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How I Built a Side Project

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Re: How I Built a Side Project

#41

Post by mattlutze »

onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number.

I think the more helpful baseline is likely the folks that opened the email (we can't infer a lot from the ones that didn't -- email services may have simply junk-mailed the message for the other 54.2%). 27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible.

1 in 20 people who saw OP question about the service were compelled enough to provide a response. That's not bad.

> If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (allegedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a big messaging problem.

I really wouldn't be so down on it. What's the average read-to-recommend on the average unsolicited call to action message? How many people actually provide extra details when an application on our computers crashes and the OS wants to send a bug report?

How many actually send the bug report? That's just a button click.

Providing their email for updates is a good indicator the base pitch is interesting, true. But it's an almost mindless activity. How many times a month does the average technophile give away an email address?

Enough times, is how many. And enough times to likely forget more often than not what they'd signed up for a day ago, let alone continue to really, really care about it.

I'm sure OP could have built a more compelling email campaign that used the right communication strategies to elicit a greater response. But, I'll take 5% over 0.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#42

Post by nezza-_- »

onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> The open rate of the email was 45,8%

How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#43

Post by dikaiosune »

mcone wrote: post #19
overcast wrote: post #17

I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

Spinning up a DO droplet with an Ubuntu image and installing dokku is pretty darn close to Heroku ease of use when weighed against the cost/performance as well. Just configure ufw and sshd and you're off to the races. It's not exactly a hardened setup, but most side projects don't have much user data to start (or ever?).

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#44

Post by robryan »

nezza-_- wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

These numbers are usually overstating I find, likely a lot less people actually read the email.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#45

Post by dustingetz »

nezza-_- wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

I click on a lot of emails just to find the unsubscribe button, and sometimes open-archive is the fastest way to get things out of my inbox

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#46

Post by corobo »

sumsted wrote: post #23

This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday, https://www.goodui.org/ . If your site was still up, I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.

It's mildly frustrating that that site mentions "Press J for next K for previous" at the bottom of the page after I've scrolled through them all..

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#47

Post by bpatrianakos »

mcone wrote: post #19
overcast wrote: post #17

I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

I'd argue the barrier is just as high. I taught a ten week course in back end development and I think the students would have done equally well deploying on a VPS or Heroku.

The curriculum called for using Heroku but I regret following it now. Heroku bills itself as being easy for a beginner but go ahead and try to deploy any simple Rails or Node project using their guides. Half the time something goes wrong. Either you need extra dependencies or you have to do extra configuration that the setup instructions didn't mention. In the end you have to look up how to check the logs and even if you get that far a beginner has no clue what those logs are really saying. Even as an experienced senior developer, I couldn't get the demo project I was showing them deployed without a ton of hassle and 4 attempts.

So while it may seem like a VPS has a lot more moving parts, it's a better deal overall. Same level of confusion and complexity for students but in the end they at least know a bit about how a server works (which Heroku hides) and it's way cheaper even with SSL. I could have run that same project for $30 up front and $10 monthly.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#48

Post by elithrar »

overcast wrote: post #20
mcone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

> Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

It's clear that the author was overspending—even a small dyno with a resource-hungry language like Rails can do a lot of traffic—but there's a lot more than just installing a web server, DB. Firewalls? WAL-E backups? Monitoring (of any kind)? A correct TLS setup? DB security?

Setting those up—in a way that you can replicate if the box is hosed—is a whole 'nother side project unto itself. Learning Ansible, Salt, etc. is great, but if your goal is to build X thing as a side-project, you'll never get anything done in a timely manner if you start reinventing wheels.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#49

Post by myth_buster »

nezza-_- wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

From MailChimp's website

http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#50

Post by userium »

nezza-_- wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> The open rate of the email was 45,8% How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

The emails were sent via Mailchimp, the open rate was gotten from Mailchimp's reports (analytics).
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