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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

#171

Post by brandon272 »

joshuaturner wrote: post #98

Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager ( https://pager.app ) that allowed users to set up alerts for content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project. Users became so demanding and I felt like if I began to take money from them it would only get worse. Looking back on it I'm not sure it was the best choice, but at least…

It feels like a hostage situation. Had you started to charge money for that app, the most demanding and unreasonable cohort of users would have become apoplectic and invested time into trashing you and the app. It's almost like that in order to start charging in that situation, you need to retire the app under that name and rebrand as a different, fee-based product.

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

#172

Post by kayodelycaon »

kmoser wrote: post #142
SoftTalker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or simply their priorities are not your priorities. They have encountered a problem, they asked for help, but they have 10 other things going on. By the time you answer, they have forgotten half the context of the issue. They try one thing, it doesn't work, they don't have more time right now so they answer that thing 1 didn't work. Repeat.

I find most people suffer from at least one (and more commonly two) of the following: insufficient attention to detail; poor time management; and bad organization skills.

> their priorities are not your priorities.

> insufficient attention to detail

I believe there's a cause effect scenario here.

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

#173

Post by benatkin »

thehappyfellow wrote: post #61
shash7 wrote: post #37

Can 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. - Inve…

Do you have an example of “polite but curt” tone? I’m struggling to see what you mean.

From the sound of it, the politeness is the shallow politeness that you can easily get with ChatGPT. The curtness is defending from the users expecting too much, which can include delaying handling issues before properly checking if they're real. I experienced this with Vercel and it probably makes economic sense for them. (BTW I really should cancel my Vercel account but haven't decided to take the time to migrate yet.) https://x.com/search?q=vercel%20benjaminatkin_&src=typed_que...

The reason it can be framed as curtness is because they're being curt about the expectations, and the real expectations are pretty low. "Sure, I can delay really addressing the issue for a couple weeks. You're only paying me 40 bucks a month, why would you expect more? The goal of responding within two days is just for a canned response." See, they were curt and didn't let me demand something more than I deserved, like being able to use the product I'm paying for in the next several days!

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

#174

Post by shawnz »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #102
crazygringo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do. There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues resolved faster and better. Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me to send a message to th…

Then you get situations like this one where the AI invented a non existent policy (which the airline did not want to honor) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

There's a non-zero chance that real humans working as customer service agents will invent facts, too (whether to try and be helpful about something they're not completely sure, or just to get a problematic customer to leave them alone)

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

#175

Post by bdcravens »

7bit wrote: post #150
siliconc0w wrote: post #140

One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100 for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer support.

I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features. If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away. And then, if your customers are business…

Perhaps, but what's your idea of polish? For many developers, it's a shiny interface. Business users have much different metrics. Developers may get excited over "productivity"; business users are more focused on ROI (ie, quantifiable savings or profit)

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

#176

Post by johndhi »

Tomorrow I begin teaching a college course, in addition to my full-time day job, that I've been creating and working on for months. Work has been very busy lately and I'm worried that my experience with the class will make my life hell. I'm having to approach it in a really different way -- one where rather than doing my usual over-preparing, I'm trying to just get confident that I can do my best and see how it goes.

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

#177

Post by fragmede »

lbotos wrote: post #63
Waterluvian wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a business is going to be like, and what a business is actually like. One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.

A trite phrase that stuck with me: "The hardest part of business is everything you are not good at."

If we're being trite, the best part about business is you can pay someone to deal with the stuff you don't want to. Sometimes the two overlap.

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

#178

Post by MangoCoffee »

7bit wrote: post #150
siliconc0w wrote: post #140

One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100 for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer support.

I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features. If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away. And then, if your customers are business…

It's about creating a barrier to exclude unwanted individuals, similar to a gated community with homes priced higher than the average worker's budget, for instance.

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

#180

Post by guzik »

shash7 wrote: post #37

Can 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. - Inve…

> - 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.

Interesting. Anything you've automated successfully that you can share? I've heard so many times that you should hold off on automating too early because constant pivoting and refining can end up making you spend more time fixing the automation than actually doing the work itself, so I kinda paused on it. I can see how it would make a big impact on my marketing outreach, which I'm doing manually right now with not much success.

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