Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 319 posts

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

#101

Post by jhunter1016 »

I love seeing tenacity start to pay off. The way I view things like this is if you like doing it, keep at it. The slow growth over time models is one that gets buried in the flashy SV-style startup stories, but they are equally (if not more) important.

I love the site and I only have two points of feedback:

1. I’d move the example player up higher. I suspect many artist will want to know what their link or embeded track will look like. Having to scroll past pricing for the example might lose people. 2. Pricing plan naming can be tough. In this case you may want to look at renaming the plans simply because artists who should be on the semi-pro plan may not pull the trigger because they think they are pros. That’s a small thing though.

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

#103

Post by wpietri »

gigamick wrote: post #40
brianwawok wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful A/B testing at such a small scale. You are going to hit so much noise, it's not usually a great use of time. Just make it feel good and go from there. A/B testing works great at google scale.

I hear you and sometimes the results weren't conclusive but I did uncover a few gems. particularly around pricing and the hero statement. I would rather do it than not.

You did the right thing. You need Google-scale traffic to tease out subtleties, fractional gains. But at your stage you were looking for big signals. And clearly you found them. Congrats!

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

#104

Post by germinalphrase »

Perhaps this is outside the scope of what you want the app to be, but...

I teach high school English. We will frequently create audio products like podcasts, speeches, Tedtalks, etc.

Traditionally, I would offer feedback in person while a student is drafting/editing their products - but with distance ed. that is somewhat more challenging.

The feature I would like is the ability to add an annotation to the audio track (either written or verbally) that is tagged to a specific moment/stretch of audio.

The ability to have creators add submissions to a shared folder would also help (such that I can rapidly click through and provide feedback on a large set of submissions).

Just spitballing, but maybe like genius.com but for private feedback on audio.

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

#105

Post by CraigJPerry »

gigamick wrote: post #18
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #14

I don’t know why, but I expected a much less professional site. That is a compelling site. I only figured out what it is you do when I got to the pricing, but I am not your target audience. Musicians might be able to see the value prop more quickly. Regardless, as one who has never even had the courage to hang his own shingle, I am impressed.

Thank you very much. I have put a lot of effort into the homepage. Like... a lot. Months and months of A/B testing copy, images, price points. I'm happy with it and I appreciate your words. Thank you.

That site is brilliant. I don't know if this information is useful but when i read it i was conscious of a few things:

    1. I could read it really comfortably, i liked the large view on my screen
    2. The "And we don't compress your music" really jumped out to me - you've nailed exactly the right amount of text and that twist in the explaination that tells me one of your USPs worked on me, like i'm going to remember that for a while for some reason
Maybe not useful to see inside the head of an internet random person but just in case...

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

#106

Post by 45ure »

gigamick wrote: post #7
jillesvangurp wrote: post #6

Good website with a clear pitch. Some suggestions: - maybe factor number of listens into your pricing rather than tracks to nudge people into higher pricing around the time they are broadening their outreach. - think about automating distribution to soundcloud, youtube, spotify, etc. as a next step. Could be interesting for e.g. podcast creators to not have to micromanage each of those. Probably some or all of those…

These are good shouts, thanks. I had already put in the roadmap digital distribution a la iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal etc... however didn't think of the Soundcloud / Youtube angle. Thanks!

I would like to add Mixcloud to your list, if it is not already on your radar.

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

#107

Post by billoneil »

imagesandwords wrote: post #19
dogma1138 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you worked on this while employed without getting a waiver their lawyers might beg to differ in the UK pretty much every contract I’ve seen has “we own all your discoveries unless stated otherwise” clause in it.

What happens if you worked at a project before you joined a company (e.g. a website or an app) which also contributes to your income? And what if you actually hire people to work on it for the time after you join the other company?

Most employment contracts have a section where you declare your existing intellectual property. You can also have this amended after you start working there.

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

#108

Post by jviotti »

gigamick wrote: post #99
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.

Sure, happy to help if I can. I believe you can find my e-mail address on my HN profile (or on my website otherwise)

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

#110

Post by caogecym »

Congrats! I feel the excitement when seeing the project getting traction. I had similar experience building a [SaaS API request scheduler][1]. Promoted mostly in Q&A communities like Quora and Stackoverflow, took couple weeks to get the first user. Then after a few weeks, started getting 1 new free plan user per week, sometimes when lucky it got 3 per day :). And after 9 month of initial release, got 100 users and the first paid user! The registration and payment are self service. It’s very exciting to feel that someone from somewhere in the world who you haven’t met is willing to trust your product and give it a try, and hey, it’s a product that you built from ground up and you know it’s bringing value to people. The entire bootstrap experience is just awesome.

Still way to go, lessons learned? Just get started, and keep doing it. Doesn’t matter if you wasn’t sure what exactly to build, maybe try begin with a real small feature, don’t need to worry about whether somebody else is already doing it, or someone is telling you this won’t fly - just get started and chances are you will identify some problems that you want to solve that is related or completely orthogonal with you current feature/product, you will find your way if you keep trying.

[1] https://ihook.us

Post reply on HN