This story reminds me of a founder I met recently, building a wildly successful project on the most meager of resources (continue reading, I include Google Analytics screenshots below).
This is a hacker in the truest sense of the word. He builds stuff just because he loves building stuff. He is a student at a University here in Jamaica. He isn't building it to be cool, or chasing the latest web 2.0 fad of the week. He didn't know HN until I introduced it to him, and he is young (say 19/20).
That's right, WAP...not iOS or Android optimized HTML5 sites. Good, old fashioned WAP sites.
The most amazing part of the story though is that he is running it on 2 dedicated servers in Germany, it's a hack job (PHP, a bit of Ruby & a bit of Java). But once he picked up traction, he got so much traffic that he hasn't been able to keep the servers online.
In the first image - http://i.imgur.com/yEbyh.png - you will see that he got over 1.5M uniques. The vast majority of the time period covered here (the last year) was either very low traffic - pre-traction - or servers offline due to excessive traffic.
In the 2nd image - http://i.imgur.com/Pu8da.png - you will see that about 1.2M of those visits were in the 3 month period of June 1st - Aug 31st. His servers melted down towards the end of August and he ran out of money to pay his server bills. He eventually got it back up again a few weeks later, and the traffic spiked again and the servers crashed a few weeks later again.
In the 3rd image - http://i.imgur.com/HJ4gy.png - you will see that the vast majority of the visits are from Asia (even though he is 1 guy in the rural areas of Jamaica).
In the 4th image - http://i.imgur.com/JSQ48.png - and perhaps the most striking you will see the diversity of devices that the visitors are coming from. Most of them are from "feature phones". i.e. A multitude of versions of Nokia phones. Notice that this is just 1 - 10 of 508 device types.
He presented at a conference I went to, here in Jamaica, and he and I started speaking. I am helping him figure out how to proceed in a sustainable way. i.e. getting this thing stable, and then generating revenue.
After speaking to him for many weeks, I finally realized how insane his accomplishment is. Apparently, in all of this, he had been creating his site on computers that were not his. He either used his school computers, or borrowed machines from people. His Aunt is buying him a 2nd hand Thinkpad for Christmas - for which he is EXTREMELY stoked.
So while we are all chasing the billions doled out by Apple on the App Store and the newest, sexiest SaaS app idea with fancy $29/mo recurring revenue, with our cutting edge macbook pros and iPads - here is one guy using borrowed hardware, making a creation app for a technology that we have long since forgotten, generating crazy traffic and usage and struggling to even make a dime from his creation.
The world is a funny place, and this internet thing that we live on - is massive. As big as TechCrunch & HN are, there is so much more out there.
If you think you can help out in any way, either donating computing resources or anything else that can help us get this site back online and helping him start to generate revenue from this - then feel free to reach out to me.
P.S. If you want to dig into it some more, check out what some of the fans of the site are saying on it's FB page. I am not trying to trick you into liking the page. It only has ~1500 likes, but you can see passionate users commenting (both complaining about the downtime and praising some of the features).
That's a great story and congrats to him on building something like that under those conditions.
There's a good reason why "we are all chasing the billions doled out by Apple on the App Store and the newest, sexiest SaaS app idea": money. He's making no money and it will be very hard to monetize. How do you get someone on another contentent, who earns very little money, using old technology, to pay you and pay enough to turn a profit?
It's great that he's helping people but if it has no business model it's not sustainable unless he can turn it into a non-profit with donors.
That is really a sad state of affairs. You can create something that helps and is used by millions of people in the world, but unless those people have disposable income, you're likely screwed as far as earning enough to keep doing it. Better do something that a much smaller number of rich white people will pay you for instead.
If people don't have money, it means this should be a financially backed non-profit, or the underlying issues should be fixed first. It's not sad that you can't make money where there is none.
You would be surprised how much aggregate purchasing power "poor people" have.
As someone that lives in a third world country, the biggest companies are those that sell lots of products to the masses - not the boutique shops that sell to "middle & upper classes". i.e. the "bottom of the pyramid". In fact, Carlos Slim (the richest man in the world) has a ton of companies that sell to the bottom of the pyramid, and he is doing fine ;)
The businesses, here, that target the middle-to-upper classes tend to struggle.
So I am fairly certain there is a way to monetize this.
In fact, some users do want to pay to keep their site alive. So we just need to balance the amount that is paid and make sure resources are effectively allocated.
So do many other companies in many other countries - including utilities in the US - but the owners are not the richest people in the world. In fact, they probably don't come in the top 10.
I say that to say that having a monopoly is not a guarantee of maximum success.
very little money / person is fine as long as you have enough scale to back it up.
@parentcomment. I see that you seem to have a lot of traffic from India. You might want to check out http://vserv.mobi/
IIRC, they do have this payment processor which can pull money from your mobile prepaid balance. I don't think a lot of people here use credit cards.
Have any specific steps been taken into monetizing his app?
Actually, let me re-phrase, what is the biggest problem he's facing?
