You haven't built a side project, you've built yourself a job. This is why I've always been scared to make any commitments to paid subs other than "I'll send you all my blogs early"
agreed. this isn't a "side project", this is a "side business".
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
#32I 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.
I usually agree, but Lemonade (insurance) has an amazing support bot.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#33Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by simply charging more. Another strategy is making it harder to purchase the product. For example by disabling the checkout process until people have completed the tutorial, or only allowing purchases after the free trial has expired.
These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#34A business can be worse than a job because there’s even more required things to be done that can’t be ignored.
the way to get the doge project to not take your time is learning to hire for existing tasks while you figure out new ones.
Also if you can use some of the funds towards a required like a vacation that you and your partner can enjoy guilt free
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#35I 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.
People want their support solved as quickly as possible. They don't want to talk to AI support bots because it's just an inefficient, error-prone wrapper over the documentation, which if you have an actual support need (as opposed to "I just haven't read any of the documentation") that kind of AI support isn't going to be helpful.
If you have an AI customer support that can actually support customer service requests and provide resolution, people will use it and be happy about it, or at least indifferent.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.
Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human first-level support that's just following a script without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to provide a genuine improvement over that.
AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#37Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time.
I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points.
- 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
#38Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the customer base it targets are people you actually want to deal with. Whatever the niche, imagine the worst people you've encountered on it, and be sure you want to use your spare time talking to them. Otherwise, the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#39I 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.
Maybe not.
But there are many ways in which AI can improve or help support. So even if "AI chat support" turns out to not work, AI can still be very helpful in automating support.
Like detecting duplicates, preparing standard answers, grouping similar requests, assigning messages to priorities and/or people and so on.
Re: I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
#40This 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-o…
I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big fundraising component as well so lots of payment infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any one event or even customer was not worth very much (a positive IMO). I still remember someone emailing me directly with the "oh we'd love to give you money but you have to add these features for us first" so they could use this event ticketing and fundraising platform to ... run their dog grooming business.
As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.