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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

#171

Post by yowlingcat »

ramraj07 wrote: post #146
djeiasbsbo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these stories also but I am genuinely curious how you were able to work 8 hours a day on it and also work your regular job. I assume you don't work a full time job, otherwise it seems unhealthy. I put a lot of time into my side projects but that is mostly the whole saturday and sunday, but even then I obviously don't feel so well rested on monday.

The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life. I remember going to conferences,especially the really small ones, the professors and students would spend all day listening to extremely draining lectures; this one particular conference started at 8.30 am, went till 1 pm, you get…

> The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others.

Is that really the reality? As far as I can tell, the reality is quite the opposite -- that sustainable levels of work across all knowledge work industries drop off a cliff past 8 hours a day, and for deep work 4 hours a day. Working on a side project after work possible for short sprints at a time, but somewhat impossible if you have an engaging day job where you are making good forward progress on your career.

On the other hand, if your day job is well paid but rather dull (quite common in tech), working on a side project is a nice way to retain creative and intellectual fulfillment, agency, and ownership in some capacity in one's life -- it can be an artistic outlet and worthwhile in itself. Beyond that, it can be nice transition to a startup. But I think this idea that some people "can just do more per day" makes the fallacy of thinking progress happens a day at a time. When it comes to side projects or new companies in incubation, that's not always the case. Explaining it away with an argument that is biologically untenable seems questionable to me.

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

#172

Post by allenu »

gigamick wrote: post #45
showsover wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for replying. If you don't mind me asking, how did you get your first users and when did you decide it was worth asking money for?

I decided it was worth asking money for before I laid a finger to the keyboard. Getting first users was really tough. I "launched" on product hunt and that was a bomb. I posted around some forums and that got some attention, but it was a post on reddit that was seen by the owner of a niche forum for audio engineers that helped. He allowed to me to post in their commercial thread and that got me going with a bunch of…

Did you have difficulties finding places to self-promote? I'm finding that that is a tricky thing to do. I don't want to jump into a community and start selling my product since a lot of places don't like it and it is tacky as hell, so I have to find ways to engage actively and when the the appropriate time comes (i.e. the conversation would naturally allow it), bring up what I've made.

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

#173

Post by halfdan »

rubicon33 wrote: post #160
jll29 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that if coding is your passion it doesn't feel like work, more like oxygen...

Unfortunately for some of us, passions fade. I still love coding, but it's not the kind of thing I'm likely to enjoy spending 16 hours a day doing anymore. I've been there, done that, seen it all (server, web, mobile, firmware, games). It's routine now, but not something I can lose myself into like I used to be able to. I get bored far faster.

It's interesting. I'm still in a state where I enjoy it most of the time and I could certainly spend an entire day coding... But I'm running super low on good ideas. Ideas used to pop into mind all the time, now it's like once a year and I quickly abandon it.

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

#174

Post by TooCreative »

gigamick wrote: post #133
TooCreative wrote: post #121

After clicking around your site a bit, I am left with a somewhat "cold" feeling of an anonymous service. As a potential customer and business partner, I would leave the site for good if I had not seen your post here on HN. For me to engage with a service, I need to know who is behind it. See their face. Their Twitter account, their Github. I would not put my data into an anonymous machine.

I appreciate that feedback however I would say 'each to their own'. I'm pretty sure the majority of businesses don't have people's faces on display and info about their personal life. HOWEVER... I take it onboard. Would it help if I made more a big deal about the "why I built it" article?

    the majority of businesses don't have
    people's faces on display
Not on display. But most successfull startups I remember started with the founder in the open. You could find them on Twitter etc. Creating a startup as an anonymous page for some reason seems to be an indicator of failure.

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

#175

Post by panosfilianos »

brianwawok wrote: post #38
gigamick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This totally depends on the sample size and the impact that you'd like to measure. You can get very actionable results with a 95% confidence and 80% power at a few thousand sessions.

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

#176

Post by rorykoehler »

jll29 wrote: post #153
ramraj07 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life. I remember going to conferences,especially the really small ones, the professors and students would spend all day listening to extremely draining lectures; this one particular conference started at 8.30 am, went till 1 pm, you get…

The trick is that if coding is your passion it doesn't feel like work, more like oxygen...

I could but I need to move

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

#177

Post by d883kd8 »

germinalphrase wrote: post #104

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…

Soundcloud actually has a feature where users can comment on specific points in a recording

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

#178

Post by warlog »

dave_4_bagels wrote: post #165
allenu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I released my own app a month ago after working on it on the side for a year... and I am finding that marketing is important indeed. Just having something in the app store doesn't guarantee eyeballs. You have to find ways of getting your message out. No matter how good your product is, if your users can't find it, you won't sell anything. This is probably why it's important to make sure you're not doing it for the "e…

Totally agree, I have a number of non-tech related side hustles and quite frankly I prefer these to tech ones because they took maybe 50hrs each to setup and 2 hours max per week to operate. I know for a fact it'd take much more time tech wise to get something of equivalent revenue up and running. I have to question these "I spent years making $40 a month working 8 hours after hours to built but now makes $60k a mont…

Slightly off topic... But can you share your nontech side gigs? Totally curious...

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

#179

Post by DanSmooth »

Fantastic logo! I first thought it was a stylized treble clef but I think it's more a stylized sixteenth note. Not sure if this was your intention but still great. You might even consider to add the five lines used in sheet music to make the music-part more clear.

Speaking of logos, I disliked that you use songbox there, but call your service SongBox. I would change it and maybe even fix it in the user stories.

Small suggestion for the image that shows the dashboard: To quote Matthew McC: "You gotta pump those numbers up!" It's apparent that they are from a demo account you use, but perhaps you could make the numbers more appealing (don't oversell it, though). If I would use your service, I would hope to have a better avg listening time for example.

Kudos for that Doctor Who easter egg, btw!

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

#180

Post by hervature »

ramraj07 wrote: post #146
djeiasbsbo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love these stories also but I am genuinely curious how you were able to work 8 hours a day on it and also work your regular job. I assume you don't work a full time job, otherwise it seems unhealthy. I put a lot of time into my side projects but that is mostly the whole saturday and sunday, but even then I obviously don't feel so well rested on monday.

The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life. I remember going to conferences,especially the really small ones, the professors and students would spend all day listening to extremely draining lectures; this one particular conference started at 8.30 am, went till 1 pm, you get…

> The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life.

> but the majority of professors would spend most of the midday break meeting each other

Spending 60-80 hours in meetings is not "work". Attending lectures is not "work". Work requires either mental or physical effort to which all humans have limits. People in academia like to think they work hard by quoting useless hours like this. But that's like people billing their bosses for the 2 hours they spend in traffic. From my time in academia, my impression is that most grad students have 1 to 2 hours of productive work per day. They will tell you that they spend 10 hours at the office however.

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