Tom's attempts to make money with Software as a Service
I’ve previously written about creating new web apps, and the simple fact that without some form of marketing effort, if you build it, they will not come. But what is the solution?
With my latest app – Interactwive, a tool for running contests on Twitter – I attempted to start marketing WAY before I’d even begun to scratch out the first few lines of code. Here’s how I’ve been getting on so far.
Continue reading Creating and marketing a new web app: trying to do it right
If there is a way to make money online by abusing a service, you can guarantee spammers will give it a try. They have so little regard for the service, the spammers will club it to death without a second thought, all to increase their chances of making a fast buck.
Somewhat ironically, spammers do have their benefits: at some point you will be forced to harden your systems, both against spammers and against Things That Can Go Wrong. Let me tell you how this worked out for one of my apps, TweetingMachine.
Continue reading The Benefits Of Spammers Abusing Your Service
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.
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