Interview with Amber Weinberg from Codesnipp.it

I had a chance to sit down and talk with the lovely and talented Amber Weinberg, freelance WordPress developer and founder of the Codesnipp.it Social Coding about how she started Codesnipp.it with her fiance, how she chose what features to add, and how to approach stagnancy.

So, Tell me about Codesnipp.it.

Well, I was wanting to work on a site with my fiance because he is a back-end programmer. We were trying to find a project to work on together and I realized that there are so many sites for designers to share there work, I mean you had dribble and all those css gathering sites, but nothing really for in my mind for code sharing. You had some code repository sites like git, but there wasn’t really a social aspect for developers. Now, this was before Forrst came out. Actually, I think they came out around the same time, but I thought it would be cool if there was a site where you could follow your favorite developers and see what they were working on and share snippits of code and plugins and be able to ask questions and get answers. I thought of it like a Dribbble for developers.

How long from the point where you had the idea to the launch of version one did it take?

I believe exactly three months was our deadline before the launch because we had an alpha and then a beta. We worked several weekends. It isn’t really a big app, so it didn’t really take us that long. I mean we launched without a lot of the features too to give just the basics of posting, sharing code, and following people.

I was in the beta for codesnipp.it and it was certainly a minimum viable product. You’ve added a lot since you’ve launched. How did you decide what to add and when?

We had a list that we wanted to add. I tried to go the 37signals route and think about what I would want and what I would use. And I also wanted to make it a minimum app because if you look at the code sites that are out there now, there just so cluttered. I know freelance switch just bought a coding site and it looks terrible so the goal was to keep everything simple all the time. Of course we had people asking for features all the time and we had our own ideas and we had to kind of filter everything through and think what would people use the most, and what is the most important.

I’ll admit, I was one of those people that sent you a nice long bulleted list of features that I wanted and suggestions, so I’m sorry about that.

No, no that’s good! It’s good to get suggestions from people because even thought I’m building it to the way I want to use it, it’s great to know how other people want to use it.

So, Codesnipp.it has a paid aspect of it. Can you explain the pricing model for version 1?

We actually had two types of accounts. We had a free account that allowed you to post 10 snippits a month and you could invite 5 people per month, back when we still had an invite system, and we had a paid account that would let you post an unlimited amount of snippits and you could invite 10 people per month and you had a private snippit timeline. The pro account was a single $10 fee.

We’re slowly going into the second version, and we’ve changed the accounts a lot to where all accounts have unlimited posting and we did away with the invite system, because you can now sign up for a new account.

So with version 2, what pain points are you trying to address?

Well, we really don’t have the kind of activity that I want, so we are trying to give the free accounts a few more features, and the paid accounts a lot more features. We’re talking about maybe a chat system where you could see who’s online and could maybe do a private chat. We’re trying to think of a couple more things to entice people to sign up. I mean, I’d love to make money on this site, but that’s not really my main goal. We do have paid advertising and I’d like to sell some more advertising, but most of the money I make towards the site, I’d like to put towards growth.

You just wrote an article about learning when to scrap your app. What made you look at codesnipp.it and say “Hrm, this isn’t working?”

To be honest, we had picked up a third developer, my buddy Isaac, and last year we did a lot of work on the site, and then all of sudden, work just stopped. We went something like five months without doing anything to the site at all. To me the site wasn’t finished and it was just sitting there, stagnant. I had to seriously think to myself “Do we just leave the site stay up and stay stagnant and hope people continue to use it, do we shut the whole thing down, or do we do something different?” because both my fiance and Isaac decided they didn’t want to continue to work on the site. I’m not a backend developer so there’s not a lot I can do by myself. So, I thought abut it for a little while. We have a core set of users who just love this app that asked me to not shut the site down and continue development. I started to look around twitter to see who would be interested in taking over the backend programming, because of course we can’t pay or anything. I ended up finding one of codesnipp.it’s biggest users, John Clarke, who decided he wanted to be the programmer for the site.

So you couldn’t pay him. What did you use to bring him on board?

I just asked him, “Hey would you be interested in working on this? I can’t pay.” And he was like “Heck yes. I love the site.” He has taken initiative. He set up a demo site to show me things he’s working on and ask what I think. All I can say is “Wow, that’s awesome!”

How did you promote Codesnipp.it when it launched?

I tried to get several famous people to try it out. I talked to Dan Cederholm from Dribbble, Chris Coyier and a couple other people to see if they would try it out and give me their thoughts. Some of them did it and some didn’t. I followed a ton of people on twitter and asked people to check it out. I got a retweet from NetTuts about it, and I got a few interviews. I paid for an app review on Appstorm.net so mostly I tried to do a grassroots kind of thing. I haven’t actually promoted anything, and I think that’s why I have been so successful as a business, because on twitter I don’t actually promote myself. It was different for Codesnipp.it. I had to get out there and quickly get a large following. It’s been a nice lesson. I just decided to try paying for some Facebook ads. I started doing that on Monday and I’ve already gotten few new signups from that.

Takeaway

Amber’s iterative feature rollout worked well for her. I think the biggest thing I was afraid of before I started ideainator was not having enough features at launch. Be like Amber and just get your idea out there. Your audience will let you know what they need and when they need it. Hell, they might even help.