mailto 附带附件
In 2014, my friends and I set out to build the best possible web design tools. We built UI kits, Admin Dashboards, Templates, and Plugins. We’ve always tried to create products that are helpful in the development process, and that we ourselves would use for building websites for clients.
在2014年，我和我的朋友们着手构建最好的网页设计工具。 我们构建了UI工具包 ， 管理仪表板 ， 模板和插件 。 我们一直试图创建对开发过程有帮助的产品，并且我们自己将这些产品用于为客户构建网站。
From a revenue’s perspective, if we don’t take into consideration the Black Friday sales (which doubled the amount that we made in November 2016), we are grossing around $22,000 per month. Part of that goes toward paying our affiliates’ commissions, collected VAT, payment vendors’ taxes, and other expenses. We end up netting around $17,000 each month.
从收入的角度来看，如果不考虑黑色星期五的销售(这是我们2016年11月的两倍)，我们每月的收入约为22,000美元。 其中一部分用于支付我们的会员佣金，收取的增值税，支付供应商的税金和其他费用。 我们最终每月净赚大约17,000美元。
In this case study, I’ll share exactly how we built our products and grew our business. You’ll hear all about:
在本案例研究中，我将确切分享我们如何构建产品和发展业务。 您将听到所有有关：
What motivated us to start our startup, Creative Tim, and how we built our initial product
是什么促使我们启动了我们的初创公司Creative Tim ，以及我们如何构建初始产品
- How we got our first users 我们如何获得第一批用户的
- Marketing strategies we used to grow 我们过去发展的营销策略
- How our business model works 我们的业务模式如何运作
- The story behind our revenue sources 我们收入来源的故事
- Biggest lessons we’ve learned so far 到目前为止我们学到的最大的教训
1.是什么促使我们开始使用Creative Tim，以及我们如何构建初始产品 (1. What motivated us to get started with Creative Tim and how we built the initial product)
We started out as a two-person agency in Romania with no funding from third parties. We didn’t have enough cash to rent an office — even desks at a co-working space —so we just worked out of a Starbucks. We were barely able to pay our daily living expenses by doing work for clients.
我们最初是在罗马尼亚成立的两人代理机构，没有第三方的资助。 我们没有足够的现金来租用办公室，甚至连办公室的办公桌都没有，所以我们只是在星巴克工作。 通过为客户工作，我们几乎无法支付日常生活费用。
Creative Tim was a side project that we thought would come in handy to web developers like ourselves. We noticed that we were always “reinventing the wheel” when working with clients, and creating the same items over and over again for their websites. So we wanted to create a few standard components, like login and register modals, calendars, wizards, headers, and footers.
Creative Tim是一个辅助项目，我们认为它将对像我们这样的Web开发人员派上用场。 我们注意到，与客户合作时，我们总是在“重新发明轮子”，并为他们的网站一遍又一遍地创建相同的项目。 因此，我们希望创建一些标准组件，例如登录和注册模式，日历，向导，页眉和页脚。
Over the span of a few months, we dedicated our time to implementing the platform and a few freebies (alongside the agency work). In the beginning, we didn’t have any Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or email list subscribers. We posted a lot of stuff about our freebies on various design forums and we used the “stalk web developers on Twitter” technique to spread the word about our products.
在过去的几个月中，我们投入了很多时间来实施该平台和一些免费赠品(以及代理工作)。 最初，我们没有任何Twitter关注者，Facebook粉丝或电子邮件列表订户。 我们在各种设计论坛上发布了许多关于免费赠品的内容，并且我们使用了“ Twitter上的跟踪Web开发人员”技术来传播有关我们产品的信息。
2.我们如何获得第一批用户的 (2. How we got our first users)
At first, nobody really understood what we wanted to do. They didn’t understand the value we could provide by helping them improve their businesses. We decided that it would be better to create a more complex product that would help people understand what we were doing ?
最初，没有人真正了解我们想要做什么。 他们不理解通过帮助他们改善业务可以提供的价值。 我们认为最好创建一个更复杂的产品来帮助人们了解我们在做什么？
We launched the Get Shit Done Kit, a UI Kit based on Bootstrap. It was featured on Designer News, and it was quite popular. We got over 11,000 users from that source, which was a huge spike for our business.
我们推出了Get Shit Done套件 ，这是一个基于Bootstrap的UI套件。 它在Designer News上被精选，并且非常受欢迎。 我们从该来源获得了超过11,000个用户，这对我们的业务来说是一个巨大的增长。
Then two weeks later our startup was featured on Product Hunt. That gave us another spike with over 5,000 users. After that, the situation was stable, and we graduated from 0 users/week to a consistent 2,000 to 3,000 users/week.
然后，两周后，我们的初创公司在Product Hunt中成为特色 。 这使我们又有了超过5,000个用户的高峰。 之后，情况稳定了，我们从每周0个用户升级到每周稳定2,000至3,000个用户。
A couple of months later, motivated by the success of free Get Shit Done Kit, we released Get Shit Done Kit PRO the premium version of GSDK, with more components and ready-to-use example pages.
几个月后，受免费的Get Shit Done Kit成功的激励，我们发布了GSDK的高级版Get Shit Done Kit PRO ，其中包含更多组件和易于使用的示例页面。
Initially, we only made a few sales. The product was generating about $200/week, which was not nearly enough to sustain our business. At the same time we were working on a web project for one of our clients.
最初，我们只进行了少量销售。 该产品每周产生大约200美元，这不足以维持我们的业务。 同时，我们正在为一个客户开发一个Web项目。
Then in December, we got published on Bootstrap Expo, the most popular gallery for showcasing websites created with Bootstrap. This was another important spike for our business. Since all of the people who go to Bootstrap Expo for inspiration already know Bootstrap or have previously worked with it, they were the perfect audience for our business.
然后在12月，我们在Bootstrap Expo上发布了出版物， Bootstrap Expo是用于展示由Bootstrap创建的网站的最受欢迎的画廊。 这是我们业务的另一个重要高峰。 由于所有去Bootstrap Expo寻求灵感的人都已经知道Bootstrap或曾经与Bootstrap合作，所以他们是我们业务的理想受众。
Later, we discovered that getting traffic on your website is not enough to create a long term relationship with your users, and most of them forgot all about us after their first interaction. We did some research and discovered what most marketers probably already know: people forget things that they aren’t reminded of. Then we implemented the “Remember us email system” following the rules from the forgetting curve.
后来，我们发现在您的网站上获得流量不足以与您的用户建立长期关系，并且大多数人在首次互动后就忘记了我们的全部信息。 我们进行了一些研究，发现大多数营销人员可能已经知道：人们忘记了他们没有想到的东西。 然后，我们按照遗忘曲线中的规则实施了“记住我们的电子邮件系统”。
We wanted to give our users a reminder that we still existed and that we’re a valuable resource for their projects or their clients’ projects.
我们想提醒用户我们仍然存在，对于他们的项目或客户的项目，我们是宝贵的资源。
Currently, we send emails at the following schedule:
目前，我们按照以下时间表发送电子邮件：
- After 3 days from their first download, we send an email with other recommended products. 从首次下载开始3天后，我们会发送一封包含其他推荐产品的电子邮件。
- On day 10 we send an email requesting feedback and asking if they need help. 在第10天，我们发送一封电子邮件，要求您提供反馈并询问他们是否需要帮助。
- On day 15 we remind them that they can upgrade to PRO. 在第15天，我们提醒他们可以升级到PRO。
- On day 30 we ask them again for feedback and offer to promote something they’ve built in our gallery and social media. 在第30天，我们再次要求他们提供反馈，并提议推广他们在我们的画廊和社交媒体中构建的内容。
- We send a final reminder on day 60. 我们会在第60天发送最终提醒。
3.我们过去发展的营销策略 (3. Marketing strategies we used to grow)
Most of our marketing strategies consisted of submitting our content to different communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, Designer News, Hacker News, and GitHub. Some important subreddits that work well in our area include /r/web_design, /r/html5, /r/frontend, and /r/webdev.
我们大多数的营销策略都是将内容提交给Reddit，Product Hunt，Designer News，Hacker News和GitHub等不同社区。 在我们的区域中工作良好的一些重要子建议包括/ r / web_design ， / r / html5 ， / r / frontend和/ r / webdev 。
We also paid between $100–200 for newsletter campaigns a couple of times. Even though the ROI ratio matched the amount we invested, the campaigns did not meet the expectations. (Maybe this was just in our case, that wasn’t profitable and it works better for others.)
我们还多次为新闻通讯支付了$ 100-200。 尽管投资回报率与我们投资的金额相符，但广告系列并没有达到预期。 (也许这只是我们的情况，没有利润，对其他人来说效果更好。)
Then we paid $400 for Get Shit Done Kit PRO to appear in the Sidebar.io newsletter, a curated list of the 5 best design links made by Sacha Greif. This was a very rewarding newsletter for us, generating about $1,500 in sales.
然后，我们花了400美元购买了Get Shit Done Kit PRO，该广告出现在Sidebar.io时事通讯中，该通讯是由Sacha Greif制作的5条最佳设计链接的精选清单。 这对我们来说是非常有意义的时事通讯，产生了约1,500美元的销售额。
Then we purchased the “Review + Newsletter” package ($550) from eWebDesign. There were about 5,000 users who participated in the giveaway, and the total sales amounted $2,800.
然后，我们从eWebDesign购买了“ Review + Newsletter”软件包(550美元)。 大约有5,000位用户参加了此次赠品活动，总销售额达2,800美元。
We also thought about different places where we could find web developers who could use our products, and we realized that hackathons were exactly what we needed.
我们还考虑了可以找到可以使用我们的产品的Web开发人员的不同地方，我们意识到黑客马拉松正是我们所需要的。
Subsequently we started talking to people that were organizing hackathons to offer them free licenses for our “premium products.” We sponsored over 20 hackathons in different cities around the world (you can check them here).
随后，我们开始与组织黑客松的人们进行交谈，为他们提供“高级产品”的免费许可证。 我们在世界各地的不同城市赞助了20场黑客马拉松(您可以在此处查看 )。
All the developers were happy to get free licenses, which made us happy that we could help them create better projects faster and they also found out who we are, so a win-win situation.
所有开发人员都很高兴获得免费许可证，这使我们感到高兴，因为我们可以帮助他们更快地创建更好的项目，并且他们也知道我们是谁，所以是双赢的局面。
Critically, being physically present at some of the hackathons also gave us a lot of information about how the developers were using our products and how we could improve them in order to make them more user-friendly.
至关重要的是，亲自参加某些黑客马拉松比赛还为我们提供了许多有关开发人员如何使用我们的产品以及我们如何改进它们以使它们更加用户友好的信息。
In March 2015, we finished the agency’s contracts and we switched from “Agency mode” to “Startup mode.” With some revenue in the bank and a few monthly sales, our team moved to working full time for our startup. As we put everything together and constantly launched new products, our sources of traffic and revenue grew.
2015年3月，我们完成了代理商的合同，并从“ 代理商模式 ”切换为“ 启动模式” 。 有了银行的一些收入和每月的少量销售，我们的团队开始全职工作以启动公司。 随着我们将所有东西放在一起并不断推出新产品，我们的流量来源和收入都在增长。
4.商业模式如何运作 (4. How the business model works)
We realized that the best business model for Creative Tim was freemium: we create high quality freebies that help web developers build great websites, then release the PRO versions for those freebies, which contain more elements, sections, plugins, and example pages.
我们意识到，Creative Tim的最佳业务模型是免费增值 ：我们创建了高质量的免费赠品，以帮助Web开发人员构建出色的网站，然后发布这些免费赠品的PRO版本，其中包含更多的元素，部分，插件和示例页面。
At this moment, we have 8 premium products, each of which have their own freebies. Their prices range from $19 to $599, depending on the license and archive type (HTML, HTML + PSD, HTML + Sketch). The freebies appear everywhere on different communities, blog posts, newsletters, and social websites — and they are driving all of our traffic.
目前，我们有8个高级产品，每个产品都有自己的赠品。 它们的价格从19美元到599美元不等，具体取决于许可证和存档类型(HTML，HTML + PSD，HTML + Sketch)。 这些免费赠品出现在不同社区，博客文章，新闻通讯和社交网站上的任何地方，它们正在推动我们的所有流量。
Our business model: create high quality freebies that help web developers build great websites, then release the PRO versions for those freebies which contain more elements. ??
我们的业务模式 ：创建高质量的免费赠品，以帮助Web开发人员构建出色的网站，然后为包含更多元素的那些免费赠品发布PRO版本。 ??
The basic idea is that those freebies are always appearing on top 10 lists in these big communities. Each post that’s in the top 10 (depending on how big is the community) gives us between 1,000 and 15,000 targeted users in one day. You can imagine how much that would cost if you wanted to do a regular targeted marketing campaign. ?
基本思想是，这些免费赠品始终出现在这些大型社区的前十名列表中。 每条帖子排在前10位(取决于社区的规模)，一天内可以为我们提供1,000至15,000个目标用户。 您可以想像一下，如果您想进行定期的有针对性的营销活动，将花费多少。 ？
Some examples:
一些例子：
Paper Kit — 380 upvotes on Reddit
纸套件— 在Reddit上有380票
Material Kit — 560 upvotes on Reddit
资料套件-Reddit上的560赞
Light Bootstrap Dashboard Angular — 210 upvotes on Reddit
轻型自举仪表板角度-Reddit上的210赞
Material Kit — 180 uvpotes on Hacker News (peak position 9 with over 14,000 users coming to our website in 1 day)
材料工具包— 黑客新闻上的180个uvpot (峰值位置9，在1天内有超过14,000个用户访问我们的网站)
Material Kit — 860 upvotes on Product Hunt
物料套件-860个在产品搜寻中投票
- etc… you got the idea 等...你有主意
5.我们收入来源的故事 (5. The story behind our revenue sources)
直接产品销售 (Direct Product Sales)
Here we have the regular sales that are done on our website, which are worth about 24% of our overall sales. This doesn’t include the Big Bundle.
在这里，我们可以在网站上进行常规销售，这些销售占我们总销售额的24％。 这不包括大捆绑包 。
What is this Big Bundle, and how did we create it? We noticed that some of our users were downloading all our free products. (When I say all, I literally mean all of them in about 2–3 minutes after they have created an account.) We also noticed that some of our clients were purchasing all the products that were premium.
这个大捆绑包是什么，我们是如何创建的？ 我们注意到一些用户正在下载我们所有的免费产品。 (当我说全部的时候，我的意思是说所有的人都在他们创建帐户后的2-3分钟之内。)我们还注意到一些客户正在购买所有优质的产品。
So we decided to test a new product called the “Big Bundle” which gives you access to all our products with huge discounts (over 60%). This big package was getting around 6–8 purchases per month. Since the prices for this Big Bundle is $299 (instead of $500) for the personal license and $669 (instead of $2,127) for the developer license, it’s a good source of revenue and a great deal for the web designers and agencies who are using our products for multiple clients. It’s a win-win situation.
因此，我们决定测试一种名为“ Big Bundle ”的新产品，该产品可让您以极大的折扣(超过60％)使用我们的所有产品。 这个大包装每月大约可购买6至8件商品。 由于此大型捆绑包的个人许可证价格为299美元(而不是500美元)，开发人员许可证价格为669美元(而不是2127美元)，因此这是一个不错的收入来源，对于使用我们网站的网页设计师和代理机构来说，面向多个客户的产品。 这是双赢的局面。
会员销售 (Affiliates Sales)
We’ve created an affiliate network, and our affiliates are very happy because they get 50% to themselves from each transaction. For example, one of our most important affiliations is done through a very popular GitHub Repo: Bootstrap Material Design (17,000+ stars on GitHub). Currently, affiliates account for around 25% of our overall revenue.
我们已经建立了会员网络，我们的会员非常高兴，因为他们从每次交易中获得50％的收益。 例如，我们最重要的从属关系之一是通过非常受欢迎的GitHub Repo： Bootstrap Material Design (GitHub上有17,000颗星)完成的。 目前，联盟会员约占我们总收入的25％。
随机搜寻(SEO) (Organic Search (SEO))
We saw that we were also getting around 22% of our revenue from SEO. So we decided to invest more in SEO, we brought on an SEO consultant, whom we pay around $500/month to improve our products’ ranks in Google.
我们看到我们也从SEO中获得了大约22％的收入。 因此，我们决定在SEO上进行更多投资，并聘请了SEO顾问，我们每月支付约500美元，以提高产品在Google中的排名。
其他收益 (Other revenue)
The remainder of our monthly revenue comes from Facebook, Twitter, and our newsletter. Here’s how our revenue has evolved over time, along with some historically important moments, so you can understand why it has grown in some months:
我们每月的其余收入来自Facebook，Twitter和我们的时事通讯。 以下是我们的收入随着时间的推移而发展的过程，以及一些历史上重要的时刻，因此您可以了解为什么它在几个月内增长了：
And here’s a breakdown of how we burn cash:
以下是我们如何烧钱的明细：
6.到目前为止我们学到的最大的教训 (6. The biggest lessons we’ve learned so far)
听起来陈词滥调，但拥有出色的产品至关重要。 (It sounds cliché, but having a great product is crucial.)
A lot of founders really struggle trying to market and sell something that people don’t want or don’t need. If your product is crap, there is no marketing strategy — and no source of investment — that can keep it alive for long.
许多创始人确实很难尝试推销和销售人们不想要或不需要的东西。 如果您的产品很烂，那么没有可以长期维持的营销策略，也没有投资来源。
At the moment, our products are used by over 134,000 web developers around the world. We have people from Microsoft, Ubisoft, Vodafone, Orange, Harvard University, Stanford University, and governmental institutions downloading and using them as different internal tools, and we’ve sponsored more than 20 global hackathons from 14 countries.
