[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a meme creator that makes around $4k...
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Show HN: I made a meme creator that makes around $4k a month
Author : par
Score : 169 points
Date : 2021-08-27 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metameme.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (metameme.app)
| conqrr wrote:
| Nice! What brings the revenue? Ads or do you charge?
| par wrote:
| It is subscription based model. $5/month or $35/year.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| I'd love to scoff who would pay a subscription fee for a meme
| generator, but clearly plenty of people. Good work!
| tarey wrote:
| Great work
| par wrote:
| thank you
| javiermaestro wrote:
| From your comments, you turned from a one-time purchase to
| subscriptions.
|
| Can you share your attrition rate? Also, how many want to pay
| per-month VS the full year (heavily discounted price)?
|
| Thanks!
| par wrote:
| Yes happy to. From the app store analytics over last 30 days
|
| Retention rate: 82%
|
| Monthly subs: 93%
|
| yearly subs: 7%
| javiermaestro wrote:
| Thanks! I just can't wrap my head around the fact that
| someone is willing to pay $5 a month for a meme app! XD
|
| Are the users active? Have you thought / analyzed if they pay
| and forget that it's a subscription? :-?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Same, but on the other hand memers do seem to take their
| craft seriously. While I wouldn't want to pay monthly for
| this app as I would use it a few times a year (I'll just
| fire up photoshop), I guess its not too much cash for users
| serious about creating. Apparently you can make some good
| cash focusing on a niche user market.
| par wrote:
| Something interesting I found is that the many of the
| 'power users' of the meme world have many different meme
| making apps and they pay for most of them!
| robocat wrote:
| What are some of the sites that the 'power users'
| initially seed with their memes?
|
| Are there any patterns to (profiles of) the power users,
| or customer segments you know about the power users?
| Amateur versus professional?
|
| Edit: I see you mention "a lot of my users run fairly
| large instagram pages (50k+ followers)", so other sites
| or segments?
| par wrote:
| Yes the users are quite active. The main thing people are
| paying for are the video features and the video scraper.
| There is some code which allows the app to pull videos from
| youtube, instagram, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc, and I
| think that is really the thing that separates this app from
| other generic image editors.
| vletal wrote:
| From YouTube? I thought that such app would get rejected
| from App Store...
| damsta wrote:
| Nice work!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I loathe apps that want a subscription for such a trivial
| concept. Why did you choose this route over ad support or one
| time payment?
| na85 wrote:
| I find ads to be disgusting, and I loathe apps that are ad
| supported. I'm glad the author chose the subscription route.
| par wrote:
| I don't get enough volume for ad support to be meaningful, and
| i didnt want to ruin the experience with ads. Before
| subscriptions, for a long time it was a one time purchase only.
| Then some VC's suggested i experiment with subscriptions, and I
| was very hesitant and semi grossed out. But I decided to give
| it a try, and I was seriously amazed that my conversion was
| barely impacted, and the same people buying one time purchases
| were also willing to purchase subscriptions. From there I did
| price experimentation, and was even more surprised to see the
| results there.
| chippy wrote:
| how did you do the experimentations? some kind of AB testing?
| par wrote:
| I'm embarrassed to say that I never used any formal a/b
| testing tools. I just fully converted to subscriptions, and
| ran it for a few weeks, and compared it to the previous few
| weeks (which were one time purchase.)
| inetknght wrote:
| You don't need A/B testing tools. Most people don't like
| being tested on. Trust your gut, listen to your users,
| and just beware of vocal minorities. It seems like you're
| doing well already.
| asddubs wrote:
| I'm surprised as well. I respect the hustle, but I honestly
| don't understand why anyone would debase themselves by paying
| $5 a month to make memes
| par wrote:
| a lot of my users run fairly large instagram pages (50k+
| followers), so for them it's quite worth it I think.
| bostik wrote:
| Ok, that's actually quite an interesting - and remarkably
| specific - customer segment.
