In the beginning of 2016, Weebly introduced their own App Center, allowing third-party developers to create new apps to extend the functionality of their website builder (a set of tools that allow you to create a website using an intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface). Finite Wisdom saw this as an opportunity to improve our name recognition in the web development community and proceeded to create four of these apps (all free):
70,634 installations
1,334,735 installations
1,766 installations
181,481 installations
It's been almost a year since the first of those apps was released. In that time, the four apps have been installed on a total of 1,588,616 websites, with the lion's share of those going to the Color Block app. The hope was that some small percentage of the people behind those 1.5 million websites would think to themselves:
Wow, those folks at Finite Wisdom are pretty smart cookies! Perhaps we should hire them to build some custom functionality for us. Let's reach out to them and start a discussion...
Looking back over that year, it seems that our hope was in vain. Of those 1.5 million websites, exactly zero have reached out to us to learn more about us and how we might help them on a for-fee basis. Of course, we did hear from a few of them, but only to ask us to add some more features to these already free apps.
I suspect that the lesson here is tied up somewhere in value theory — simplistically, one might not value what one doesn't pay for. Back in college, my mind was nimble enough to wrestle with questions like this. Today, not so much.