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

Just open sourced my 10k LOC PHP & MySQL invoicing app

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 101 posts

Re: Just open sourced my 10k LOC PHP & MySQL invoicing app

#5

Post by Alan01252 »

renownedmedia wrote: post #3
manelvf wrote: post #2

How many users did you have?

There was only about 120 users at its peak. I hesitated, was never ready to make it a real money-making business, and therefor didn't really advertise it.

I've a few questions if you have the time.

Did you never charge? Or were you charging? What were the reasons it was / you were not ready to make it a money making business? Any mistakes or lessons learned while building/running the software? Where did the 120 users come from?

As someone who is looking to create their own product soon I'd be really grateful for any response you can give.

Thanks

Alan

Re: Just open sourced my 10k LOC PHP & MySQL invoicing app

#6

Post by renownedmedia »

obituary_latte wrote: post #4

Is that mochaUI? Looks like it. Tried using it recently and it actually was quite nice despite the lack of docs and other various hiccups. At any rate, thanks for putting it out.

Yeah, it's MochaUI. About two years ago, the project was mostly un-maintained, I haven't looked at it recently though.

Re: Just open sourced my 10k LOC PHP & MySQL invoicing app

#9

Post by renownedmedia »

Alan01252 wrote: post #5
renownedmedia wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was only about 120 users at its peak. I hesitated, was never ready to make it a real money-making business, and therefor didn't really advertise it.

I've a few questions if you have the time. Did you never charge? Or were you charging? What were the reasons it was / you were not ready to make it a money making business? Any mistakes or lessons learned while building/running the software? Where did the 120 users come from? As someone who is looking to create their own product soon I'd be really grateful for any response you can give. Thanks Alan

For a few months I had the ability for users to sign up for a paid account, but I never pushed it. After that, I just disabled the feature altogether.

The most advertising I did do was a 125x125 ad on a website used by web developers (DavidWalsh.name) for one month. I didn't get a single user through that ad though.

The biggest lesson learned is that an app like this really needs someone who is good at marketing. I'm just a programmer, but if I had found a marketer and pursued the development of the app, I'm pretty sure it could have been successful.

Another take away is to research competitors. I never looked them up since I actually built this mostly for myself at first, and just kept adding new features as it got bigger. It turned out the market was very crowded (This page has a list of 17 competitors: http://thomashunter.name/blog/shutting-down-and-open-sourcin...).

Also, "piss or get off the pot". I spent a lot of time developing this but I didn't devote enough of my time to it for it to be successful.

Re: Just open sourced my 10k LOC PHP & MySQL invoicing app

#10

Post by markhuus »

markhuus wrote: post #8

I can't believe you hardcoded this for MySQL instead of using PHP's excellent and versatile PDOs, and I can't believe the 10k line count. Gosh. Is "de-engineering" a suitable term here? Thumbs up for open sourcing your work, though.

No I'm serious here, renownedmedia. Don't disregard my rant with a silly downvote, but do instead indulge yourself in the PDO methods instead of painting yourself and your projects into corners: http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php
Post reply on HN