|
| If your core customer base pulls in 4 or 5 figures a
| month from their own hustle, they might be willing to pay
| up to $15/month for features tailor-made for their needs.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I don't know either, but I imagine it's the same reason
| they debase themselves by valuing the fake internet points
| the memes earn them.
| zem wrote:
| what would you consider "real" internet points?
| wy35 wrote:
| A successful meme page with thousands of followers can
| generate substantial income. "Fake internet points"
| sometimes correlates directly with real cash.
| Freeboots wrote:
| A lot of big ig pages or whatever make decent money, even
| 'theme' pages that dont revolve around an 'influencer'
| personality. This would be a pretty minor business expense
| if its even a little bit useful.
| tyingq wrote:
| Hard to argue when it's making non-trivial revenue. I was
| surprised people would pay a subscription for a meme tool too,
| but...
| par wrote:
| but here we are :)
| exdsq wrote:
| Clearly it's not trivial enough such that hundreds/thousands of
| people are willing to pay for it!
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I loathe apps that want a subscription for such a trivial
| concept. Why did you choose this route over ad support or one
| time payment?_
|
| Not OP but to counterpoint: I loathe apps that want to be
| supported by ads. Give me a one-time payment or a subscription.
| Let me choose if your service if worth paying for. If it's not
| worth paying for then it's also not worth ads. I'll use
| adblockers and use your service without ads anyway or else not
| use it at all.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a user, my order of preference is:
|
| 1. Non-personalized (non-intrusive) ads
|
| 2. One time payment
|
| 3. Yearly subscription
|
| 4. Ads that mine Bitcoin or otherwise make use of my compute
| resources
|
| 5. Monthly subscription
|
| 6. Personalized, intrusive ads
|
| I will go out of my way to actively avoid 4-6. For 3 it would
| hav to be DAMN good software.
| orangea wrote:
| I know it is a popular opinion, but I never understood
| it... why would you rather have non-personalized ads than
| personalized ads?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Because I know personal ads were made possible by
| obtaining private information about me, whereas non-
| personalized ads likely weren't. I'm not going to
| interact with either of them so I prefer the ones without
| privacy cost.
| handrous wrote:
| They're creepy as fuck. Same reason someone might not
| like being followed around everywhere, even if the person
| following them just writes down stuff about them but
| never does anything else. Spying ads are like that, but
| worse: it's like that person also occasionally runs in
| front of you to slap an ad-bearing sticker on some
| surface you're about to encounter, based on stuff they've
| written down.
|
| Spyvertising is that, but at an industrial scale. If
| one's creepy and ought to warrant intervention by law
| enforcement, the other's much, much worse.
| chucksta wrote:
| I don't trust whatever company is holding their
| informational profile of me to hold it securely. Or what
| the extent of the information they've gathered can
| indicate, no one is going to stop at "just enough"
| orangea wrote:
| Honest question, why do you care if it isn't secure? What
| would be the downside of one's internet activity being
| public?
| inetknght wrote:
| > _What would be the downside of one 's internet activity
| being public?_
|
| Are you for real?
|
| Want to know what your employer has you working on? Let's
| see what searches you've done.
|
| Want to know what your employees are doing? Let's see
| what things they're buying.
|
| Fuck that obnoxious bullshit.
| orangea wrote:
| Yes I am for real and I genuinely don't see why either of
| those things are bad.
| inetknght wrote:
| Well your employer probably doesn't want you to leak work
| to competitors.
|
| You probably don't want your employer to know that you
| have cancer, are hiding a fling, and could soon have
| family problems requiring you to take a leave of absence.
| kaybe wrote:
| I am deeply annoyed by ads with bad context fit. When I
| read about something I don't want my attention to be
| hijacked to other topics.
|
| E.g. when I look at code I don't want ads for photography
| equipment, but ads for coding courses or books may be
| juuust acceptable. It also has the nice benefit of not
| needing personalization, so the sibling comments' points
| are also included.
| mishafb wrote:
| 1. You charge what people are willing to pay, not how much your
| product is worth.
