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

Perhaps a quick chat with patio11 would help here? I can't imagine a more appropriate HNer for the kinds of questions you have. He has been thinking about the education market for quite a while. He has long advocated finding freelancers who you can pay to build up content. What about hiring some freelance subject experts to build questions for you? That removes at least one burden to expansion and lets you trade money for time. Along those same lines, you might focus your energy on automating as much of your maintenance as possible so that you can focus on developing novel stuff. Maybe even hire a freelance web developer to do some of the more boilerplate stuff so you can focus on the truly unique stuff.

Some ideas:

- which subjects make most sense to expand into (math, science, languages, ...) ?

- maybe there is an opportunity to have former teachers create exercises for you (as freelancers). They have a lot of experience creating exercises, after all.

- including subjects like math could make it easier to expand to other countries, though I don't know how different education systems are (maybe the UK, Germany, France would be interesting as they large markets but of course there are other factors like fragmentation of the educational system in Germany, for example)

- as someone else has already suggested make it attractive to invite your classmates to your website. Rather than offering cash maybe free months (after their current subscription period) or discounts if enough students from one class sign up would be an option.

- maybe offer more options to obtain classroom membership, e.g. sponsored by parents, more than n people from one class signing up, maybe even local businesses as school sponsors but that could have the negative side affects you mention about ads)

- maybe offer "gift" memberships and free months if a group of students sign up at the same time, things like that?

- would it be attractive to people offering private tutoring to have a "group" membership for their students (e.g. up to n students/year) which includes seeing results of their students) ?

- maybe including other subjects provides an opportunity to raise prices, i.e. charge separately for additional subjects but offer a "all subjects included" premium membership.

You have not included a link to your site (or I missed it ?), would love to take a look.

Good luck with your business (and your parenthood!) :°)

(I'm more of a developer who cough failed with businesses twice so my suggestions should be taken with a grain of salt)

Some random thoughts:

- Don't sell to students, sell to parents (apart from the schools of course). They are more motivated to than children to pursue good grades and they have money.

- Charge more. If you lose users, so what? You've only lost the ones that you can't make money from in the first place. (although I see that you've raised the price already).

- Your wife doesn't sound committed. No selling the thing (migrate to a new domain now to get rid of the name association, what's the problem?), no charging more out of fear, fear of losing control. If it's a hobby for her, and you want it to be more, you have a problem. Solve this first.

- Find subject experts on a profit-sharing basis if you don't want to invest any money (although seriously at your age and your household makeup, 5000 euros should not be a major problem and it would get you sufficient content for 5 different subjects).

- If you will work 4 days after your baby is born, you'll have even less time than you have now to work on this! This one day will be full-time babysitting unless you take her to day care, which I presume you'll only do for 3 days a week!

- The way your website is structured, it doesn't seem to be easy to expand into different subjects.

- The 'original' website (with the free content) looks like a 1997 Geocities page. It also doesn't make many attempts at upselling, apart from some small links to the premium version.

- Have you tried calling schools, or the associations your wife is a member of? If she uses it, ask her colleagues why they don't. Then fix those issues.

First, congratulations on making something people want. If people are requesting more exercises it probably means you have a user base that: a)cares about your product and b)wants to see it continue. Yes, going after schools is hard, but going after teachers may be easier. There was a HN post a couple of months ago about a student grading application someone here had created and in trying to sell it, he ran into similar difficulties with targeting schools. But what he was finding was that teachers valued his application enough to purchase it themselves, then they would tell other teachers at the school, and pretty soon the whole school signed on. I think you should focus on keeping your product at a price point that would allow teachers to purchase it themselves. Maybe even try to build in some social features that would encourage teachers to spread the word. Then, with the revenue, outsource content creation. Finally, once traction and revenue reach a point where it makes sense for you to leave your full-time job or hire an additional developer, add functionality that would appeal to entire schools or school districts. Also, congratulations on the little hacker on the way!

Does patio11 have a project page or resource out on the net somewhere? Education has always been of interest to me, specifically improving things and knocking down walls.