I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com. We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month.

We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates.

Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 13.02%

May: 12.37%

June: 13.76%

July: 15.61%

August: 16.46%

Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 39.54%

May: 40.06%

June: 37.21%

July: 32.8%

August: 31.17%

So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction.

Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.

Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...

Really awesome to see people being so transparent about how they're doing.

By the way, if you ever want to write any blog posts and cross-post them to Lifestyle.io [0], we'd be happy to have them.

[0]: http://www.lifestyle.io

We launched Staff Squared about 18 months ago, it was originally an internal app that I used at my software company http://atlascode.com that we realised could be useful to other companies. We bootstrapped the app from the outset and haven't taken on any investment as I wanted to see if we could make this thing work first. Turns out it's possible to make a profitable business from it but it's by no means easy.

I do pretty much everything...sales, marketing, support, QA, specifying new features, and so on. My team of devs at Atlas consists of four full time .Net developers. I now also have a part time person who helps me with marketing, newsletters, copywriting and design. Our office manager assists with some of the support requests we receive and manages our oLark chat on the site...

We're looking to grow now and take on more developers as I'm finding it hard to balance the client work we've got at Atlas and keep Staff Squared "fresh". All good problems to have :)

I'll check out lifestyle.io and see if I can contribute something of use to that community. Thanks for your interest!

BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.

For the record, if anybody thinks we've made a huge mistake on the site I'd love to hear about it!

(FWIW, apparently "SMB" means "Small-to-Medium Business".)

We are also targeting SMB sith a SaaS in a different area (sales): http://www.quotty.com.

We haven't still defined a strategy, but your comment caught my attention because we are facing the same issue. Your application is innovative, how do you announce it? I figure that hardly somebody will search for an application like yours that nobody figures exist?

In summary where you get most leads: keyword search, organic search, partnership, ads placed in industry blog? Did partnership generate results? With other software? With distributors?

Another issue we found is that many users are too lazy ans inexperienced for the trial disert. I am conducting the following experiment: instead of immediately sending a free subscription-trial password, we ask for a phone number that we will call to make an interactive (remote) demo of the product using real client data, This has improved results, but elevated cost.

Don't you have the same training problem with new users?

We have a limit of £30 per day on PPC. It drives traffic to the site but I'm still getting under the hood of whether it delivers real ROI.

We get a lot of interest in our app from the Chrome web store. I think a lot of people overlook that as a (free!) place to market their software. They have a whole section dedicated to HR software and the majority of the time we're featured at the top. We're going to get listed on the Google enterprise marketplace soon too.,

A bunch of other stuff we do includes:

* Advertising on various HR blogs

* Partner marketing - I could write a whole post on just this topic, it's a big undertaking

* Writing guest posts

* We're trialing influads.com at the moment, which is an ad platform. Again I'm not sure if we're getting value from that just yet...

The one thing we've not done to date is press releases. We've performed exactly zero PR for the app, but that will change once we complete a few super cool features we're working on that I feel will set us apart.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Formatting

In the Google marketplace it's a bit more advanced, and you can integrate with Google authentication for sign in, and with documents for document sharing and so on.

I don't know if that's something that might turn off a woman, but it did sort of jump out at me.

[1]Full Disclosure:I only browsed through a few pages, I did not to a page by page gender analysis.

To explain: I was experimenting with an app that it turns out breaks the twitter rules and so they've suspended us. I'm talking to Twitter now about getting us unsuspended.

Sep 3, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603

Sep 4, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293

Sep 24, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771

May 21, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487

Mar 9, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599

My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon.

I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over the world. I should blog about it.

---

Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about this stuff, leave me your details: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com

  * net connections are very very spotty,
    prepare to work offline

  * supplies are rare (usb devices, upgrades, etc), 
    expect to pay more for less

  * desk conditions are poor, rarely did we 
    find a place where I could get into the flow. 
    Checking email and noodling on the net was 
    fine, but getting real quality work done 
    requires spending time to find the right location.

You can simulate work/travel by playing with IPFW settings on your mac and only working out of a macdonalds.

When going on another extended adventure, we will definitely stay in one well scouted location for awhile (6 weeks to 6 months). Nothing ever gets dialed in if you're moving all the time.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

Also a TED Talk by the same guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...

tl;dr “Symbolic Self-Completion"

As someone who has tried (and struggled) to monetize personal projects, I'm always interested in hearing stories about independent apps that are financially successful.

Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking for money, or even advertising on my content (only about 50% of the videos I put out have ads at all, and many of the most popular do not), but at the same time I'd love to have the time & resources to produce more & better content in the future.

Not looking for advice, as my disposition away from revenue is much stronger than my wish to get money, and I've learned that lesson many times, just adding another voice to the thread.

I have my own ideas on how to solve these issues for me. I sm not giving you advice here. Just saying it resonates, fwiw.

I wouldn't hire you for freelance work due to your seemingly incredibly unstable situation.

I hope you have a great day. The world would be a better place if more communication came from a place of concern for another person's welfare. I hope you do not stop caring about other people. Although the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, I believe it is usually due to good intentions combined with poor execution. I think execution is easier to fix than a cold heart.

Take care.

So, like I said, worth a lot. And making people feel good, caring for people, it's the most valuable skill so far as I'm concerned. Glad there are other people who value it.

((hugs)) & take care.

I've cultivated a niche expertise that I translate well to a wide range of communities, but when asked politely I tend to give my time and even tangible goods away for free.

Now, I'm actively trying to change that. I'm getting married next year and am very excited to have a family in the relatively near future, so I'm paying off debts, I re-entered the workforce at a decent salary, and have been trying to train myself to be comfortable asking people for money in exchange for my time & expertise.

It has been harder than you might imagine, but I'm making progress. Being able to externalize the need to earn money via the idea of a future family has helped me, but I remain very uncomfortable asking and often find myself under-reporting hours spent, transportation costs, etc.

If I could just produce content, conduct research, give workshops & lectures & have someone else handle the money, I would be in heaven, but the few people I've spoken to about it, despite initial enthusiasm, have never followed through. Considering my own disposition, I obviously don't blame them at all :)

I read your comments here and then I saw it. I think it is a sign :)

Seriously, I am not sure this aproach will help you. It looks like to me that it is more about "why do it" than "how to do it". I think what you should do is put yourself in a position where will just assume you will charge for it, so you don't have to say "oh, I would like you to pay for that".

But that wouldn't help with you refusing to charge for long hours. But you may consider a transparent aproach for it. Why not sending an email asking your clients if they feel confortable with you charging some extra hours. If they complain, you don't charge, but I guess some may accept it and even enjoy if they are rewarding a good job. This way it is no more a binary "I don't charge and they never know/I charge and they don't like it". There is a dialogue about that may substitute any confrontation.

And I also appreciate your thoughts. Thank you.

Best of luck to you :)

If anyone on HN wants to start a speakers agency for tech/security folk, I'd be first in line to sign up :)

Made about $200-$350 every 3months investing no time at all. Last year I started feeling bad, because I didn't do anything and made the menu free. I wanted to sell other stuff, but never had the same motivation to be honest.

I made a menu for a customer, then decided to sell it for $1, but the system didn't allow that (no micropayments). So I just made a dozen additional colors of the menu using Photoshop and sold it for $15 for 2y.

Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month.

The site in question is http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com, it provides printable gift certificate templates.

EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-o...

Thank you for writing that post.

As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time.

The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.

It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine.

Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.

Around $700/mo from a themeforest account.

And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i bought.

I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner £190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for £13.5k.

Still in the early stages and still changing things but the previous owner was/is in massive debt, little free time to put into the business, did EVERYTHING on paper/fax/phone and had enormous monthly costs.

Theres a much longer story to this but i'll write it up in a few months when its a bit more proven.

The couple had been making sensors for a niche industry forever and were still charging prices from 10 years earlier. His first order of business was to contact all the customers and tell them prices were going up.

I saw the service of acquaintance of mine and what revenue he's making, so I though I can do better.

Generally, in this industry there's massive shortage of talent, ideas and innovation. This is a big opportunity for people who are delivering value in the "mainstream" startup scene and that was one of the reasons which made me try - you can get in and disrupt pretty easily if you think out of the box, which is not so hard in this context.

Most of the stuff is almost scam, the customers are threatened like idiots and technologically the year is 2002-2003.

There are people who say there's no money anymore in this industry and they're right - there's no money for people who are short on skills, ideas and execution, but there is huge potential for people who are coming from other "mainstream" industries.

My prediction is that lot of talented kids will enter this industry with great services - I see it as emerging trend at the moment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Thylmann

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manwin

In my case - I've kind of outsourced it, but every user submission is being reviewed before it's published.

Source: I have just spent the last 12 years in adult and recently just severed all ties with the imploding industry.

I'm using Webair at the moment, but you can check also Amerinoc and Leaseweb.