|
| 2. When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust
| that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase,
| who knows how long it will last.
| xaedes wrote:
| > When it's a subscription as a customer you have more trust
| that it will continue working. When it's a one time purchase,
| who knows how long it will last.
|
| Funny, for me this is the total opposite: subscription
| software may end any time and then you got nothing. One time
| purchased software you can just continue to use. Well, I
| guess in the games of rent-seeking, cloud-only, security and
| updates the viability of this is fading...
| WA wrote:
| It depends on the software. Is it an isolated thing? Then
| yes, you can continue to use it. But apps that read from
| APIs or scrape data are one version away from not
| functioning at all. Hence, regular updates. Hence,
| subscriptions to justify the ongoing modifications.
| cftm wrote:
| Total tangent, I used to have the Office 365 subscription
| but canceled it, yet I can still use word/excel - I've just
| lost access to the cloud features which I wasn't using to
| begin with - I would have thought they'd disable my version
| of word/excel but when I canceled it did not happen.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 1. You charge what people are willing to pay, not how much
| your product is worth.
|
| What's the difference?
| yupper32 wrote:
| Probably better phrased as:
|
| You charge what people are willing to pay, not how much you
| _think_ your product is worth.
| FunHearing3443 wrote:
| True, with #1 this is pedantic but it could be restated as
| the worth of your product is what people are willing to pay.
| granshaw wrote:
| What do you think? To make more money of course, which is the
| whole point of businesses.
| bob229 wrote:
| Are you a communist or something?!
| 58x14 wrote:
| Forgive me, but if the market responds to OP's subscription
| model (and $4k/mo is not trivial), no ads is a better user
| experience and there is less dependency on the ad network for
| revenue.
|
| It's typically much harder to acquire new users than retain
| current users = subscription model allows you to monetize your
| userbase over a broader period of time (let's say $5/mo * 6 mo
| = $30) to a value that would likely be cost-prohibitive. Most
| users would not spend $30 for this app. But they might sign up
| for a free trial, and then the $5 subscription.
| angryasian wrote:
| the one time payment for a multi year support of software
| doesn't grow businesses. We just don't see the business of
| releasing a new version of the same software every two years
| with some new features and minor refresh, though it still
| done. It might support a small dev, but you need recurring
| revenue and subscriptions and ways to increase the ARPU to
| grow a real business.
| par wrote:
| Yes agreed. I used to have a one time purchase, but then I
| kept improving the app, adding more complex features, and
| the old price didn't reflect all the new work I had put in.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Since you're essentially mostly repackaging content other people
| have created, what's your approach to copyright and royalties? Or
| is the plan to simply hope you never get a DMCA notice or the
| like?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| For some time I wanted to make browser-based utils/time wasters
| in the same vein (think Photopea but simpler, or .io games) - to
| generate some passive income, even if it'd be $100 a month or so.
| Has anybody succeeded in that and can share what was key to
| achieve income? I mean, most savvy people have ad blockers these
| days.
| par wrote:
| Personally I think app would be the way to go, and charge some
| in app fee or subscription. I don't think anyone would pay for
| browser apps, and you would require massive volume to be ad
| supported.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I guess the adblock usage percentage for mobile is much lower
| due to the hassle required :)
| sosodev wrote:
| I made a web game that has been played by around a hundred
| thousand people so far and net a few hundred dollars. Now that
| the idea is validated I'm releasing a huge update soon that
| will tie in with a Patreon page and I expect it to earn some
| decent monthly revenue.
| 0xbkt wrote:
| Have a client from Turkey who is basically running all Agar.io
| clones today (600+ online players) in the Web. Google ranks him
| 1st in search results (even higher than the original Agar.io
| itself) for multiple competitive keywords, and he makes around
| EUR3-4k every month from ads. Target audience is mostly kids,
| who are looking for unblocked alternatives of their favorite
| browser games at school.
|
| He keeps saying SEO is everything, and won't drop the tiniest
| hint about how he's achieving to top Google results.
