Tom's attempts to make money with Software as a Service
One of the lessons life teaches early on is that many decisions are not easy to make. Sometimes it’s a case of choosing a bar of chocolate over a packet of crisps/chips. Traumatic, but do-able. This is a quick follow-up to a post at the start of the month about InboxCleaner. Continue reading Is a web app earning $100/month a failure?
Have you ever thought of an idea, something quick and easy, that you could launch in an afternoon and start taking money straight away? This is what happened to me with InboxCleaner, and six months later, here’s how it’s going. Continue reading Failure: Building a web app that makes $50/month
Earlier on this week, I came up with a new idea for a web app. Now it’s time for the exciting part: will anybody want to use my easy email protection service?
Continue reading Creating a new web app: announcing EasyEmailProtection
I have a new idea that I’m going to turn into a web app, and this is the first post that documents the process I’ll be taking. You can expect more updates as I complete each step, and in a couple of months the app itself will be live!
When it comes to my web apps, I’ve been feeling a bit restless as of late; I’d like to create a web app that involves slightly more than adding to social media. So, I went through my ideas file (note: keep a stream-of-consciousness file on your computer where you record any and every idea that pops into your head), and started to map out what I want to get developed for the rest of the year.
One freshly-added idea came from reading My Email Canary on John Graham-Cumming’s blog, and the subsequent discussion on Hacker News. These posts talk about how to find out if an unauthorised person is reading your email, albeit tailored somewhat towards GMail. I read that it might be possible to write a gadget that sends out notifications when suspicious activity is detected. I like this idea – it sounds interesting to investigate at least – and there’s a chance people might like to pay for the service.
Continue reading Creating a new web app: the first steps you should take
You’ve had your great idea, completed market research, have your marketing plan in place… and now you need to build it. But what technology should you use?
Here I’ll briefly discuss the choices I made for TweetingMachine.
Note: This is a lightening-quick post, and my last for a few weeks; I get married on Saturday, and will be out of contact on my honeymoon after that until hallway through June.
As mentioned before, I am not a natural designer, and my previous design attempts resulted in physical illness for anyone unfortunate enough to view them. This is not an ideal state of affairs when one wants to sell to the general public.
Luckily, there are a few methods you can use to stop yourself from visually poisoning potential customers. By far the easiest is to outright cheap and buy a theme. Still, one can’t help but worry: what will I get after handing over my money?
I contacted the authors of the two themes (from ThemeForest) that I use in TweetingMachine, and they agreed to me showing you their themes’ details.
A quick recap from where I left off in Part I: starting with all of the business ability of a dried plum, I developed an unpopular Twitter tool called TweetingMachine; after nine months, I was ready to scrap in its entirety and mark the whole sorry app as a failed experiment; just before I gave up, a friend pointed me towards ThemeForest, and suggested a couple of themes. Continue reading Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part II
This is the first part (Part II here) in a series of posts about the first web app I wrote for myself, TweetingMachine. I’ll cover every aspect of its creation and development, starting at how the idea came to me, the many, many mistakes I made, and how eventually I improved the tool so much that it now brings in $500 a month, a figure that increases with each month. I realise that this isn’t a huge amount of money, but it’s a nice present.
Continue reading Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I