Incomeware: Making Money Off Side Projects

Transcript

1. Incomeware How to monetize your projects
2. Markus Persson If you build a car, you can only sell it once. If you paint a fence, you only get paid for it once. If you create a piece of software that's essentially free to reproduce, you can keep getting paid over and over perpetually.
3. Who Am I?
4. Income Opportunities • Ads • Subscription Services (SaaS) • In App Purchases • Pay To Use Software (licensed software)
5. Ads • Extremely easy to set up • Allow you to monetize projects that users wouldn’t pay for • Low maintenance cost
6. Ad Networks • Google Ads • Google AdMob (mobile) • Carbon Ads (for developer and designer audiences)
7. Subscription Services • Recurring income • Overhead of managing subscriptions • Platform Cut
8. Subscription Platforms • Stripe (2.9% + 30¢) • ChargeBee (generous free tier, paid starts at $250/month) • RevenueCat (mobile) (cost scales by transactions, paid starts at $8/month) • Apple / Google Play (mobile) (30% / 15%)
9. In App Purchases • Conventionally only accepted in mobile apps • Tons of options: Game currency, extra lives, extra photo filters, special effects, ad-removal, there’s not really any limit • You probably want to make sure your application is still usable even if the user doesn’t make any purchases
10. In App Purchase Technology • Apple / Google Play (mobile) • Stripe
11. Don’t store credit cards
12. Users access your server architecture
13. Conventional Stripe Architecture
14. Stripe Checkout Architecture
15. In your webserver...
16. In your browser...
17. Just looking at the JavaScript...
18. Back in our webserver...
19. Building and Monetizing Luna Journal
20. Ideation • Solve a problem ◦ Needs to be worth solving ◦ Something someone would pay to have solved for them • This step is critical. No matter how great your code or design is, if it doesn't actually do anything useful, no one will pay for it.
21. Luna Journal’s Ideation • Sharing seizure information with my fiance and vet was too difficult.
22. Market Research • Who would pay for this problem to be solved? • How many people are there with this problem? • Are there any tools out there that help with this problem currently? • What do people pay to solve this problem currently (if they can). • What are the lifestyles that people with this problem lead?
23. Luna Journal’s Market Research • Canine Seizure Support Group - 5.6k people • 1 or 2 times per week, “What app are you using to track your pet’s seizures?” • Seizures are expensive, pet owners don’t have a lot of money to spend on an app to help track seizures. • Several tools help log data, few help share it with your veterinarian.
24. Building a Product without Monetization • Have an idea on how to monetize your product, app or tool, but don’t build monetization first. • Focus on solving the problem and get a few people using it to get their feedback. Once they’ve used it, ask if they'd be willing to pay for it. If so, how much? • Good coding techniques (architectural planning, design patterns) will make it fairly easy to add monetization later.
25. Luna Journal without Monetization • Built on Firebase’s Free Tier • Added support for all the core features • Pushed Luna Journal out to Friends and Family (non-medical needs pet owners) • Get feedback, implement improvements
26. Bolting on a Monetization Strategy • Ads are the easiest • Paywalls help gate off paid features • Offer a free trial for subscriptions • Incentivize existing users to upgrade
27. Luna Journal’s Monetization Strategy • Subscription for Cloud Storage and the “Sharing with Vet” functionality • Building out on-device storage for free tier • May investigate ads and the ability to purchase them away. • “Pet Health is stressful enough. Be respectful to the user.”
28. One Last Tip
29. Profit = Revenue - Expenses - Operating Costs
30. Questions?
31. https://speakerdeck.com/ bradcypert/ incomeware-making-money-off-side-projects Great site for slides Slides for my other talks Slides for this talk