My passive income from my investments in government bonds is enough to cover mortgage, basic living expenses for my family, and two family trips a year.

Source of money for investments:

- savings from many years of working and diligently saving

- some real estate investments

I tell everybody around me it's surprisingly easy to become financially independent. By saving s% of my income investing with a rate of return is i%, then the worst case is that I should be able to completely replace my income in i%/s% years. I was saving 30% (actually more) and investing at around 5%, which resulted in complete income replacement in around 10 years.

The income is not shared with Buffett, but any income I receive is "return on capital" from me taking inventory risk. So I do have to invest some of my $$$ to buy the book inventory, and as it's sold to Amazon I make (great) return on that money. But the profit per book is actually pretty low compared to other published books -- I could be charging much more for the book, but it was part of our "agreement" that I make the total price of the book as cheap as possible. (Which I think is accomplished with Amazon's price of $19-25 for a 700 page textbook-size book.)

Do you have to share revenue on the book? I'd be curious to know how you went about obtaining the rights and what the process is like.

EDIT: My portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio

Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.

Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is design. Feel free to email me with a link to your portfolio if you want some specific pointers...

I've send you an emails, thanks!

I spent quite a bit of time early on writing the website, and lost some hair recently trying unsuccessfully to upgrade the OSS libraries, but for the most part it runs itself, at least when GoDaddy's $60/month VPS isn't flaking out. The only other expenses are the domain, e-junkie, and payment processing fees.

http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com

This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertising and sales I'm still making ~400-600 USD/month. For 0 hours investment. I love the long tail.

Working 9-5 for a year is only 2000 hours...

Your hourly rate from last year will look slightly better now if you add in this year's earnings...though it's still a rough game to play. Good luck!

http://dressed.so

I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over.

For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page http://drsd.so/15YxDWv the 'shop this look' links earn me affiliate revenue.

Since your site is focused on men, you should try and filter out women's products in your shop section.

Example for a search on "sperry" topsiders: http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry

I'm guessing that mixing in women's products will hurt your conversion rate for affiliate products. If your affiliate network can't filter like that, you may want to check out http://prosperent.com/ or http://www.cj.com

Thanks for the links; just yesterday I put 'investigate alternate affiliates' on the top of my list.

There are some killer fashion sites out there, the ladies have been driving them for ages. You know, search by anything, real time refresh, change the colors, suggest a match, SAVE SAVE SAVE SALE DISCOUNT FINAL STOCK 3 LEFT!

The area is good, execution can be improved. Refine.

(Alternatively, punch out and sell me the domain ;)

Zero-maintenance, which is nice.

Dirty "viral" tactic.

EDIT: Oops. I've had an ad blocker installed so long I forgot it even existed. :-) Leaving my comment up though to save this discussion thread in my history. Nice site!

http://buildanappbusiness.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760

Sign up for Amazon's affiliate program and use your own affiliate links on your links to amazon.

-------

Also, as commented below - I posted the first of these recurring income threads almost two years ago - I'm now compiling some stats, data and insights [1] for myself so that I can learn how to boost my numbers closer to yours :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851

Also, my latest book sells nowhere near that amount. How are you marketing if you don't mind me asking?

Mostly I haven't done much marketing for it outside of my blog so far. I've been toying with some other ideas for it, but I haven't really had the time to devote to it. Mostly it's just a side project I've had fun with.

United States v. Scheinberg is a United States federal criminal case against the founders of the three largest online poker companies, PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Cereus (Absolute Poker/Ultimatebet), and a handful of their associates, which alleges that the defendants violated the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) and engaged in bank fraud and money laundering in order to process transfers to and from their customers. (...) After the indictment was unsealed on April 15, 2011, a date quickly dubbed Black Friday by the online poker community, PokerStars and Full Tilt stopped offering real money play to their United States customers.

"Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast."

How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots?

Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

Its an interesting world though where only us, table ratings, and mailer actually do mining (as far as I know) and we sell at wholesale prices to some of the other resellers. And then of course there are lots of people who buy hands and without our consent resell them through forums, web sites etc and that is an ongoing battle. We all have interesting ways of marking our hands so we can track them back to users and ban them.

I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times.

Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month.

However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.

However; for these kind of games there is no 'support'; people like it or don't like it, but you don't get support requests; people who experience issues with the software just uninstall it. It's not worth actually fixing it for a few outliers with crap white label phones. So you don't actually have any work with these things and that beats Taco Bell.