| gldev3 wrote:
| I enjoy seeing posts like these, good for you pal. Is it hard to
| maintain? Is this just side income?
|
| :)
| par wrote:
| Thank you! It doesn't take a lot of maintenance, mostly side
| income at this point. But I have put in a LOT of hours on it
| over the years. I will work on it in bursts, and take a few
| weeks and work on it 3-5 hours a day, and then not work on it
| at all for a while. I do need to keep the image library fresh,
| but that is pretty easy. To be honest, if I worked a bit more
| on it, I think it could do a lot better.
| giarc wrote:
| At $4k per month, you could sell it for quite a bit of money.
| Multiples on apps are pretty high right now.
| yreg wrote:
| Thank you for all the info you shared in this thread, it is
| interesting.
| lxe wrote:
| Awesome work, Par! Nice to see this on HN.
| [deleted]
| par wrote:
| thanks buddy :)
| gramakri wrote:
| I am seeing "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue" in
| firefox.
|
| Here's a screenshot - https://imgur.com/a/SzVS75Q
|
| Same in chrome. The cert is wrong, it has the cert of
| "search.dnsadvantage.com"
| par wrote:
| Hmm, i just installed a new SSL certificate today, but it seems
| to be installed correctly. Can you try some kind of refresh or
| a different browser?
|
| edit: oh, please try https://metameme.app
|
| edit: the cert should be sectigo https://imgur.com/a/jb91a0z
| gramakri wrote:
| Heh, seems to be something with the wifi because it works
| fine with android+mobile network. Suspicious! Looks like a
| misconfigured dns server in the coffee shop. Sorry for the
| false call .
| par wrote:
| no no, it's not false! My friend on at&t has also noticed
| some really weird dns or server configuration issues with
| my server. It's a digital ocean cloud instance. I need to
| get to the bottom of it.
| opencl wrote:
| The Android version seems abandoned, it hasn't been updated in
| several years and there are several reviews complaining that paid
| features no longer work. Are there any plans to update it?
| par wrote:
| I do personally apologize for this. The android app was built
| by a very close friend of mine as a favor/side project back in
| the early days, and you are correct, it has been abandoned :(
| The plan is to just take it down. I need to contact him but
| don't want to offend him! Let that be a lesson of going into
| business with friends!
| imnotreallynew wrote:
| You're making a healthy revenue, any reason you don't want to
| just contract out a few updates? I work full time but I've
| also run a small contracting business for years, happy to do
| it at a reasonable cost.
| par wrote:
| I have considered this, I don't see anywhere near the same
| purchase conversion on android that I do on iOS. But that
| could also be due to build quality. Do you have any insight
| on how successful pay models are on android apps?
| handrous wrote:
| This is the norm on Android, and means you have to have
| huge scale before it's worth releasing a paid or
| subscription app on Android, which might be viable at
| much smaller scale on iOS. It's part of why Android's
| ecosystem has so much prominent adware. Common wisdom
| (backed up by data) in the industry is that, generally
| speaking, your "conversion rate" for paid or subscription
| apps on Android will be a tiny sliver of what it is on
| iOS, unless your app is very unusual.
|
| There are a bunch of factors that probably cause this,
| but they're all mixed up and intertwined so it's hard to
| point at one and go "that's it, that's the reason".
| Selection bias of the user base (think: socio-economic
| status, and maybe even average technical know-how or
| comfort with software); iOS users use their devices _way_
| more than Android users, for all purposes (but, is that
| because of the previous thing? Maybe); it could have
| something to do with the ecosystems the two app stores
| have cultivated, causing different levels of trust among
| the two user bases when it comes time to spend money; it
| could have something to do with the quality of the
| experience of using the respective operating systems
| themselves.
|
| Probably all of those contribute _some amount_. It 's
| hard to say, though.
| [deleted]
| 58x14 wrote:
| This is pretty standard - most Apple ecosystem users tend
| to be somewhere between 2-3x more measurably valuable,
| whether App store v Play store revenue [1] or as audience
| segments in advertising _.
