Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years.
I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools.
Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video editor, I decided to incorporate more user-friendly video tools. I then introduced image and audio tools to maximize the capabilities of FFmpeg. I use my app daily, and it has surprisingly generated a few thousand dollars for me.
- Most of the page titles are the (same)[1] which doesn't seem good for SEO. Each of the pages like "Pricing" or "Compress Your Video Files" should be differently named.
- The "video compressor" tool would be much more useful if you could enter a target file size. This is a frequent use case, if you want to send a video over email or social media apps like Messenger with a file size limit. The only way I've been able to do that for myself is basically encode it repeatedly with ffmpeg at various quality settings until the file size is just small enough, but you could probably automate that with something more intelligent like a good guess and a binary search. I'm sure someone's made a library to do that already though.
- It needs a whole bunch of features related to subtitles, like making a subtitled GIF from a video file with subtitles.
- Maybe risky to include copyrighted work like the Spider-Verse movie in the demo video? Unless you really did rip it legally from a Blu-ray.
- There are random grammar mistakes and capitalization issues throughout the site, nothing major but worth a pass by a native English speaker. "What kinda files Pimosa supports?" and "Every files gets processed on your device only" as some examples. Might give some people pause.
- Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box at the top section that automatically detects your OS. Most landing pages have that so I assume it works.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpimosa....
I disagree. Any page that sports a big "buy now" button without even scrolling but has at that point not even shown me a single screenshot will have a hard time catching my attention. I didn't look further.
Would love to see examples of nice landing pages that _don’t_ do this and also aren’t big enough companies that you’ve already heard of them (10b plus companies may not need to do this as they’ve earned the scroll in brand recognition and likely have more than one product line).
Can I get a discount if I copy edit your site and docs for you? :) But, yea, agree that the typos give pause.
> - Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box …
And make it more clear what downloading gets you. Is it a trial? Or just a version of the app that doesn’t save?
Reading through the site and docs, I get the impression you’ve spent more time getting license keys to work than anything else. Certainly at least in the way of docs.
Congrats on the first release.
Switch to offering a year of free updates and charge a small fee after that.
Trust me. You will coverge to this scheme sooner or later, so do it now.
Standalone Windows installer is a must.Windows Store is still a deserted wasteland and is not a default choice for the vast majority of Windows users. You are losing a ton of users over this.
ffmpeg and other dependencies need to be acknowledged for both ethical and technical reasons. The technical reason is that your app doesn't depend on OS-supplied codecs and doesn't require installing them separately. And ethical reasons I hope are obvious.EDIT: spelling.
This is not true, not as phrased.
A. You can get a cert issued in your personal name. Not an EV one, but still.
B. You are likely to already have a company if you are selling online.
C. It doesn't take "a month" even for an EV cert. Several days tops unless you go through Comodo, in which case you get what you pay for.
D. It is perfectly fine to distribute unsigned installers. They produce a warning on launch, granted, but contrary to the urban legend they are not getting instantly shit-canned by the Defender.
I always thought that an LLC was sufficient, what's the actual requirement if an LLC is not enough?
100% agree! I've been using Windows for over 20 years and I haven't installed a single app through Windows Store.
Ironic.
And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.
HN is a community of hackers, not business people that are only commercially interested. But Hackers need money too, so we also need to be a little bit commercial. But it would be ideal if we could be commercial without having to give up the hacker ethic.
But many people don't believe it's easy to be open source and commercial at the same time. Why would people pay if they don't have to?
I'm thinking of a new form of software licencing: what if we make a license that says that a particular piece of software must become open source after for example 5 years. Then the developer can sell the software they wrote for 5 years long, and after that it will become open source.
This would give FOSS developers more motivation to create software, and the community will benefit eventually, so people won't feel too hesitative paying for the software, because it will eventually benefit everyone.
From what I read here daily, it is becoming an anti-hacker, anti-worker, anti-individual and pro-big business community.
One of the proofs is this theread. You can see People defending AWS... BUT my point is not AWS is wrong, but supporting AWS and criticizing individuals is what is wrong.
And no one noticed this, and has already started defending AWS.
This is something...
It should at least be visible in the FAQ that the open source FFmpeg tool is used by the app, with an appropriate link to FFmpeg's website. The tool could be described from the start as a "User-friendly FFmpeg front-end" (but I would understand that this may not speak to its target audience, hence the idea of putting the information way down the page in the FAQ or even the footer, but at least don't hide it).
Decades ago we were calling out these software and now it’s the norm.
Another example along the line: I wanted to extract a frame from a video on iOS, it’s impossible with the built-in tools (screenshot aside) and found that someone built a paid app only for that.
I tell you where we’re heading, we’re screwed.
I have seen absolutely miraculous backends, totally pooched, because the library developer thought that GUI was for "wusses."
> now i have lession that i shouldnt build apps that consumes so much time.
Sounds like somebody really devoted to the perfect UI experience.
Look, I don't want to talk down this kid. Everybody starts somewhere and I like the enthusiasm. But him expecting to make $30 off everybody for plumbing together a bunch of FOSS libs is rubbing me the wrong way.
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Building ffmpeg is very different from an SSL lib. They need different tradeoffs, design strategies, domain knowledge, etc. And doing them properly is really really hard. A lot of software out there sucks, in part because there is more focus on marketing than on correctness and reliability.
If roads had the same quality as software then traffic deaths would be an order of magnitude higher.
Try working on a library used in tech that your life depends on and you might re-consider your road metaphor.
Case in point: I regularly use a free iOS app that is clearly the result of someone's deep passion in taking what could have been a simple wrapper and turning it into an incredibly simple but powerful interface to complete a useful task efficiently and at any scale... and that task is exactly what OP was trying to do...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/frame-grab/id1319670797
But as someone who's somewhat familiar with app store optimization, I guarantee the creator did none of that that.
Their app name would need to be something obnoxious like "Frame Grabber Extractor: Pic from Video" to capture all the different searches people do for this task.
And the people focused on distribution are even paying for ads with the money they make their IAP infested "1 week trial; $4 a week" alternatives make.
There's nearly 2 million lines of code in the FFMPEG codebase: unless you're building the next Adobe Premiere, no matter how much value you provide, you are building an extremely shallow wrapper around FFMPEG when you build an interface to crop videos.
No one is saying a shallow wrapper can't provide value, but most of the value for the end user is derived from FFMPEG, not the layer you added to it.
If we took FFMPEG and your wrapper and separated them, FFMPEG could still do the one task that your users need: it would be harder, and it would be less convenient, but it can still crop videos. Your tool would no longer do anything but draw rectangles where we'd like a crop to appear. It'd meet no user needs at all.
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Also to clarify my stance, there's nothing wrong with shallow wrappers, and I've made shallow wrappers: I know finding the user need, and thinking of the right UX and figuring out distribution is all a lot of real legwork.
But I also find it's important to realize when most of the value you're providing is enabled by something you built on. There shouldn't be shame in admitting that you wrapped something that was powerful and potentially unwieldy for your segment of users and made it useful.
Doesn't mean he manufactured it, or invented it, or conceived of the very idea of an automobile with an ICE (or EV). It's all a big collaborative effort, and imagining that all of the $40k for that car go straight into the dealer's pocket would be absurd. Legally absurd, and ethically absurd as well.
Similar with a piece of software that builds on other work. Of course it provides value (hopefully). But on the whole, the extra value added is not the majority of the whole package.
We are talking decades of work, dealing with platform issues, performance, loads of security considerations and then there is the whole licensing+patent topic.
Sure UI work is hard, but of the whole package, it's only the visible part of the iceberg and now I'm expected to give $30 to the person who only contributed that last piece? Of course it's work too but if not at least half that money is being donated to the underlying FOSS projects then I'm out.
Another suggestion: open source your app. Those who don't know how to compile/build it, or are too lazy, which will be most, they can pay for the convenience, and you'll have the income you expect, but at least you are giving back to the community on whose work you are basing yours.
> self-taught full-stack developer who wrote the first line of code in the 2020 Corona lockdown.