I think the reason he is not killing it is the nature of these games; they are very easy to make so there are 1000s of clones in the Play Store, people usually cheat (look up the answers) and those who like them have more than 10 installed on their phone. So the ad exposure is very short lived. Installs are not a very good metric; play time is; you're not going to keep apps like this active for a long time.

If you make an app which gives value to people or games with fresh content every week , you will make a lot more money. But that's not automatic; it's a job :)

These apps will not be in the store, but they are making or saving companies millions. These kind of apps are already critical to a lot of enterprises and are a real opportunity for developers to make your $100k/year and much more.

The promising factor can be in games, but then rather games people stay engaged with (Minecraft, Plague, Plants vs Zombies; not saying if they are good or bad; saying they are liked for years in a row because they are better gameplay and polish wise). Next to that the aforementioned apps either to save or make money; mobile, unlike laptops/desktops, brings apps to everyone, all the time and there is a lot of money to be made in all market segments because of that difference. Both for devs as well as companies hiring these devs.

Oh and, this is definitely a matter of taste, but I rather make $2k/month from home than $10k/month in some gov job in an office. Where I live, you are allowed to work from home in some of those jobs, but they do expect you to be in the office at least 2 days/week and that is definitely something I wouldn't do very unless there is really no other way out.

I've been just by myself for 2 years now and by "hacking" the play store this way, was the only way I could build my startup, so I seed-funded it myself. And all that finally brought it on the trajectory and it just started to work.

I'm not proud of building these apps, but there are 50 clones of these out there. I don't use that money to buy things, I'm going towards for $40k in debt now by taking another loan to invest everything back into my own startup to change the world.

Seems like a dream if you really just like programming, once you've got your funnel streamlined and your infrastructure banged out, you can add new algo's and consequently money to your service in a flash.

I'm impressed.

I guess it was around 864 days ago that I posted the original one of these threads!

My current stats:

$~500/mo from a few supplement related websites, and some fitness stuff. Last worked on these back in April. Total work/month is roughly 30 minutes.

My current project:

Doing the research so that I can boost this to around $5000/mo :)

I figure this is as good a time as any to announce that I'm actually putting together a little recurring project of my own - and it's pretty meta.

It's pure stats and useful information on who generates recurring income, how much work they had to do to get there, what they learned/should've done/shouldn't have done. I'm researching this purely for myself, because I want to get to more recurring income faster (because recurring income is so, so, so freeing) - but a few friends asked me to package it up so I'm doing so!

Check it out [1]. Also I figure I should post it to HN, so I'll update this comment when I do so :)

Thanks guys - and really glad to see this thread live on longer than when I first posted it almost three years ago!

[1]: http://recurringincome.meteor.com/

Edit 1:

On HN. [2]

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851

I also run W3Counter (freemium) and a couple smaller services and paid plugins for Shopify stores.

I'm currently working on a project designed to help make Rails Tutorial–type stories more common among hackers. Stay tuned...

I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

But make no mistake: if you had put a stick in the ground you would have seen the same result, provided you were as geologically fortunate as these two lucky suckers.

Google is much different in that you have the option to publish on alternate app markets, or self-publish your own apps, of which Google gets a cut of $0. This lack of control over their own app marketplace is probably the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market.

Was your comment sarcasm, or just terribly misinformed?

"Flagging" stock price? You mean the one that's hovering around all-time highs? Android's "failure to compete" with iOS for the mobile market? With 80%+ of global market share?

The feedback was that a) some people bought precisely because they didn't have a recurring bill hitting their account, even a small one. b) some people found the fixed price too expensive to buy and were disappointed they couldn't buy it. c) The ones that did buy the fixed price were happy with their purchases. Overall, however, we ended up with fewer total buyers each paying above the average lifetime value of the monthly buyers.

When we offered BOTH subscription AND fixed price access for individual units for a period of time, people tended to buy the lowest cost subscription instead of the lowest cost unit. They shopped on price. They were not as happy with their purchases in either case, though more so for the cheapest subscription.

In the end, it was counterintuitive to what is commonly considered "good business" to have recurring revenue from customers. We still think there's a place for monthly recurring billing somewhere, but we don't have the catalog or products to support a mix. It would be great to provide Level 1 at a fixed price and Level 2 at a lower monthly fee because we know they are the "stick with it" customers and so will likely have a better lifetime value.

