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

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

#81

Congrats! I ramped a little faster but followed the same path. The project started at my kitchen table now grosses $13M per year (10 years later). Keep going my friend; the road will be rocky but it's well worth the time and effort once you reach the top of the mountain!

wow - congratulations to you! that is awesome.

lol if I get to £1000 MRR I will be jumping for joy. Over £1m mrr is insane!

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

#82

With no experience in this business I wonder if some of your plans (especially "Pro") are priced to cheaply?! Great story! Keep going. I still have a side project that basically goes unmaintained for several years now but only returns about a hundred bucks a month. I think it still has potential but for several reasons I totally lost the passion for it.

Thanks a lot.

What's you side business? You should consider selling it.

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

#83

Congrats! I ramped a little faster but followed the same path. The project started at my kitchen table now grosses $13M per year (10 years later). Keep going my friend; the road will be rocky but it's well worth the time and effort once you reach the top of the mountain!

wow - congratulations to you! that is awesome. lol if I get to £1000 MRR I will be jumping for joy. Over £1m mrr is insane!

when I was at your stage I thought the idea of $1M/m was an impossible dream...it's not...just keep iterating, listening to your users, following your gut and make good decisions everyday

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

#85

Are you going to add more features to the audio player? The one that's featured on the home page doesn't let you skip to the middle of the the song etc. Thanks for sharing your experience, it's quite useful for all of us to learn.

Yeah that's the embed. The players on the actual songbox pages themselves are nicer. I may pull the embed functionality as I don't think it's used much.

Maybe when songbox scales it will be useful but right now the main use of my product is for tracks that are NOT YET public, so the embed thing was probably a waste of my time lol.

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

#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 mobile app, but I'm not sure how accurate that is, and how it would look like on i.e. a laptop

- After I signed-up, the main call to action asked me to create a "SongBox". I guess this is the term you use for a playlist, and the in-app short tutorial also hinted at that but I'm wondering if this is a term that some people might be confused about, at least at the beginning. I definitely did get a bit confused

- I have some copyrighted songs, but also some demos I'm working on at the moment. It'd be nice if the UI made it clear whether is safe or not to share non-copyrighted files through the platform to get feedback, etc (some platforms such as SoundBetter apparently have some protection for this as part of their terms of use). I don't know if this is the case so I will only upload copyrighted files

- A small thing that can probably be easily fixed: I started by creating a SongBox, which prompted me to upload the files I wanted to add to the SongBox. After I uploaded some files, the songs remained unchecked by default, which meant that the main call to action to continue creating the SongBox would not actually add the songs by default to my SongBox. Because I started with the goal of creating a SongBox (the main call to action) and I did not have existing files, the product could be really sure that I did wanted to add those songs and at least check them my default or omit the whole song-checking phase

- Having two different screens to select the songs I want to add and then to also sort the selected ones felt a little bit weird. Maybe they can be joined into a single screen where you can select & sort at the same time? (i.e. the selected ones bubble up to the top and you can sort them in place?)

- I get the link to share, which is exciting, but again, I have no idea how this will look like, so I have to open a private browser tab to try it out before feeling confident to share it. Maybe the product can at least show me how it looks on this screen? (i.e. embedded at the right?)

- I didn't realise I could customise my bio until opening the page. Maybe the wizard I followed could have suggested me to do that if I was creating my first SongBox and I did not fill it yet?

- Cool stuff! I can see analytics coming in right away! What did seem super weird is that if a song is playing and I jump to another section of that same track (i.e. to skip part of it) then SongBox dashboard shows that as 2 different plays. Having the ability to know at which points of the track (i.e. minutes & seconds) people try to skip forward to another section vs just stopping the song would be killer!

- After some initial plays the average listening time looks very skewed. It shows a lot, lot more listening seconds that I actually did. Maybe there is something wrong with the average calculations?

Overall I think the idea of having better analytics for how people listen to your song is super nice. I'll keep an eye on the platform but the stats I got based on my own plays through private browser tabs seemed not very accurate, so I'm hesitant to trust it more for the time being. Hope that helps!

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I'm not entirely clear what you mean. However I try not to weigh myself down with "What ifs" as a general life rule. Where does it end? What if your parents never met? Please don't read this as facetious, I'm not meaning to be.

Maybe what I am asking is ambiguous. However, @dogma said that anything you work on during the time you are employed might be regarded as company IP. What I am asking is what happens with work/projects/apps that someone has done on the side before joining a company, and especially in the case that this creates a revenue stream.

Oh in that case I'm not sure, but I would always be clear with the employer at the interview stage.

In my current role I mentioned that I work on things on the side and they were like... oh that's not allowed, and I said... oh well I can't work here then.

They changed the rule lol

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow - congratulations to you! that is awesome. lol if I get to £1000 MRR I will be jumping for joy. Over £1m mrr is insane!

when I was at your stage I thought the idea of $1M/m was an impossible dream...it's not...just keep iterating, listening to your users, following your gut and make good decisions everyday

Thanks so much. I got goosebumps reading that comment lol.

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

#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.

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

#90

In the pricing page, the "Starter" pack is vertically unaligned with the other 3. Using Chrome desktop. Is that on purpose? Coincidentally it has one line of text less than the other 3, hmmm..

Not intentional but not a dealbreaker to me. However... I will remedy :-)
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