Ask HN: sideproject, generating revenue & profit what's next?

Let me first give an introduction. I'am a 30 year old dutch software developer working at one of the largest internet companies in The Netherlands. My wife is a Highschool teacher, teaching Dutch language to 13- 15 year olds. Almost 3 years ago we build a website for here students to use. After a few months it took off and visitors are climbing. From our stats we see that a lot of schools are using it. We got good media coverage and top-5 rankings in google for important keywords. The succes came as a surprise to us and we decided to create a business out of it.

We provide 250 free exercises and since a year we also provide subscriptions: personal subscription (5 euro / year) and classroom subscription (35 euro / year). With a subscription customers have access to their performance report and a few "member-only" exercises. With a classroom subscription a teacher can see the results of their students, look into the exercices they made and what mistakes they made. And some other extra functionality.

All this functionality is primarly used & tested by my wife and her class. For us it is a sideproject; it is generating revenue & profit, a couple of hundreds a month. Enough for me to cover my hosting expensives, and working less hours at my day job.

My wife is very clear: she is a teacher and wants to teach. She doesn't want to persue the business fulltime. Also she is pregnant with our first child. So technically: I'm the one running the business and my wife is my biggest (& most influentual) customer.

I'm not sure what to do next: we have a few hundreds a month and I would really want to grow. So I can work even less at my day job and more on our project.

But we have a hard time figuring out how to scale:

* Selling to schools is hard, even more without dedicated sales. With keeping the price low we think it's easier for schools to buy. * The succes of the website started with the free exercises and quality content. We got a lot of free press with that. We don't want to risk our name with making it all premium content * We don't want to run advertising as it would distract students, and make schools don't want to use it anymore. * I work at the website besides my main job, doing all the coding and administration stuff * My wife doesn't want to sell (the website is tied to her lastname) * We are anxious to get outside funding, we want control over the project ourselves * We are afraid to charge more (risk of losing customers) * We only want to go into different subject when we can find good teachers who can create quality exercices.

Sofar the options are to creat more verticals (we need subject experts there) or create a better site.

So what to do? I would really like more time to develop more functionality. We get a lot of e-mails asking for different kind of exercises. Which I simply don't have the time for to develop. I feel we are an unique team: teacher and softwaredeveloper working together. I think we have a great oppertunity to create a big product. Good software is a huge gain for edecution.

But I don't know how to execute on this oppertunity, any tips?

Tnx, i'm working 4,5 days now. When the baby is born I will be working 4 days. Getting from the current income to 10x at the current grow rate will take us 4 years at least.

Any advice how to make it sustainable?

How does this work?

Yes, that! If you can, take a sabbatical or a long holiday to focus on your business. It's difficult to give your best when your day job eats up your most creative hours of the day. He's right about taxation, but since it's your own business, there is no upper limit on how much you can make. Outsource the content business, recruit students and other teachers.

You've solved some of the hardest problems already - getting the initial traffic, a decent product, initial user base, and marketing. You need to work on profitability and market size.

I agree that you should keep the free exercises to keep traffic flowing to your site. Don't focus too heavily on these, though.

Without knowing much about your market or product:

- Estimate the size of your market. A back of the envelope exercise should help you estimate how many schools are in the Netherlands, how many classrooms at each school, how many students. That's your current market size. How can you expand that? Can you extend to universities, or to other countries in Europe? Increasing your market size gives you more potential customers.

- You need to extract more money out of each user. $5/user/year requires a huge amount of users to generate even basic profit. Can you offer a premium subscription, for $15 per month? $20 per month? Compare this to the cost of private tutoring for parents. Put high value material in the premium subscription. Offer a 7-day free trial of premium.

I think you've got a good opportunity, you need to monetize it.