Jer Blog Roxer:
It’s been several months since I’ve written about Roxer. Currently Lex does all the coding since I’m investing just about every waking moment at WhiteHat. Primarily I help on Roxer strategy and solve extremely difficult JavaScript problems. Since the beginning we’ve been completely enthralled in the types of pages users build and the features they ask for. Iterative development is a lot of fun as is prioritizing enhancements into buckets that draw a crowd, improving the user experience, and keep people coming back. Astonishingly we’re up over 13,000 users, not bad for near-zero marketing, and that’s if you count my single blog post. :)
Its really cool seeing people from all over the world using something you’ve built. Actually we think over half of our users are outside the U.S. Teachers are posting classroom curriculum. Students are making online book reports. Bands are creating their online presence. Gamers are creating fan pages. And of course there is some other stuff in there we have to remove from time to time that’s’ not PG-13 rated. :) A lot is being published and its become impossible for even us to track.
Our next challenge is trying figure out a business model that makes sense. Fortunately though since everything is so darn cheap to run on the Amazon cloud platform we haven’t really felt pressured to do so, focused more on product and kept the service free. Premium subscription pricing seems to be the way we’ll go, much more attractive than advertising, but we’ll probably try that to. Maybe I’ll post again when we hit 50K users, that’ll be something!
6 comments:
I came across it in the summer of 2007, and thought it was an awesome concept. When I read that you ran it I wondered why you did not mention it more often.
Thank you. Its just one of several of our side projects we work on from time to time, when we have the time. :) This one just seemed to get a little too good. heh.
I am using it right now, just because I read here about it, usually I did pages "manually" - line by line, sure no big marketing hit stuff kinda sites. It is indeed easy, nice but still has to be worked on some things. It may become the "next trend" because the ones until now in this domain seems that lost this oportunity. And, if every one wants to have his/her "space", "profile", "id" why not also a webpage?
So, from 13001 user: happy going ;))
@cosmin, thanks for the kind words, glad you like it. Roxer is a delicate balance between features and extreme easy of use. The hardest part for us is bugs, JS at this level is really hard to keep smooth and clean. Damn browsers all do things their own way and nothing is exactly easy.
My Roxer page created a while ago no longer comes up since a week or so ago. What is going on with Roxer? the www.roxer.com does not come upe either.
Doug
swampbranch2@yahoo.com
My Roxer page no longer comes up. Why? It worked for quite a while, but is missing as of last couple weeks!
Doug
swampbranch2@yahoo.com
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