Sorry to be vague here. The numbers vary over the years, but started about $2500/mo and grew to about 10k/mo over about 6 years. It is for a learning endeavor that people SHOULD commit a year+ to learning, but tend to quit for very human reasons. We think people who make commitments are happier because a) that cool TED talk about irrevocable choices that everyone talks about and b) Committing to putting in the time on our product DOES result in a new skill set, so it has tangible personal improvement if it is used as directed.

I had already an app on android with ~3000 active installs for doing simple shopping look ups. I changed it to throw in some affiliate codes and fixed a crash and updated it approximately 18 months ago now and haven't made a single update.

It's next to nothing but it encouraged me to look more into at least trying things out for myself - I would never have thought (and still can't) it would be any more than a personal exercise. If I look at it as "free netflix for 2 years" then it's a real thing to me and "means something".

[1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments

pass-through : Consultants not employed by my company but work for my clients.

I started 'The Wiki Game' by building this web game: http://thewikigame.com - but all revenue comes from the iOS apps, not the site. Been meaning to potentially monetize the site some day. It gets ~30,000 players per month, with time-on-site ~9mins.

I've talked about Let's Code JavaScript on HN before; check out the previous thread [3] for some details about how I started and market the site.

Since simonswords82 was so generous with details about his business, I'll do the same. About 2% of the visitors to the site sign up for the free trial. That seems poor, although I don't have a lot of insight as to what the number "should" be. I do require a credit card in order to sign up for the trial. The trial automatically converts to a subscription after seven days.

About 70% of trial subscribers convert to a paid subscription. This seems pretty good to me, although I'd of course be happier if it was higher. Once they've subscribed, I lose about 25% of subscribers in the first month, and then the number drops asymptotically down to about 5% (of the initial total) per month. I'm reasonably happy with this as well. It's poor by the standards of a SaaS, where a churn rate of 1-2% is doable, but I think it's pretty good for a content site.

My most recent push was an inbound marketing campaign: I took one of my monthly specials and turned it into a dedicated site on object-oriented JavaScript [4]. That was very successful; it nearly doubled traffic in the first month (from 2,800 uniques in the previous month to 5,400) and looks like it will permanently add about 1,500 uniques per month. Trial rates went down slightly as a result, but overall subscriptions went up.

The biggest challenge for me is having lots of things I'd like to pursue, but not enough time to do them all. The Object Playground inbound marketing campaign was successful, but a lot of work. I recently released another special that might make a good inbound campaign (on large-scale JavaScript fundamentals: modularity and automated cross-browser unit testing), but I'm not sure it's worth the time it would take to create a marketing site for it on the scale of Object Playground.

For now I'm focusing on A/B testing various ideas for improving conversion. It takes less effort and potentially has longer-term impact. So far, I've improved the subscribe page [5] by adding testimonials and a better design. Next, I'll probably provide more opportunities for people to preview the series without signing up, as well as more obvious calls to action on the video pages. I also have some other plans in the works that I can't talk about yet. :-)

[1] My screencast is Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, a series for professional JavaScript developers. It's available at http://www.letscodejavascript.com. I'd love to hear your feedback.

[2] My book is The Art of Agile Development. It's been out for over five years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it.

[3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226

[4] My recent inbound marketing campaign was Object Playground, a tutorial and visualizer for object-oriented JavaScript: http://www.objectplayground.com.

[5] The Let's Code JavaScript subscribe page is at http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe.

The site looks really nice, and appears to have really great content. Signup achieved.

I just discovered that my demo video is recorded at too high a bitrate. It's at 2.8Mbit/s, compared to 1.3-1.8Mbit/s for subscriber videos. That's probably because I used my standard screencast encoding settings (which are set nice and high) for a video that has a lot more motion than my standard screencast.

Fixing this alone will probably do wonders for my conversion rate.

Thanks a million to tankbot for starting the conversation rolling and to alecthomas for helping me to troubleshoot it over email.

In researching this issue, I found recommendations that 2.5mbps is probably the most you should plan for in North America. I'm not sure how accurate or current that recommendation is, but since I was seeing problems at 2.8mbps, it seems reasonable. (It also might explain why I have such a large proportion of international subscribers.) That said, I'd really love to get my bitrate below 2.0mbps, because that's what my actual videos come in at.

I went into my video export settings and fiddled (and fiddled, and fiddled) and ended up finding a compromise that gave me 1.94mbps at the cost of slightly-visible artifacting during transitions. [1] Bingo! Uploaded, deployed, done.

Well, not entirely done. I'm still using my old settings for most videos, because it doesn't have any visible compression artifacts at all, at least not until you get out the magnifying glass. (I can get away with such high quality because, although my screencasts have more transitions and motion than average, they're still mostly unchanging text.) But I don't want to run into this problem again. It's embarrassing. And I like killing problems dead. DEAD!

