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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

#181

Post by inson »

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?

Or about page would be fine. As a client I would like to know the person behind the company.

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

#182

Post by inson »

gigamick wrote: post #16
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.

I understand what you're saying but it's not a thing in this case. And with my current employer I had my contract amended before I started (as a condition of joining, I recommend everyone does the same). The change implemented allows me to work on anything I want so long as it's not a competing product.

That's a great idea!

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by rasikjain »

Congratulations on your Milestone. Website looks very professional. Like the colors and theme. I also watched the youtube on getting started. Very nicely done overall.

I have an adblocker installed. I see that there is a grey area under "Share your tracks anywhere". It says the request had been blocked by ad-blocker. May be googletagmanager or new-relic

Good luck :-)

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

#185

Post by jefft255 »

hervature wrote: post #180
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 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 al…

This is such an ignorant comment. 1) actually paying attention to an advanced academic lecture requires serious mental effort, so by your definition it is work. It is also not useless, unless purely academic work is useless to you 2) I don’t know what kind of experience in academia you have (my guess is not much) but grad school can be very intense in terms of work. Sure you can slack off, but if you want to do well you’ll likely work very hard.

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

#186

Post by retsi »

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.

This is what real experience sounds like.

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

#187

Post by fileeditview »

gigamick wrote: post #82
fileeditview wrote: post #75

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.

It's namesmith.io. A tool for finding business names and their corresponding free domains. I had some offers but they basically all were just cheap and not worth any time.

There is money to be made in this market but generally my experience with domains is that it's a pain.

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

#188

Post by blackrock »

frankbyte wrote: post #136
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.

There's 24 hours in a day. Read Bezos or Musk's or anybody stories and they'll tell you they worked 20-23 hours a day. It's fucking crazy with some people, but that's what it takes to get ahead of the competition. Edit: Please note that I'm not advocating that anybody should do this, but just be aware that a lot of people are setting that level for themselves and in some cases for their subordinates.

Maybe it’s time that society reduces full time work hours from 40 hours per week, to 24 hours per week.

6 hours per day, 4 days per week. 24 hours per week total.

Or 8 hours per day, and 3 days per week. Then you have a 4 day weekend.

Anything more, is regarded as overtime.

Then those that do want to get ahead, can work the remaining 16 hours on a separate job.

Software automation, mechanization, and robotics, have reduced the need for manual drudgery. And farms are highly mechanized to mass produce raw foodstuffs.

The corporations should be competing against themselves, to work for us, the citizens, that makes their profits possible. Instead of just competing to take a bigger piece of the pie, and to hoard it all for themselves.

It’s time that we as a society, begin to think differently.

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

#189

Post by chiscript »

holoduke wrote: post #41

Very nice. Congrats. Keep on going. I remember that I started with my side project back in 2011. A small app. It made like 1 dollar a month. I spend like 8 hours on it every day and night next to my normal day job. People were thinking I was insane. After 1 year, it made like 1 dollar per day. Then few months later I got 20 dollars in one single day. Another few months later it made for the first time 100 dollars a d…

One word: Persistence!

I have realised that too many people quit early and yet it is clear that their ideas are good. I hope many are inspired by this story, I know I was... inspired to keep on fighting.

As I said here > https://twitter.com/getflookup/status/1332767868002455554 "If you quit, you did it early"

BTW, what app is this, if you don't mind sharing?

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

#190

Post by dkural »

This is very compelling. I humbly recommend that you spend 80% of your efforts in finding ways to market this. What's nice is, it is "viral" in that as people start sharing their music in this way, probably with others in the music scene, they will also get exposed to the product.\

Your tiers could use some work. Your basic aim is to discriminate between dirt poor student musician, professional or hobbyist individual freelancer, small businesses, and enterprise:

- The first free tier is good, but for the second one, I wouldn't give unlimited songboxes (I understand you're limiting by track de facto); as that feature should be saved for enterprise.

- You can charge a lot more as you go up, as you increase number of songbox, and bands supported (i.e. a set of songboxes).

- I wouldn't limit the # tracks much after the first paid tier, because it helps drive engagement and exposes your product further.

Also as a growth aim buy more domain names with an ultimate aim of songbox.com :)

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