You my friend are standing on the shoulders of giants. Time to ack them.
That said, there is nothing wrong with a paid wrapper around a large and complex open source library. Distributing their work more widely is not a disservice.
That said, what's the free and open source version of this tool? There are some great open source video editors like Shotcut, Openshot, KDENLive, Blender, etc., but I think this tool is more like CyberChef for video?
PowerToys is Free and Open Source, and has at minimum an image resizer utility. It's a good starting point for adding on richer functionality like a preview GUI, and I'm sure that the basic video and audio manipulation would be appreciated as additions. Also since it's a Microsoft sponsored project, I imagine that the signing process is drastically different than what OP has experienced.
I know that's really not satisfying to say that "someday we could have this in the FOSS space", but everything starts somewhere.
Though editors like Shotcut and KDENLive are considered non linear since you can layer on different effects, while OP's utility is definitely not that.
Context: a big chunk of my 2024 income was from grant money to build open source software that I may have tried to monetize otherwise. It’s possible.
Gives everyone the option of picking free or paid options, depending on people’s needs.
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However I don't think it's fair to call this a "shallow wrapper". It's clear that a lot of work went into the design of this GUI and, and making user-friendly interfaces is also an important work (that is far too often overlooked in the open sources communities).
Yet the fact that FFmpeg, the tool that does all the heavy background work, isn't even mentioned anywhere on the website, even in the FAQ or the footer is at least a non-negligible ethical problem.
UPDATE: The same goes for ImageMagick that I just saw this app installs and uses too.
The licenses for both ffmpeg and ImageMagick do not require anyone to mention them in the website.
However, if they are being re-distributed, there are clear obligations for providing source code and attributions. Omitting to do so is a violation of the legal obligations.
We dismiss these things as wrappers on HN because we like to believe that the technical side is 90% of the work.
But this belief has an easy antidote: ask to see the "UX" (lmao) we built.
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* The "< Home" button when you enter video/audio/photo tools is only clickable and changes color when hovering below the text, I would suggest making that a larger blue button. This doesn't happen for the "< Back" button which is in the same area when you're in a tool
* If the upper image crop handles are all the way at the top, they aren't clickable, they don't show the resize cursor. When you drag them it moves the window instead of the crop handle
I have a few suggestions:
* I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I think video should have a similar combined crop/flip/rotate UI instead of separate ones like for photos
* It seems like batch processing is a first class notion in the app, which is definitely very handy, but I think maybe it should be a mode toggled by a radio? I think a lot of use cases are just one off uses, in which case the UI can be made a lot simpler. If I'm just working on one file, I would prefer to be dropped right into the tool editor rather than having to click edit.
* 2 devices for the extended license is still a little too limited in my opinion. I would make it so authenticating the app to a computer requires access to the email that purchased it, and then make the extended license unlimited. I don't think you have to worry about that getting used for a team since it would require access to the email account.
Nevertheless, I agree that two devices is too restrictive, it should be five or so.
Nitpick on your nitpick: By definition, all nitpicks are small. This isn’t important, but I thought you might appreciate the meta commentary.
Things that are considered small can still have variations in the extent of their smallness.
The model like jetbrains does with IntelliJ I think is decent. Or look at smaller software like sublime text or ArqBackup (we're a license is forever for a specific major release of the software)
1) Free lifetime updates 2) No subscription, but limited updates 3) Subscription model
The parent was suggesting no. 2 (what you would find acceptable as well).
In theory you could have a single binary that never changes, ever, but it's just unrealistic.
Subscription models are fine, Jetbrains is the fallback if you're going to be super adamant about refusing to fund ongoing development, but software is not like other products. Maybe in the past when it was very simple within a simple ecosystem it was different.
There's something to be said for reducing the pricing to something more sustainable and more explicity upstream donations, but "pay once, have the developer continue to work for me for free if I keep it long enough" isn't realistic.
Unless you are the legal creator or buy the copyright, you never own software outright, you license it from the owner (or its public domain and has no owner.)
Just read his webpage, it's quite obvious.