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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

#431

Post by make3 »

shnock wrote: post #397
make3 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it's a subjective very negative judgement about another human, and in polite conversation one should assume baseline positive things about other humans. it's basically like calling someone an asshole. as HN as a culture of politeness, you apologize first, even if it's justified.

Serious question, especially if there’s follow up reading. Where does that principle of assuming baseline good things about the other speaker in polite conversation come from?

you know how people judge you harshly if you're mean to service employees, I think that colleagues and professional acquaintances will expect the worse out of you if you say bad things out of other people, because they're also in a contextually forced (through work) relationship with you, and if you're a psycho they're going to suffer from it, and they have limited info to judge you from

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

#432

Post by razakel »

hkxer wrote: post #131
razakel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently encountered one that just sends you in a loop, and there is literally no way to actually speak to a real person. Unless you want to give them more money; they're very responsive in that case. This is a billion-dollar company you have definitely heard of.

Why don't you just name the company?

Legal reasons.

(It's not Amazon.)

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

#433

Post by piaste »

tonyarkles wrote: post #281
Aurornis wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising prices works wonders when a product is both underpriced and hard to replace. It can backfire when the new price point bumps it into a different category of decision making, though. For many, a $20/month product is an easy decision but $100/month price tag bumps it to a point where it becomes a more complicated decision making process. If you're not careful you can easily raise prices so much that people decid…

I agree with most of what you said, but there's significant nuance to this piece: > Finally, higher prices come with higher expectations from your customers. Whereas previously they might shrug off a slow response to a customer support request at $20/month, their $100/month service might lead them to expect more customer support, not less. This is potentially true, but there's other effects here too: - When I was doi…

> Most of the high paying customers would just kind of... take my work products, say "yup, this meets the requirements we agreed to", and run with it. The ones who were paying the least were the most likely to pull the classic "well... is what we agreed to but..."

Drawing on my experience: perhaps the high-paying customers are being represented by dedicated buyers/executives who do not actually use the product themselves day-to-day. So they're happy as long as it _can_ perform its tasks, even if it's slow or clunky to use - they're paying the workers for 40 hours/week regardless, after all.

Meanwhile, the more tight spenders are more likely to be small businesses where the person making the purchase is also a regular user, and any UX flaws will drive him mad every day.

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

#434

Post by taneq »

tda wrote: post #204
Vegenoid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. All the time when I worked in IT: Me: Please try these 3 things and let me know how it goes: (list of 3 things with instructions) Them: I tried (thing #1) and it didn’t work. Me: Thank you, please try these 2 things and let me know how it goes Them: I tried (thing #2) and it didn’t work. Me: Thank you, please try this thing and let me know how it goes Them: (no response) Me: Just checking in to see if this is re…

Me: This very specific thing is broken in general for your product when I do a and b. Just like users x,y and z report on . (Siemens) Support: Before I can help you, please find the serial number via , and the exact version of subsystems . Me: Here you go, though I fail to see how my specific setup is relevant as the problem has been reported on forums for years, and it is easily reproducible Support: Please update t…

Me: Hi, my ADSL isn't working, I have line sync but no data.

ISP Support: Hi do you have a dial tone?

Me: No we don't have a land line phone at all and haven't for years

ISP Support: Can you please check your land line phone and let me know if you have a dial tone?

Me: I. HAVE. LINE. SYNC.

ISP Support: Yes but your line might not be connected yet. I need to know if you have a dial tone.

Me: ...

Me: drives 5km to the nearest shop that sells telephone handsets

Me: YES. WE. HAVE. A. DIAL. TONE.

ISP Support: Okay so it looks like there's an outage in your area which is affecting your connection.

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

#435

Post by conductr »

hermitcrab wrote: post #423
conductr wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it but main thing is you should know that's a choice and it shouldn't be a requirement/burden. For the common things I think I'd just setup an autoreply that said something like; Thanks for your message, please know that we are limited on time and only respond to critical issues. However, also please know that we do eventually read and monitor these emails; - Bug reports or issues on our current application: we…

Taking up to a week to respond to a bug report sounds like a long time. I would wonder that anyone would bother to submit a bug report if they think they might have to wait a week to get a response. But I guess its acceptable, if you set customer expectations accordingly.

A week can be a long time, even 2 days might. If you want to respond sooner that's great, they will likely be pleasantly surprised. However, for those times when you're offline for the weekend or on holiday for a week - the messaging helps you out with no extra effort to update it. Always better to under promise and over deliver in my book.

I also think expectations are relayed based on the price and scale of your business. Being transparent about your operations is helpful. If you're running your business as a one person side project but pretending to be a large multinational corporation (which is common) or charging a larger sum of money for service then perhaps it's expected. Also if you're providing some mission critical application, then probably expected. The author is talking about a charting plugin to a trading app that he charges peanuts for and has no intention of continuing development on. I think most people's "businesses" fall into this camp, even if mildly revenue generating. In any case, it's mostly about setting and managing expectations. It helps if you are transparent if you are not actively making improvements or it's just a hobby/solo/side hustle thing for you. At the end of the day, they can decide if they want to discontinue using your thing or not and if your optimizing for "least amount of time invested" then you also just need to come to accept that some churn is the price of it. Obviously, if you can charge more or have a huge amount of users, that churn becomes negative ROI versus providing more attentive support and that would likely justify a change of strategy - for some.

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

#436

Post by cies »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #233
cies wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chargebacks are a creditcard thing. In some countries people are willing to pay with methods that do not allow chargebacks. Also chargebacks do not work for wiretranfers. So you can ask them to do a wire transfer instead

You honestly think someone is going to set up wire transfer for an online subscription service?

In some countries this is not uncommon.

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

#437

Post by jldugger »

> This was sad. I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were. People who had an investment strategy and only needed a tool to automate the drawing of the charts that they would normally draw by hand. Not some gung-ho investors whose entire investment strategy consists of "this random script I found five minutes ago says that stock X will go up, so I buy."

Technical analysis is pretty much magical thinking, so, no, you pretty much built a sales funnel for "people who believe investing money is magic and can be easily parted with it." The customer support story seems pretty predictable as a result.

Well, I guess you're mostly piggybacking on TradingView's funnel.

> Sometimes, I would get a job offer. Yay! For writing PineScript for a living. Nay!

Reasonable, but then why bother with a hobby project like this?

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

#438

Post by gnutrino »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #286
gnutrino wrote: post #93

The amount of fraud and scammers out there is insane. I worked on a platform that only had a few hundred in revenue a month (just starting out). We did many smaller transactions, and getting hit with disputes was a killer. If someone did 15 transactions, they could get hit with 15 chargebacks up to 3 months later. So for every transaction, even if it only generated $3 in revenue, the chargeback could be potentially $…

How come the chargeback value could be that much higher than the revenue? (NB: revenue, not profit) If I buy a $3 product and chargeback, then I get $3 back, right? Or does the payment processor bill you $15 for each chargeback no matter the transaction cost?

Yes, the payment processor will charge you for each chargeback. Stripe’s fee is $15 per chargeback.

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

#439

Post by 7bit »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #157
7bit wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having run my own tourism business (so dealing with consumers directly, rather than b2b), and having spoken to many other business owners, this is counterintuitively true. My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or are otherwise looking for a deal. My theory is that people that happily fork out for an expensive product have already seen the value. There are exceptions, but a lot of business owners se…

I tend to agree (gut feeling) that the claim holds true in tourism. But I wouldn't compare that to a software service, where people typically don't do evaluations and rate services on a completely different level.
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