ZERO-TO-ONE ★ 29 upvotes 2011

I Just Made My First Sale Woooooooooh

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @motyar on Hacker News:

I just made my first web script sale, http://motyar.info/draw/

Its the code to draw like on canvas like ms paint. User can download the drawing.

I placed the "Buy It for just $10" one week ago. Here are more statics from Google analytics:-

467 Pageviews

327 Unique Views

00:04:20 Time on Page

78.95% Bounce Rate

69.59% % Exit

I need suggestion to improve sales.

Thank you all in advance!!

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

@motyar's retrospective from 2011 captures the critical transition from initial concept to the first dollar of customer revenue.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Early traction rarely comes from passive launches; it requires direct manual outreach, personal network activation, and high-touch customer support.
2
Narrowing down the target audience to a specific niche allows solo founders to out-position generic horizontal competitors.
3
Underpricing out of fear of rejection is common; founders who set premium pricing often discover higher customer satisfaction and lower churn.
Community Debate Themes:

Discussions analyzed Show HN launch mechanics, cold DM outreach conversion rates, and the psychology of validating customer demand before writing code.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (31 total discussions):

PO @polyfractal Peer Contributor

Other people have touched on your price and quality/usefulness of the app, so I'll ignore those.

You're conversion rate is around ~0.3%, which actually isn't that horrible for an unoptimized site. Between 0.25% and 0.5% is pretty average for newly launched app.

In terms of marketing and copy, you need to work on your message and audience. Who is going to use this? Probably not techy people who know how to use Photoshop/Illustrator.

Perhaps grandmothers wanting to draw something for their kids? Or kids drawing something for their grandmothers? Either way, neither of those audiences know or care about "jQuery". This is just one example of how you need to optimize your message.

With that said, I wouldn't put time or energy into promoting this further. There are a lot of great drawing/illustration programs, both online and offline, so its a pretty competitive market.

FO @foxylad Peer Contributor

Contact the buyer, and find out WHY they bought it.

Personally I can't see why anyone would spend money on this (no offence intended), but perhaps they have a use case I (and possibly you) haven't considered. You can then optimize your marketing for this.

MA @maris Peer Contributor

Try out http://sellfy.com/ - you can offer discounts for people who share your product with their Facebook/Twitter friends.

You can also setup freemium (in they sahre) - paid (if they want just buy) model.

PO @potomak Peer Contributor

Do you know your price is easily hackable?

Anyway I must implement a feature like this to my drawing app http://drawbang.com, cool idea!

GE @geon Peer Contributor

That's pretty expensive for what you offer. You can't draw lines without moving the cursor slow enough for the dots to overlap. There is not even a brush size setting.

HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 29 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 31 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: