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I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

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Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#11

Post by authorfly »

sklarsa wrote: post #5

I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.

Yes it's great writing. But it's not really about automating I feel (please chime in author OP?). To me he wanted to get away from customer email ghosting and disputes. He chose to change the customer support approach and create customer service tools to manage the common requests programmatically. I feel from the writing that his original vision, or continuing to extend the product and scale it, has now changed to maintaining it as is. He realizes customer requests and the time/disappointment of all that grows linear to revenue and does not want to do that any more.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#13

Post by Y_Y »

It sounds to me like the really valuable product here isn't the harmonic charts but the little automation platform (based on n8n?). I can imagine there are plenty of devs with even less tolerance for customer service and actually running a business, but are happy to build software and sell it to people.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#14

Post by fasteo »

Over the years I have had some good (to me) ideas for side projects, but I have always hesitated to build them rationalizing that the potential market was way too small (a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of developers).

If anything, this post shows how wide - or deep - any internet niche is.

Silly me.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#15

Post by shash7 »

Very candid experience - I love it.

I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. Over the years I've learnt a lot of tricks in this area.

- You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support.

- Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future.

- Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues.

I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#16

Post by btbuildem »

This was a fascinating read, really.

The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button.

Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-opening. I don't know if there's a sane way to deal with the entitlement, other than just plain ignoring those interactions.

How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue to use the project yourself?

I really like the learnings the autor took from this experience. Seems like most of them came from adopting "I give up" attitude when flirting with burnout -- which inadvertently seems to follow the 80/20 rule.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#17

Post by Lutger »

leapis wrote: post #6

> Why on earth would you bet your money on some random tool you don't even understand? ... I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were. The tool is for drawing "technical analysis indicators", one of the most convoluted ways to ascribe meaning to a random process and something that will only ever be true in the self-fulfilling sense. I don't think it's a surprise that some users are willing to blin…

At least half of the interactions that are presented as terrible, I feel are actually quite normal and potentially even pleasant. If you don't actually enjoy talking about your product with 'beginners' or even just normal people, then maybe reconsider the customer support role?

For me this reads as 'I don't enjoy voluntary customer support' rather than my customers suck.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#18

Post by creesch »

Interesting article to read. Part of the issues also seem to come from a few contributing factors like the unusual platform and expanding from this platform including whatever limitations come with it. Meaning you implemented things in a reverse order than people might otherwise do as they don't start out with a product on a platform trying to make it fit a subscription model.

I can imagine the specific type of user base also increasing specific types of annoying support requests. Although customer support almost always ends up being one of the things that at some point will annoy the hell out of you. Even on open source projects, the entitlement can be incredible. Although there you can get away with a remark like "You are free to uninstall , we will give you a full refund!".

Automating a lot of that certainly was the right call, as well as filtering out all the low hanging fruits of bullshit requests. If people can't be bothered to read instructions (assuming they are clear instructions) then they certainly will also run into various other issues making them not worth the effort.

The one thing I don't entirely disagree with is "Be nice" which I personally have replaced with "Be civil" over the years. It still means listening to peoples requests, helping them where reasonable, even be courteous where applicable. To be fair, there might also be a cultural aspect involved here. In communication with US companies the "being nice" mantra often seems to be taken to such a degree where I am less wishing for someone sane to just help me swiftly with my support ticket and be done with it.

Overall, nice write up of the experience though!

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#19

Post by btbuildem »

_se wrote: post #10
sklarsa wrote: post #5

I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.

No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.

Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to continue the conversation manually.

Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

#20

Post by [deleted] »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #8

Side projects have always been the most exciting banes of my existence. I LOVE the initial rush of building and launching something. Even maintaining it is SUPER exciting for the first few months. The first customers are a rush of endorphins. Then the shine wears off. Life can't be kept on pause. Your partner wants a date night, but you have a backlog to work though. You got a frantic email from a customer that they…

[deleted]
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