Congrats man! This is the first time I stumbled upon your extension and I have to admit, it is pretty neat and useful. I too have created one vocabulary trainer extension, but haven't released it as it way too unpolished and I am using a paid dictionary.
However, do you mind sharing some of your stats? Which language pairs are mostly used on Readlang?
As there is a high failure rate in startups it is very important to know though whether you are made for that kind of world. True, you'll learn a lot with every failure but not all of us want to spend years and years on miscarriages.
The blog post states that Pinboard makes around $200k a year but they charge only a one-time fee of $10. Does that mean they get 20k signups each year? Does Pinboard display ads or is there another business model behind it?
I totally agree with keeping the message short. Also I have read from several other sources that telling a story is key. But how are you supposed to tell a story in 4 sentences?
First it was hard for me as well to figure out "what it does" or to be more precise "how it does it" but there is this little animation on the landing page which illustrates it pretty well.
@nota.io: you could make that animation bigger or make a video out of it.
Well you can always argue what is right and what wrong. Very true, it is a violation of the Twitter terms of services but I still appreciate it for sharing with the HN community.
There has also been a post about Darkmarket (https://github.com/darkwallet/darkmarket) on HN. Again, I do not encourage trading illegal goods at all but as a proof of concept it is still impressive.
That is truly an uncomfortable situation. Without any deeper knowledge about HamsterDB or your pro version, you might consider offering your service as SaaS and charging for that. Of course this won't work with all your pro features such as compression or encryption (or maybe it could work in some innovative way).
For instance you could charge for painless DB hosting, so users do not have to worry about complicated setups and can immediately use HamsterDB after signing in.
EDIT: But you can still go for the 30 day money back guarantee with the exposure of the pro version's source. If that fails you still can decide to switch to a SaaS model.
I am the cofounder of MyMundus, so my opinion is quite biased. We started MyMundus because conventional note taking apps such as bookmark services did not suffice, especially when you forgot to create a bookmark.
Wow .. that is something I have been looking for quite some time. In the meantime I decided to make a custom solution, but yours seem to work way smoother.
- Do you cache images? If so, how long are they cached?
- Are there any restrictions, beside adding the attribution link, for commercial usage?
Thanks for this insight. You are right, it might send the wrong message but could also mean we pivot / go for that ideas which generates higher growth [1]. I guess it is a matter of communication.