目前，我们的产品已被全球134,000多名Web开发人员所使用。 我们有来自Microsoft，Ubisoft，Vodafone，Orange，哈佛大学，斯坦福大学和政府机构的人员下载并使用它们作为不同的内部工具，并且我们已经赞助了来自14个国家的20多次全球黑客马拉松 。
不要成为下一个Facebook。 尝试解决一个实际问题。 (Don’t look to be the next Facebook. Try to solve a real problem instead.)
Every step in our development seemed like the natural thing to do at the time. Looking back at our evolution, we wouldn’t change anything. But with all we’ve learned, we could definitely do everything faster the second time around.
当时我们发展的每一步似乎都是很自然的事情。 回顾我们的发展，我们将保持不变。 但是，根据我们所学的知识，我们绝对可以在第二次完成所有任务时更快。
We’ve always created and improved our products based on our customers’ feedback, and that is the best way to develop a business. It doesn’t matter what you personally like — you need to make sure you solve a real problem for a real customer.
我们始终根据客户的反馈来创建和改进产品，这是发展业务的最佳方法。 您的个人喜好无关紧要-您需要确保为真正的客户解决真正的问题。
阅读，阅读，阅读。 (Read, read, read.)
In the past three years, I’ve read more than I’d read in my entire life, and this makes me feel great. Here are some of my favorite books, which I recommend to everybody:
在过去的三年中，我的阅读量超过了我一生的阅读量，这使我感到非常愉快。 这是我最喜欢的一些书，我向大家推荐：
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster — Alistair Croll
I really do think that the secret weapon is to deliver great products combined with a great user experience and a great customer support.
我确实认为，秘密武器是提供出色的产品以及出色的用户体验和出色的客户支持。
The best decision that we made was to put our customer in the first row, and make sure that they were receiving a great UI kit/Dashboard that really solved their problems. That guided us through the whole journey. Our secret weapon is that we deliver great products combined with a great user experience and great customer support.
我们做出的最佳决定是将客户放在第一行，并确保他们收到了能真正解决他们问题的出色UI套件/仪表板。 那引导了我们整个旅程。 我们的秘密武器是，我们提供出色的产品以及出色的用户体验和出色的客户支持。
一切皆有可能 。 (Everything is possible.)
We are living in a world where anybody can become anything they want as long as they want to invest the amount of time that is needed. I’m saying time, and not money, because we all have time. I want to recommend two books that talk about this: Karaoke Capitalism by Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordstrom, and Zero to One by Peter Thiel (a PayPal co-founder).
我们生活在一个世界中，只要有人愿意花费所需的时间，任何人都可以成为他们想要的任何东西。 我说的是时间，而不是金钱，因为我们都有时间。 我想推荐两本书谈论这件事： 乔纳斯·里德斯特拉(JonasRidderstråle)和凯尔·诺德斯特罗姆(Kjell Nordstrom)撰写的《卡拉OK资本主义》 ，以及彼得·泰尔 ( Peter Thiel) (PayPal的联合创始人)的《从零到一》 。
At this point, there are no limits. You can go anywhere on the planet and you can talk with whomever you want just by contacting them through social media. Today an ordinary person can achieve more influence than the president of a small country. Think of those Instagram accounts with millions of followers. If I — a regular guy from Romania — can build a profitable business in 2.5 years that is making 60x my country’s monthly minimum monthly wage, then boy, just about anything is possible.
在这一点上，没有限制。 您可以走到地球上的任何地方，也可以通过社交媒体与他们联系，与任何人交谈。 今天，一个普通人比一个小国家的总统可以发挥更大的影响力。 想想那些拥有数百万粉丝的Instagram帐户。 如果我(罗马尼亚的一个普通人)可以在2.5年内建立可盈利的业务，并使我的国家的月最低月工资达到60倍，那么男孩，几乎所有可能。
谢谢阅读！ 如果您有任何意见或建议，可以在这里找到我： (Thanks for reading! If you have feedback or suggestions, you can find me here:)
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Also, here is my IndieHackers interview that I based this article off of.
另外， 这是我根据本文撰写的IndieHackers访谈 。
I Hope this motivates you to start your own business. Just drop me a message if you have any questions — I would be glad to help you!
我希望这能激发您开展自己的事业。 如果您有任何疑问，请给我留言-我们很乐意为您服务！
翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/growing-a-side-project-into-a-17-000-month-business-46024d2aa87f/
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