstanding. But I have to say your pricing is terrible - from all perspectives. For you, unless you sell in the hundreds of thousands (which I've never heard of for B2C software) it's unlikely to ever be a day job replacement. For the consumer, before they even decide to try your software you're telling them it has the lifetime value of a cup of coffee and a donut. Price is one of the things consumers look at to determine something's value. You've priced your product so cheaply and many will view your product in the same way. It's not much harder to sell a $99 product as it is to sell a $9 product to consumers. And the users you get at the higher price point will be better users. But that 1600 user sales figure - for a one man shop in year one - is fantastic. What would your yearly profits have been if your price was $49 or $79 or more? I would never buy this app for more than $9 - there are free alternatives such as Rectangle. $9 is low enough I'd consider it if it has some extra features or polish, but definitely not $49 or $79. Which means you are not a customer worth having. Good data point. Sure. Though if it turns out that there are no customers worth having due to free/cheaper competition, your business has a problem. FWIW I paid roughly $25 USD for a lifetime license for BetterTouchTool about 5 years ago, and I still use that daily. Only going off the description, BetterTouchTool seems like mostly feature overlap (not fully) and more flexible version of OP’s app. With a free trial model like what BetterTouchTool uses I could easily see myself spending $49 USD on a tool like that today. It would obviously have to be as mature as BetterTouchTool and not brand new without as many features and polish like OP’s tool, but probably OP can start to increase the price over time to something more in that ballpark as more features are added without much chagrin. Also FWIW, I tried the free/FOSS tools like Spectacle and Rectangle before eventually deciding on BetterTouchTool for its flexibility with key bindings and wide swath of api’s that they can be bound to. > Though if it turns out that there are no customers worth having due to free/cheaper competition, your business has a problem Yes, which also a fantastic thing to learn as soon as possible! I've been steady user of Rectangle for years - coming from windows, it still amazes me how native Mac doesn't have a good built in system. OP - Rectangle is pretty well known, open source, and maintained - it might be worth adding a comparison chart so prospective users can understand what makes your paid product worth choosing a free offering. Cool,
I might give it a try considering that Moom is having issues with Sonoma on my MBP m3 :/ I think your pricing is great but I would personally do a different tier system. Smaller yearly cost for yearly subscriptions for future updates (6,99 maybe) plus lifetime for a higher price. I think lifetime value at that price is unsustainable for you if you have to give support and updates with no extra income coming from it. If you consider lifetime as a 5x yearly you’re giving yourself a good time window to make the product grow sustainably. Interesting. Congratulations on your achievements. I was wondering, what channel did you use to initially get the 2,000 customers? Did you post in in some forums or buy Ads of some form AdSense, Facebook or Twitter. I kind of find it sad that you still need an app in 2023 for these features as most of these are built into Win10 for like 8 years now. Only when I was issued a Mac did I understood why Windows is Windows and Mac is not. But what should we expect from an OS in which you have to manually enable right click? Wins looks really good, and congratulations on having sold so many licenses! This is just my opinion, but I think you’ve priced too low. It’s an interesting balance and I don’t know the magic formula to pricing but before I looked at the price I looked at the features and my first guess was $30 and was surprised to see $6.99. I would change your licensing to be something along the lines of 1 year of free updates, pay again for future updates (seems like the standard pricing model in the space if you're going to be adding more features). This small tweak can massively swing your total earnings over a couple years. Other people have mentioned pricing and $12 doesn't seem unreasonably low. Especially early on when you're building word of mouth. Long term maybe you could double it. Opinionated Technical Notes: Shake to hide, I wish it only acted on one screen (or a setting to enable that). I have my dock setup vertically, it'd be nice if the previews were also arranged vertically. Love that this just exists in my settings instead of adding a millionth app to my top nav. Overall great work, congrats on the progress. It's exciting to build something people actually find useful and more importantly pay for. You just got yourself another customer. Do you think it might do better in a group of similar Mac Mod products, like Steam? Is there a way to recruit another kind of user or customer? Who are they and why do they need Wins? Any word on the need for similar managers for all UNIX systems? Have you tried working on any Linux OS with your current product? I know this is for OSX but a ton of users of Linux systems might purchase the product as CSE undergrads? Educational software? Congratulations on your success so far, I hope you have an even better 2024! As an aspiring Apple ecosystem developer myself (I haven't released anything so far, but I am working on learning SwiftUI and the related Apple technologies), I have a couple questions... How have you marketed this so far? Word of mouth, social media, ads? What shopping platform powers your website and what are the other channels that you have used in addition to the official website? How are you tracking the usage data for your software? Have you considered bundling your app into a general software subscription service like SetApp? It would potentially give you some decent recurring revenue. I'm not sure why there's so much hostility to this comment here. SetApp is actually a pretty good deal for developers because it creates a recurring revenue stream for low effort, and if you use a lot of the apps available on SetApp, it's a decent deal for the users too. Unfortunately, paying a low one time price for a lifetime license for software is completely unsustainable. It leaves developers with effectively 2 options if they want to continue to receive revenue: subscriptions or major version upgrades released periodically. Major version upgrades released periodically is the standard model for pay-once software, and it is preferable for users, because it gives them a choice of if and when they want to upgrade. It is preferable for users. Mostly they don't ever upgrade. However, if you want to create an actual business, if you want to quit your day job, if you want to make a career out of this, then it's a good idea to start thinking about things from a business perspective. I know this is HN, lover of all things free, a self-selecting group that treat tiny purchases like they're buying a house, but the key to building an actual functional sustainable business is to make business like decisions. Part of that is pricing. Take something like this, where the price is completely arbitrary. Less than 10k for 2k users is $5 per user. If the product is $2 more then revenue jumps 40%. One-and-done sales means you never get ahead. Every year is harder sales. Whereas Annual subscriptions means you build on a growing foundation. Conversely Upgrades just waste your time dreaming up features nobody wants or needs, and the market just gets smaller. Sure, offering value to users is good. Offering value to customers is better. Making the business sustainable (so it exists even if 0 new sales) is the best model for both customers and the business. So yeah, pricing matters. Software subscriptions are a plague. They are also a way to make a living as a solo dev / small team Sure, the one doesn’t exclude the other. Are you selling on the mac store? Looks pretty cool!