Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?

Yes, there are low cost services that will write copy for you or rewrite your copy, such as Textbroker. You could also hire a freelancer independently. (I do this kind of work.)

About a week.

I launched DesignerJobs (https://www.designerjobs.co) about three weeks ago: posted on HN a friday afternoon and got like 5 upvotes. I thought that was going to be it but someone picked it up on ProductHunt the next day and it ended up ranking #4 on there all weekend. I got plenty of traffic from there, realized I wasn't collecting emails (oops) or had links to social media (duh) and rushed to deploy the features. Got my first customer on Monday! From there, I contacted a lot of companies with open positions for designers and eventually added more sales, one after another. So far things are going pretty well, I've added features, companies and I'm trying to maintain growth.

The biggest challenge for me was/is marketing. I'm finding it's actually pretty easy to code and design anything, but marketing/reaching out/selling whatever you have is what truly separates having a website from having a business.

I've been taking a circuitous route with a side project: first just building an open source command-line tool that scratches my own itch, and then evaluating traction from there. If companies find the tool useful, I've been keeping in mind ways to build out a SaaS/enterprise version. Or if it doesn't get much traction, worst-case at least I have something that's useful to me!

The tool is called Skeema [1] and it allows you to manage relational database schemas as code -- a bridge between git (or hg, svn, etc) and SQL DDL. You can use it to export CREATE TABLE statements from a DB to a repo, and then auto-generate and run DDL based on changes to that repo. Currently it just targets MySQL (due to personal familiarity, and the historic complexity with schema changes there), but if it's successful I could envision porting it to other DBs.

The open source CLI is still in alpha, but getting very close to a first release candidate. I've spent 9 months of working 5 to 25 hours/week on it so far.

Some unexpected challenges:

* Even for entirely text-based command-line tools, building a nice polished interface takes a lot of time! My goal has been to make Skeema's CLI paradigms immediately intuitive to users of Git and MySQL, in terms of option-handling, subcommands, and config file format. Even little things like exit code values, and STDOUT vs STDERR for different types of output, matter a lot for building CLIs that are friendly to pipelines.

* None of the existing Golang CLI/config packages were the right fit. After a couple attempts at hacking/forking popular ones resulted in overly-awkward code, I scrapped all that and wrote my own. I should have done that from the start, but it felt like yak-shaving.

* I eschewed unit testing at first, going with the common side-project wisdom of only prioritizing functionality. But as the codebase grew, I really wished I had spent more time writing tests from the start. I suspect it would have been a net time-saver vs the manual ad hoc testing I was doing initially.

[1] http://github.com/skeema

I know it's nit picky, but in the 'About' section on Financier's website the first sentence under '100% offline web app' reads "Click the button above to go the the app"... I just wanted to let you know it bugged me a little but other than that it looks very nice!

I've been working on https://instantexporter.com/ I'm surprised by how much longer it actually took me to build the v1, compared to what I initially thought it will take (5+ months vs 1 month!). Also, I thought that I wouldn't fall for the common psychological pitfalls as I know about them well, but here we are.