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relentless self promotion. relentless. It's awful and kinda soul drain and I have no stomach for it but every one I have ever seen that managed to pull it off did so by getting as many eyeballs as possible and then getting as many ears possible... or getting impossibly lucky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind sharing the link to your Hobby project for me to check it out? :)
I'm reluctant to because I've had zero time to dedicate to it for a couple of years and there's a laundry list of improvements I have been intending to make. But, with that caveat, it's https://www.folktunefinder.com It's a mix of clojure and java. And there's a half written rust search backend waiting for a rainy day...
relentless self promotion. relentless. It's awful and kinda soul drain and I have no stomach for it but every one I have ever seen that managed to pull it off did so by getting as many eyeballs as possible and then getting as many ears possible... or getting impossibly lucky.
They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetised.
This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetized.
This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
I'm honestly expecting to be down voted for this, and that's fine, I can understand why my reaction would be seen as negative, unconstructive, and so on, but posts like this go on indiehackers.com, not HN (unless they're genuinely a hobby project on the side.)
This isn't the answer you want. But I have a hobby side project that I've kept going for a decade, and which gets high enough use to feel like it's worth keeping going. It costs server money to run, a couple of take-away-coffees per week's worth. In the past I did agonise about putting ads on it, or otherwise monetizing it. But at some point I decided that as I was lucky enough to have a paying job, the marginal retu…
Example: I did a project for a hackathon at UT when I was in college. The idea was that in this day and age it's still hard to get a file or snippet of text from one device to another unless they share some kind of account sign-in or something. People still email things to themselves.
So I made a website called "Catch" where you can upload a file or a text snippet, get a throwaway 6-digit code with which you can download the thing from any web browser, and after ~15 minutes the artifact is deleted from the server. The whole appeal of it was having absolutely minimum friction.
When we presented our project one of the first things they asked was, "how will you monetize it?". It was something where any sort of sign-up or payment step completely defeated the purpose, so the answer was, "we won't".
But I don't think that's the case for every fun-project. Especially if you take a freemium approach or show ads.
This is an ad. This isn't a genuine request for help. They have everything in place to monetize this. They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetized. This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes. I'm honestly expecting to…
My email address and main job / company are in my profile btw.
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Interest is measured in how many will pay and how much. As said above, you need to talk to your users and figure what features have value and what that is. Rinse and repeat.
We've priced it relatively high at first, but we've also put the language "If you want to get on the paid plan for Hallway, but don't want to pay, just email us at support@hallway.chat with a link to yourself sharing Hallway on social media and we'll give you a discount"
This is an ad. This isn't a genuine request for help. They have everything in place to monetize this. They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetized. This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes. I'm honestly expecting to…
Things that snuck up on me:
1. I thought it'd be the same work as before, but more of it. But when your side project is promoted to your full time job, you want to keep it that way. You start focusing on different things, like making sure you make enough money to keep going. My project used to be ~90% free, and after six months of "that's okay, I'll just build more paid features" it didn't work out (that's a whole post on why) and I was forced to move a lot of free stuff behind the paywall, which comes with all the user backlash you'd expect.
2. Apart from building paid features, learning how to do so and funnel people into them is half a full-time job in and of itself. YC's free Startup School was a fantastic resource here.
3. The more people pay you, the more you feel beholden to them. You'll spend more time doing customer support than you want because of the guilt. You'll think you can resist this or engineer it away, but it just keeps coming.
Before: - 10k MAU - Net negative $300 a month
1 year of full-time later: - 13k MAU - Net positive $500 a month
Uplifting result, but not salary-like, so I'm moving on and demoting it back to a side project. Nonetheless I don't regret this; if I hadn't done it I'd always be wondering "what if".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mind sharing the link to your Hobby project for me to check it out? :)
I'm reluctant to because I've had zero time to dedicate to it for a couple of years and there's a laundry list of improvements I have been intending to make. But, with that caveat, it's https://www.folktunefinder.com It's a mix of clojure and java. And there's a half written rust search backend waiting for a rainy day...