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Hallway started as a fun side project / "toy app". It creates temporary video rooms in Slack for teams to connect and make working from home less lonely.
I wanted to ask if anyone has any ideas about how to think about turning this into an actual business given there seems to be some interest?
I thought Slack has video rooms?
Your existing users might be good leads, or they might not. At the least they see enough value in your offering to use it for free. Talk to them and find out what they think you’re adding, and figure out if that’s something people might pay for.
But, that said. I'm not the target audience for it, and going to the current users and talking to them or figuring out why they signed up and what would sweeten the deal for them is probably the best method forward. There might be a bit of a pivot that would make paying worth it for them.
This is always a great resource for keeping that product market fit loop really tight.
The same way you turn anything into a business: figure out who will pay how much money for what. Then, figure out how much it will cost you to provide that to them and tell your future customers that you exist. If the former is more than the latter, you might be able to make a viable business. Your existing users might be good leads, or they might not. At the least they see enough value in your offering to use it for…
Great point. It is possible that a lot of the existing users only use your service because it is free, perhaps because they simply don't have a budget for paying for any service, or perhaps due to some other reason, e.g. they work for some huge organisation where they may need to fight through a lot of red tape in order to get a new service approved for use and paid for.
In both cases, these could be kinds of users that are difficult to turn customers of a viable business: in the former case, because they won't pay you money, and in the latter case, because they can't pay you money unless you first invest 18 months in an enterprise sales cycle with the hope they sign up to your "call us for pricing" enterprise plan that offers RBAC, integrates with their baroque SSO implementation, and offers support for white label branding (or whatever it is that the various stakeholders deem as mandatory features).
> Talk to [your users] and find out what they think you’re adding, and figure out if that’s something people might pay for.
This is much more actionable and useful advice compared to my speculation!