|
| You may consider a relationship with another developer
| where they maintain the Android distro in exchange for
| some significant percentage of revenue.
|
| 1 - https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-
| downloads-1h-20... _ - source needed, but speaking from
| experience at scale
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Curious if you've thought about getting anyone else to take a
| look at the Android side of things. Seems a shame to just let
| a working project fizzle for Android.
|
| Do you have a repo or something for the Android app that
| curious people could look at?
| [deleted]
| cushychicken wrote:
| Man, that's really cool.
|
| I love memes. I've always wanted to do some kind of a browser
| based meme maker I could either monetize with ads or a nominal
| ($10/yr) payment to remove ads.
| par wrote:
| I think Kapwing has dominated the browser market as of
| recently, but before that imgflip was always my go to.
| atum47 wrote:
| Memes are a good source of income now a days, just look at Elon
| Musk.
|
| Jokes apart, great to see a fun project like this giving profit.
| Well done.
| par wrote:
| thanks! memes can pay off apparently :)
| zfxfr wrote:
| It looks like the Android version is not accessible or the link
| contains a mistake. Or you removed it from Google play store ? If
| so why ?
| par wrote:
| seems like it was just taken down by my friend... the android
| version is woefully out of date. Sorry about that. I am
| removing the links now.
| santa_boy wrote:
| Where do most of your customers come from? Any typical profiles?
|
| Quite impressive that you could do this with a meme creator!
| par wrote:
| Thank you! The early users came from me buying instagram ads,
| and recent users are primarily from App Store ads. Amazingly
| there is some organic traffic as well. I spent a lot of time
| trying to improve my app store ranking, and that makes a HUGE
| difference for getting new customers. If you can rank in the
| top 3 for a couple of important keywords, you can do really
| well.
| joenr wrote:
| What did you do to reach so many users? How did you grow it?
| par wrote:
| I have been building the app for many years now. In the
| beginning I spent money mostly on instagram and facebook ads. I
| had pretty decent results on this, and could get installs for
| around 20-30 cents. However, those users also trashed my app in
| comments and didn't convert to paying users. Later I moved to
| App Store ads, it costs a bit more for the downloads, but the
| users convert much better. I am starting to think of going back
| and giving IG ads a shot though.
|
| Edit: forgot to mention, I also spent quite a bit of time
| improving app store ranking, which contributes significantly to
| getting more downloads and customers.
| tommymachine wrote:
| what did you use to do the ASO?
| par wrote:
| I used the free version of App Annie, and did a bunch of
| experimentation on the title, subtitle and keywords that I
| entered into the app store.
| kebsup wrote:
| Good job! I've created gif meme creator and so far I've only
| received one 5 USD donation. :D https://gifmemes.io
| aazaa wrote:
| > The total cost of this tool is: 60$ (yearly, domain) +
| 60$(yearly, hosting) + more than 150 hours of programming
| (which would be about 4000$ from where I live). Revenue is non-
| existent. I've decided to leave the site ad-free because ads
| suck but now it's only eating money so please donate. My
| current plan on getting a payout is getting Elon Musk to use it
| and hoping he will buy me a Tesla.
|
| That is a seriously good result for 150 hours give or take. I
| wonder if Elon peruses HN...
| cookingrobot wrote:
| Looks neat. FYI the templates search isn't working.
|
| I'd love to browse for more examples.
| maximum_stress wrote:
| You're also missing an obvious donation link. Might want to
| link to Patreon, Paypal, a *coin address. Something.
| didibus wrote:
| Well, you offer it for free, but also you don't target mobile?
| Maybe that's the difference?
| zem wrote:
| that's seriously impressive!
| jwithington wrote:
| template search isn't working. did you exceed your search api's
| limit lol
| kebsup wrote:
| yep, I needed to upgrade firebase.
| par wrote:
| get on the blaze plan :D
| khazhoux wrote:
| How do I donate? I'll double your year-to-date earn!
