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Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

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Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#61

Post by mvindahl »

callmeed wrote: post #24

Contrarian view: don't spend time automating things. Spend any extra time you have selling and building the product people need. If someone needs your product, they'll probably be fine with an invoice. Spend the early mornings before work prospecting and reaching out to potential customers. If you're on the west coast, even better because you can conduct sales calls with east coast people who are already at work. Aft…

As programmers we really like to automate away the mundane stuff, and we're not too fond of human interaction. I'm grossly exaggerating, of course, but for a lot of us, this was the push and pull that originally drove us to hack away at computers. Creating a big and shiny automated processes is almost a no brainer for us.

Yet, I believe that you are absolutely right. We should fight our inclination to see everything as a nail for the hammer that we master. The ROI on automating everything from the outset is not worth it, and if the business flops, it's just wasted effort. Worse yet, it's a missed opportunity for learning about the customers and about the domain.

So yes, do things that don't scale. If and when you get in the air, profile the business processes and only then automate the bottlenecks. It's the only sane way when you think about it.

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#62

Post by davnicwil »

muzani wrote: post #46
callmeed wrote: post #24

Contrarian view: don't spend time automating things. Spend any extra time you have selling and building the product people need. If someone needs your product, they'll probably be fine with an invoice. Spend the early mornings before work prospecting and reaching out to potential customers. If you're on the west coast, even better because you can conduct sales calls with east coast people who are already at work. Aft…

Agreed, automation can take far more time than it saves. Especially in very early stages, when you don't even know which features are used often. Something like payment is a given, but not other things.

In code: make it work, make it good, make it fast

In business: make it, make it better, make it better again, ..repeat until it's popular enough that it's painful to operate, automate it

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#63

Post by wizzzzzy »

adamqureshi wrote: post #31
codegeek wrote: post #7

Automate as much as possible. Payments ? Slap a stripe checkout form (unless you happen to be in a country where Stripe is still not supported) or Paypal for others. Onboarding: Make it as easy and smooth as possible for clients to get started after signinup. Show them exactly where and how to start. Documentation & FAQ: Create tons of it. If a client has a question, thy should be able to resolve it through your docu…

exactly this, kinda. https://onlyusedtesla.com/ I make like $100/day and have 1 online dealer who pays me $500/month. I do all the support on FB messenger. I am working on a better FAQ (have to hire a subject matter expert) on used tesla cars. I launched the MVP using WP, now gonna up the product stack to some new VueJS. I fooled a lotta people using WP for validation. I accept Stripe or Paypal. Main thing is im maki…

Forgive me for asking but how is the site making $100/day while it's in the free beta phase?

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#64

Post by wegi »

throw2bit wrote: post #54
bowersbros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 25 countries are where to _seller_ can be based. Stripe allows purchases from over 135 countries. https://stripe.com/docs/currencies#charge-currencies

Don't you understand ? Using Paypal anyone can sell from anywhere in the world. Why are you still insisting on Stripe ? "Stripe allows purchases from over 135 countries". I want my product to be sold all over the world. Stripe don't do that. Stripe has a good API than Paypal and it ends there. I ditched Stripe for Paypal and I never looked back, sales from everywhere in the world, rather than customer's emailing me..…

Well I have the same problems with Paypal that you have with Stripe. Its also not true that you can use Paypal everywhere.

As a German citizen I cannot use Subscriptions with Paypal for my company for example.

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#66

Post by qhoc »

dahart wrote: post #53
debt wrote: post #8

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, quit your job and do it full-time.

I agree with the other responses here, but I don't feel like this deserves to be downvoted to death either, so I'm upvoting. I did this, quit my job and ran my startup idea full-time, without enough funding, and I have a family and a mortgage. I loved it, and I regret it, and I don't regret it, all at the same time. I had some savings, but I've used it all. I've been going full-time for a lot longer than I thought I…

I am very close to making the decision to the same path you took (with family and kid of course). I know each case is different but how long did bootstrapping take for you? I already put saving aside for one year (covering insurance and mortgage plus other minimal living cost). I imagine I need earn at least $85K in a year to survive the second year and so on (based on cost of living in my area). I am also thinking about doing random consulting here and there, to supplement the income of building a product. But I know it's always a trap.

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#67

Post by robinjfisher »

daliwali wrote: post #52
robinjfisher wrote: post #29

I'm just beginning to push my product (it's been around for 6 years) and have certainly noticed the customer requests increasing. I agree with a lot of the advice here and in particular I've just started building out the knowledge base in Intercom to mitigate some of the support queries. Sales is tough but can be worth it. I've spent lunch hours walking round the business park where I work on the phone and those call…

Care to explain how your product has been around for 6 years and you're just beginning to push it?

Of course. Started as a side project, part of learning to code. Had my mom's company as first subscriber and then periodically people would find me and sign up. They were paying £13/month and it dropped into the bank account - nice side earner.

Never really had time to promote it and Adwords is just an expensive game unless one has data on conversion rates and can accurately calculate a CPA. So, it's kinda trundled along with me tinkering in spare time - upgrading the code base but not really developing it.

Recently did a Slack integration which has noticeably increased traffic (1-2 trial signups per day)[1] and that's driving more development requests and encouraging me to blog a bit more, promote on social etc.

I've also been working with some HR consultants who are selling to their clients. Long term plans are to build our more of a basic HRIS rather than just focus on absence management. Waiting for Digital Ocean to launch their object storage so I can see what that looks like versus S3 or similar.

Main challenge is to balance time between feature requests and marketing. One of the suggestions I received here many years ago[2] was to "internationalise" the language so need to have landing page which is more US-oriented e.g. PTO management.

[1] https://pasteboard.co/GDUbwPA.png QTD numbers from Stripe. So just over a month. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666318

Re: Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

#69

Post by CodeWriter23 »

adamqureshi wrote: post #39
anfractuosity wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding payments can you recommend a simple API over both Stripe & Paypal out of interest (or would you just implement both using their respective APIs?) I know Paypal has its Instant Payment Notification API, were they ping your server once a payment has gone through, I assume Stripe has something similar. I was just wondering if there's a simple API, that can handle payments through both Paypal and Stripe etc.

I actually had a problem with PP. They can freeze you without notice at anytime (something todo with risk exposure). So now Im sticking with STRIPE. Unless the customer insist. Yeah STRIPE api is super easy for integration. I get my money in 2 business days. 2.9% fee+30 cents P/transaction.

Stripe or any merchant bank for that matter will freeze funds, or extend rolling payout intervals if your refund and chargeback metrics indicate a need to hedge against your losses via refunds and chargebacks. Stripe is pretty up front about it: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts#payout-schedule while PayPal buries it in the click-wrap TOS. Maybe that's why people get totally unglued when PayPal impounds their funds. PayPal Capital has also been known to solicit loans to companies that had their funds impounded...we just swiped your cash, can we loan it back to you for an extra charge?
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