From idea to release and first paying customer, how long did it take? What were the challenges? Encountered anything unexpected?
Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#2I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side project called https://keygen.sh, and am finally wrapping things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my mailing list, so that's a plus.
Challenges I've faced:
- Getting carried away with automation: emails after certain events, marketing to users who don't convert, billing features; all of these are things I should have done post-launch.
- Writing tests. I've literally delayed the launch of the product a whole month because I didn't feel my test coverage was good enough. I should have launched the beta and then started writing tests.
- Too many features. "Hey, x) would be a cool feature!", "Oh man, y) would be super useful to my users." – Yeah, I've written and then removed so many features that I'm a little ashamed.
- Wanting to adhere strictly to the JSON API spec. I shouldn't have spent so much time making sure that it followed the spec, because in the end, it doesn't.
After reevaluating things, all I need to do is finish writing documentation so that I can roll out the beta.
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#3I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side project called https://keygen.sh , and am finally wrapping things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my mailing list, so that's a plus. Challenges I've faced: - Getting carried away with automation: emails after certain events, marketing to users who don't convert, billing features; all of these are things I…
When I view your landing page, the graphics spaz out. Is that intended?
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#43 months to build a new video chat platform.
The first release was very naked, live video chats worked, but there was no text chat on the side.
Since then, we've fixed a lot of connection bugs, added Twitter login, and had to scale to a new server with 15 times capacity.
It's called Harf, would love to hear anyones opinion: http://harf.io
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#5For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release.
What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-fusion.html
Challenges:
- Bug testing and regression testing a large/complex user interface was difficult as it tends to be a largely manual process
- Maintaining a multi platform codebase added a lot of extra complexity and it certainly made distribution more difficult
- Identifying what the users precisely needed was difficult as time could be spent on a number of different facets of the project
- Polishing up pieces of the application after it was functionally complete took much much longer than originally predicted
- Marketing/Estimating-the-market: Initial surveys indicated a large number of users would be willing to pay to support a replacement UI and a few hundred were on a dedicated mailing list for it. Conversion rates were much lower than expected with both the general audience and those subscribed to the sub-project specific mailing list.
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#6We're still working on getting our 501c3, so that was unexpected. I knew there would be a lot of legal work and IRS work, but the sheer volume of it still staggers me.
The rest of the work on our site (werebooks.org) is coming along pretty well, I think. There has been a lot of work done to get the load times down (especially for mobiles in other countries), lots of tuning. We have a long way to go yet, but it's nothing like the prototype we tossed up early 2016.
Our biggest effort in 2017 is going to be adding content. Lots and lots of content.
So, to answer question 1 - from idea to 1,000 full book reads a week (we don't charge, so no paying customers) took about 8 months. I don't know that I'd consider it "done" any time soon, so many I'm speaking out of turn.
Challenges and unexpected potholes have been almost entirely of a legal nature.
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#7For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release. What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer:…
Wow!!! I had not used Zyn for a while and admittedly always the UI kind of put me off. This is such an excellent work, both from a technical and sound design POV. Thanks a lot!
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#8For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release. What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer:…
Btw, I see that you are following a Libre Software + pay for the binaries model. How is that working out financially?
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#9For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release. What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer:…
Btw, I see that you are following a Libre Software + pay for the binaries model. How is that working out financially?
The response is leagues better than the old donate button, but it's certainly not what I'd call good. If I consider only the main sprint on this sub-project (last few months which included a fulltime period of work) and current sales (40-50 last I checked) I'm getting roughly $4/hr for the time that was spent on this.
Looking at other open source projects this sort of funding difficulty isn't unusual at all unfortunately.
Re: Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?
#10I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side project called https://keygen.sh , and am finally wrapping things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my mailing list, so that's a plus. Challenges I've faced: - Getting carried away with automation: emails after certain events, marketing to users who don't convert, billing features; all of these are things I…
When I view your landing page, the graphics spaz out. Is that intended?
I think so, I'm pretty sure it's meant to be skeuomorphic :)
That being said, it freaked me out a little bit when I opened it!