| atum47 wrote:
| this looks super cool. I'm working (from time to time) in a web
| flash app, that could be used to this kind of meme creation.
|
| How do you do the tracking? Is it blob tracking or do you use
| something more sofisticated?
|
| this is how my web flash app is coming along:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9BbCp2ZTj6...
| atum47 wrote:
| I'm also interested in the GIF export. Right now I'm only
| exporting videos using canvas record stream, but I'm thinking
| about using ffmpeg.js to support different formats including
| animated gifs
| kebsup wrote:
| I've tried using ffmpeg but the browser support just isn't
| very good yet, so I'm using
| https://github.com/deanm/omggif.
| kebsup wrote:
| The tracking is basically a greedy search of the least sum of
| square differences of pixels in anchor, so even simpler than
| that.
| par wrote:
| Uhhh, WOW! This is actually really well done. I love the labels
| anchored to the objects in the image. That is so crucial. And
| the frame editor, the label position editor, I mean this is
| seriously well done. I think it might be a bit too powerful for
| average users though.
| kebsup wrote:
| It was my bachelor's thesis project, so I just kept adding
| features. There is a simplified version on mobile, in which
| you just choose a template and change texts.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Way to go man.
| par wrote:
| thank you!
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Good job, may I ask , what was your marketing strategy? Did you
| engage a lead generation company, SEO? How did you gain
| visibility in the virtual shops? Used social media for promotion?
| Pricing structure?
|
| If those questions are too profound, feel free to not address
| them, but either way, this is impressive for a solo Indy dev.
|
| And what is the tech stack? Do you listen to users feature
| requests and bug reports?
|
| I have a project in mind myself and all the above questions I
| wouldn't know how to handle.
| par wrote:
| I have not engaged in any outside marketing consultancy, lead
| gen or SEO. I have done some stuff myself, written blog posts
| and tried my hand at basic marketing tasks, but honestly i
| don't have much time for it. For gaining visibility, i mostly
| rely on app store optimization or paid ads.
|
| Tech stack is swift, and python on the backend. I do listen to
| user requests and bugs, in fact I get tons of great feedback
| from my users with how quickly i respond to their issues,
| usually resolving issues within an hour, all on my own. It
| takes up a decent chunk of time, but I do care a lot about the
| customers, so that makes it worth it.
| lurn_mor wrote:
| Whom do you license the Original Content from? Or do you steal it
| without recompensation?
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Parody/satire is generally fair use.
| trolololooo wrote:
| I wonder if that protects the person who makes the parody,
| rather than the app developer who make $4K a month. Lawyers
| will not typically go after targets that don't have money for
| payouts.
| langitbiru wrote:
| I mean Elon Musk steals memes all the time.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/style/elon-musk-memes.htm...
|
| Technically speaking, building a meme platform that takes
| recompensation into account is an interesting problem.
|
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1370373708506750977?lang=...
| par wrote:
| I've always been concerned about this, but there are so many
| meme creation tools out there that don't seem to be impacted by
| this problem.
| giarc wrote:
| I'd say just be ready to take down an image if someone
| approaches you and you should be fine.
| _ink_ wrote:
| I am really envious of people living in countries that have fair
| use. In the EU somebody would sue you because of copyright
| infringement.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Nope.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47708144
| luckylion wrote:
| That's about platforms where memes are posted to though, not
| a meme generator that creates templates (i.e. other people's
| pictures etc) for you to post and takes money specifically
| for providing that service.
| par wrote:
| I've always worried about copyright infringement as well.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I love the promotional messaging. :D
|
| "Your Instagram page will gain tons of followers. You will be
| famous on Twitter."
| par wrote:
| thanks, writing copy is not my strong suit, and this was after
| many iterations.
| pixiemaster wrote:
| actually it's quite to the point, no fuss, clear value
| proposition.
| smhenderson wrote:
| And it comes across as just whimsically sarcastic enough to
| fit in with the overall subject really well.
|
| If that wasn't intentional, even better!
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(page generated 2021-08-27 23:00 UTC)