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Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#91

Post by avinoth »

Congratulations is due! The journey sounds very similar to what I'm going through, though in my case acquisition was the end result, couldn't see it through to the 3 digit $$.

Built an app 3 years ago, just kept at it and it was on a constant cycle of losing interest and suddenly bursting out features then losing interest again over and over.

Nevertheless, I get the grind and I respect it. It isn't easy keeping at something for these many years on the side especially without any rewards. There will be this inevitable impulse to just kill it and move on to the new one when after the excitement wanes off (it definitely makes sense for certain projects). Kudos for keeping it up!

Keep on going.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#92

Post by stuaxo »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #89

FWIW, I personally found the gradients a bit too pronounced, and the "EPK*" thing stood out a bit because if you're going to put an asterisk wouldn't it be visually cleaner to just fully write it out? Other than that it's a clean look. Congrats, your story is inspiring.

Similarly - it looks, nice - the shadow + soft effect could be a bit more subtle.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#93

Post by stuaxo »

gigamick wrote: post #65
epalm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem! PS I think your Pro tier is too cheap ;) anyone that wants to remove your branding (and perhaps whitelabel the product as their own?) is a big enough outfit to pay more than what you're asking.

You're not the first person to say that. It used to be $50 a month and no-one took me up on that, however the product has evolved quite a bit since then. Will re-look at pricing in the new year. Thanks a lot for your input, it is appreciated!

Sometimes people respect things when they cost more.

Corporates and other businesses won't blink at paying bigger amounts than this, if you can tell them how much support they are going to get for their money.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#94

Post by gigamick »

avinoth wrote: post #91

Congratulations is due! The journey sounds very similar to what I'm going through, though in my case acquisition was the end result, couldn't see it through to the 3 digit $$. Built an app 3 years ago, just kept at it and it was on a constant cycle of losing interest and suddenly bursting out features then losing interest again over and over. Nevertheless, I get the grind and I respect it. It isn't easy keeping at so…

Thanks, how did your acquisition end up happening? what MRR did you sell it at?

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#95

Post by jxm262 »

gigamick wrote: post #30
showsover wrote: post #28

Congratulations! It's honestly very encouraging to read about it taking so long. Usually you hear about these 3-month projects that hit 1k MRR like it's the most normal thing in the world. It might be a bit egoistical, but this makes me feel better about my project going at a snail's pace (after 6 months I have something barely resembling an MVP).

No, I see those stories in the same way that I see stories about people winning the lottery; it can happen, but it probably won't. Growing slowly has aided me hugely in being able to refine and optimise as I went. If I had the money to throw at marketing 2 years ago, to get loads of eyeballs on the site, it would have failed. Because the product wasn't ready then. It's been 2 years of listening to feedback and making…

This is a brilliant perspective. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#96

Post by gigamick »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #89

FWIW, I personally found the gradients a bit too pronounced, and the "EPK*" thing stood out a bit because if you're going to put an asterisk wouldn't it be visually cleaner to just fully write it out? Other than that it's a clean look. Congrats, your story is inspiring.

I'll experiment with this tonight. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#97

Post by gigamick »

MrDresden wrote: post #76
gigamick wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you're not recommending a competitor, it's songbox :-) not soundbox. Hmmm... I'm unsure of wether you could host the audio somewhere else and serve it through songbox. It's an interesting proposition though and one I will look into.

Ah ops, fixed that for the history. Songbox it is ;)

haha thanks.

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#98

Post by btown »

This is a really great idea, kudos!

You might want to look at Docsend for feature and marketing inspiration - they started by allowing mainly startup pitch/sales decks to be tracked in much the same way your audio clips are, but have since expanded to a wide variety of enterprise use cases. I can only imagine that the music industry has many such use cases, including enterprise-style auditing/reporting needs and the ability to limit an audio file's distribution to within an organization. Not for the faint of heart to approach that, but there could be real opportunities there.

Some other random thoughts: This would be a perfect UI to standardize the pattern a lot of YouTube ads do: a ~5 second teaser clip that pre-plays the full material. With this and other network features as you grow (say, "submit demos to my SongBox drop box, and then I can quick-review my inbound SongBox feed"), you could gain the reputation of - "if I receive a demo on SongBox, it means that the sender is being highly respectful of my time." You might not want to build all that social-network functionality, of course, but it's a possible direction to go!

Also, custom subdomains (and beyond just removing branding, letting people add branding) could be a high-ROI way to add another pricing tier!

Re: Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue

#99

Post by gigamick »

jviotti wrote: post #86

Cool stuff. Apart from a Software Engineer, I'm a musician/producer and the idea of having better stats about who listens to what and for how long sounds pretty appealing. I'm giving it a spin now and will write my thoughts as I go through it: - My first concern before signing up that the landing page is not answering very well for me is how the UX looks for my listeners. I see a screenshot of what seems like a mobil…

haven't read all of this yet but it looks awesome. I will digest properly later.

and get back to you... if that's alright.

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