So I modified my deploy script to run `ffprobe` and pull out the bitrate for each new video. If it exceeds 1750kbps, I get a warning. And if it exceeds 2000kbps, the script fails. [2] That'll do it.

Of course, the real root cause here is that I don't have visibility into client-side performance issues. Eventually, I'd like to modify the client-side code to report back playback experience. That would have detected this problem much sooner, and it will protect me against CDN/network issues as well, which are particularly hard for me to get visibility into.

Thanks again to tankbot and alecthomas for helping me find this problem.

[1] The settings I ended up with, in case you're curious:

Video encoding: H.264; 24 frames per second; 2250kbps max bit rate; "High" quality; Single-pass

Audio encoding: AAC; 44.1KHz audio (mono); "Normal" quality; 64kbps audio bit rate

[2] These thresholds are pretty conservative, and I'll increase them if necessary. I like starting with low thresholds because it gives me more visibility into what's going on, at the cost of requiring me to be a bit more hands-on until I get things dialed in.

If anybody else sees this issue, and you're willing to take a few minutes to help me troubleshoot it, please let me know. james@letscodejavascript.com . Thanks!

I am also a huge testing fanatic, and absolutely love that you're teaching using TDD from the first episode!

Consider me signed up and a paying customer!

My company does web dev and consulting, but we struggled with how to manage long-term support. So we developed an automated html5 testing platform and started writing custom UX tests for our clients' applications. This way, if they continue to develop new features or whatever, they have a way of quickly checking for breakages. It works so well that we've now opened it up as a service we offer outside of our development projects.

We get a little bit of cash for writing the tests, and a little bit of cash for hosting/maintenance/updates.

Here's a link: http://html5testing.co/

What do you use to drive the tests? I'm most familiar with Behat.

I'm not familiar with Behat. We're using Node.js.

Anyway, I'm sure you know the various scenarios, so my question is: how do you determine where to focus (or how to distribute) your efforts? Of course, the free trial signup rate becomes a limiting factor as your trail-to-paid rate approaches 1, but at this point, where do you see the best opportunity for improvement?

Here's how I decide what to do next: I have a big 6' folding table in my office that's covered in index cards. On the left-hand side are six columns: what I'm planning to work on this week (the current iteration), the next four weeks of commitments (mostly episode air dates), and any future commitments (such as my Christmas vacation with my family).

On the right hand side, I have five more columns: Attract, Convert, Hygiene, Delight, and Intelligence. Whenever I have an idea for something that I should do, it goes in one of those columns. If an idea column is full (some categories get two columns), then I have to throw out one of the existing cards before I can put a new one in.

All of the columns are full.

Every Monday, I calculate my velocity (Agile/XP-style) based on what I finished the week before. Then I look over my upcoming commitments and move everything that should be done this week into the current iteration. I try to stay about two weeks ahead of The Beast (that is, episode commitments), but I don't always succeed. Still, I have yet to miss an air date.

Then I look at the amount of points remaining and choose an idea from the right-hand half of the table to work on. Sometimes there's one I'm already working on--that goes into a special "On Deck" corner of the table--in which case I just generate story cards from that and slot them into the current iteration. If there's nothing on deck, though, I look over all my existing ideas and pick one.

I pick ideas primarily based on bang-for-buck. Is it relatively easy, do I think it will work, and will it give me useful information even if it doesn't work? But sometimes I pick small things that are bugging me or that I think would be satisfying to work on. Morale's important. And sometimes I choose things that are really big and risky but the time is right to do them.

tl;dr: dart board. ;-)

Here's a picture of the table: http://imgur.com/tmm9TvT

the one point i wanted to criticize was the lack of accounts page, not being able to view my billing information or the ability to cancel my account kind of scared me.

other than that your videos were high quality and course content was great.

Part of the time is spent adding titles, notes, and transitions (such as when I zoom out to show a web page), but the majority of the time is just spent going through the episode with a fine-tooth comb to strip out pauses, ums and other filler, and to speed past necessary but uninteresting work.

The monthly specials take a lot longer. I typically spend a full week on a 15-30 minute video. Sometimes longer. Editing probably takes 2-4 hours and the rest of the time is on scripting/outlining, animations, coding the examples, and so forth.

Thanks in advance for answers.

What happened to RailsCasts?

[1] http://www.jamesshore.com