I see that most of his visitors are from Asia, then why not reach out to Alipay payment processor? I am not overtly familiar with them, but maybe they have a cheap payment-by-sms product or similar (where users could pay a small price using their phone via txt message).
It is a very popular payment method in some areas of the globe for micro-payments.
Thanks for that suggestion. Never heard of it, but we will look into it.
The biggest problem, right this instant, is keeping the app up. I suspect it needs to be re-architected, because there is a lot of room for optimization so we can at least get the app working properly on the current hardware.
Once the site is online and stable, then it is a matter of monetization.
As for specific steps, yes...developing an ad network along side this app - and also using third party ad networks. The issue is that a lot of the sites that people create have porn.
I believe, when he gave the presentation the site had 19,000 WAP sites active. By active, he means updated in the last 7 days. He does a purge of all non-active sites every 7 days - because server resources are so scarce.
"His Aunt is buying him a 2nd hand Thinkpad for Christmas - for which he is EXTREMELY stoked."
Thanks for posting this along with the data screen shots, very interesting. He has the right kind of aunt (I use recycled Thinkpads)! I take it you will be providing cloud storage/backup discs &c as well?
Well, Thank God for things like Dropbox - he has been using some amount of cloud storage & he has a backup external drive.
I will be doing my best to get it up and running - but given that it was initially written in PHP largely, and I am a Ruby guy we are trying to figure out the best way forward (in terms of a sustainability path with hosting resources).
I do PHP development and would be happy to lend a hand - I have a lot of respect for people like your friend who build things purely to help people so if there's anything PHP development wise he might want help with, send him my way. My email's [email protected].
Don't get me wrong, this isn't an altruistic venture. He found a need and built a solution. Now he is exploring ways to make money from it. It's just that it is much trickier than accepting a credit card from a US consumer.
If you are still interested, I would love to drop you a line.
I'm sure you are exploring this, but would some NGOs be prepared to fund a server/bandwidth for a period of time in return for having health advice/business advice/information on the front page? Just thinking of the African page views he was getting...
Great story marcamillion, I had totally forgotten about WAP, it's so easy to get caught up with the tech that we use every day and forget about the rest. Good luck to your friend!
This is a hacker in the truest sense of the word. He builds stuff just because he loves building stuff. He is a student at a University here in Jamaica. He isn't building it to be cool, or chasing the latest web 2.0 fad of the week. He didn't know HN until I introduced it to him, and he is young (say 19/20).
He built http://wapcreate.com - a WAP site creator.
That's right, WAP...not iOS or Android optimized HTML5 sites. Good, old fashioned WAP sites.
The most amazing part of the story though is that he is running it on 2 dedicated servers in Germany, it's a hack job (PHP, a bit of Ruby & a bit of Java). But once he picked up traction, he got so much traffic that he hasn't been able to keep the servers online.
In the first image - http://i.imgur.com/yEbyh.png - you will see that he got over 1.5M uniques. The vast majority of the time period covered here (the last year) was either very low traffic - pre-traction - or servers offline due to excessive traffic.
In the 2nd image - http://i.imgur.com/Pu8da.png - you will see that about 1.2M of those visits were in the 3 month period of June 1st - Aug 31st. His servers melted down towards the end of August and he ran out of money to pay his server bills. He eventually got it back up again a few weeks later, and the traffic spiked again and the servers crashed a few weeks later again.
In the 3rd image - http://i.imgur.com/HJ4gy.png - you will see that the vast majority of the visits are from Asia (even though he is 1 guy in the rural areas of Jamaica).
In the 4th image - http://i.imgur.com/JSQ48.png - and perhaps the most striking you will see the diversity of devices that the visitors are coming from. Most of them are from "feature phones". i.e. A multitude of versions of Nokia phones. Notice that this is just 1 - 10 of 508 device types.
He presented at a conference I went to, here in Jamaica, and he and I started speaking. I am helping him figure out how to proceed in a sustainable way. i.e. getting this thing stable, and then generating revenue.
After speaking to him for many weeks, I finally realized how insane his accomplishment is. Apparently, in all of this, he had been creating his site on computers that were not his. He either used his school computers, or borrowed machines from people. His Aunt is buying him a 2nd hand Thinkpad for Christmas - for which he is EXTREMELY stoked.
So while we are all chasing the billions doled out by Apple on the App Store and the newest, sexiest SaaS app idea with fancy $29/mo recurring revenue, with our cutting edge macbook pros and iPads - here is one guy using borrowed hardware, making a creation app for a technology that we have long since forgotten, generating crazy traffic and usage and struggling to even make a dime from his creation.
The world is a funny place, and this internet thing that we live on - is massive. As big as TechCrunch & HN are, there is so much more out there.
If you think you can help out in any way, either donating computing resources or anything else that can help us get this site back online and helping him start to generate revenue from this - then feel free to reach out to me.
P.S. If you want to dig into it some more, check out what some of the fans of the site are saying on it's FB page. I am not trying to trick you into liking the page. It only has ~1500 likes, but you can see passionate users commenting (both complaining about the downtime and praising some of the features).