Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016? 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? From idea to release and first paying customer, how long did it take? What were the challenges? Encountered anything unexpected? |
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.
My product was developed because I've written more or less the same licensing API logic for a few different desktop applications. I figured I couldn't be the only person who didn't want to write licensing logic, especially when it starts getting more complex with add-ons, user accounts, etc. so I've been creating a solution for myself and everybody else.
Keygen solves that issue by making licensing simple for desktop applications (not only limited to Node/JavaScript, of course), as well as some web apps (most notably in my mind would be gaming or other SaaS apps, but really it could be used for many different types of web apps). I've tried to provide a better UX than current solutions, such as not requiring a license key but rather having your users login and then checking their account for a specific license.
That being said, it freaked me out a little bit when I opened it!
The product is a SaaS progressive web app for budgeting. It's $12/year for the premium version.
The main challenges were adding the last few features, making it production ready, and polish. The 80-20 rule really applied here (it took 20% of time to get 80% of the way), and that's only for the MVP! I still work on the app almost every day. :)
I'd say the hardest part now that I have many customers is not breaking anything for those existing customers.
It is a side project though, and I'm not under pressure to acquire customers.
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.
Looking at other open source projects this sort of funding difficulty isn't unusual at all unfortunately.
But it quickly became apparent how useful it would be as a product, so I built it that way from day one, with its own domain and API for collecting data. The idea was to build the pieces I needed to do my thing, and if it didn't work amazingly well, to shoot it in the head and move on.
So:
- Idea in July
- Prototype in August
- Decided to move forward in September
- Public site live in September
- Fully functional by around October
- Some minor promotion in November
- Just went live with real customers in December
Naturally, feedback is always welcome.
Could you elaborate a bit on the "minor promotion" part?
We are at the "fully functional" step and wondering how to approach the marketing part.
That'll make a great blog post, i guess we are not alone in that situation.
Many thanks.
We are http://www.parseur.com by the way.
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.
My biggest challenge was not picking something and just going with it. I picked what I knew (WinForms with C#) and went with it. I ended up throwing away the UI 4 or 5 times because I just couldn't get it right. It didn't look "good enough" it just looked horrible. After I launched I just thought my UI looked horrible so I started to re-do it (yet again) but this time in WPF. My UI looks so much better, I have added more functionality to the UI and it took much less time.
So far I have two big challenges, getting a paid customer as well as accurately tracking my metrics. I have, I think, 30+ downloads of the trial since I launched early access but I'm using events in Google Analytics to track and numbers I see don't always make sense. On top of that, my analytics don't seem to make much sense either as I'm getting majority of the traffic from direct but I'm not sure why that would be.
At the end of the day, I'm looking forward to 2017 as I will have a new updated release of my product, my book will be finished and I can devote more time to getting customers.
It basically allows you to plug in a community to your blog using a widget that will use the core of our community voting platform Snapzu (that launched in 2013). There are other widgets out there that bloggers can use, such as Twitter Timeline, Pinterest, Instagram, etc, but all of them are redundant, showing duplicate stuff that's already on the blog, and don't really add anything for engagement and revenue like we plan on doing.
Biggest Challenges:
1. Getting the word out (mostly for feedback at this point), so that we can continue improving our landing page so that people understand it better and see the value proposition.
2. A/B testing to figure out what works and what doesn't. This is tough because of the small sample sizes (because of challenge #1 just above) and because it requires a lot of re-writing copy/text.
Unexpected encounters:
Explainer video (still in production) is taking way longer than we thought it would, approx 3 months now.
Happy to answer any questions. Links if you want to see our service in action:
http://www.snapzu.com (platform)
http://www.blogenhancement.com (SaaS for bloggers)
Is there a low-cost service that will proof-read everything you do (not for grammar accuracy, but also tone)? The easiest fix might be to live in the UK for a bit.
It's called Harf, would love to hear anyones opinion: http://harf.io
We are pushing code every day, though it's not always visible to the user. A lot of features are coming soon, most importantly moderations tools.
Eventually I got sick of spending weeks and months on things that were too big and serious to actually release and spent one week to get www.whispe.rs out into the public eye. It started as a paid Twilio wrapper for anonymous texting but has now morphed into a free web tool for anonymously texting goofy messages to friends and family for free.(For anyone who has ever wanted to anonymously text "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of Elderberries!" to an unwitting friend) I don't think it will ever make money or anything but it was fun building it, getting harsh feedback, and then rebuilding it. It has also already made a few people smile so I consider it a worthwhile use of my time :)
At some point I will start finishing bigger and bigger projects but for right now I'm happy with Whispe.rs.
I launched DesignerJobs (https://www.designerjobs.co) about three weeks ago: posted on HN a friday afternoon and got like 5 upvotes. I thought that was going to be it but someone picked it up on ProductHunt the next day and it ended up ranking #4 on there all weekend. I got plenty of traffic from there, realized I wasn't collecting emails (oops) or had links to social media (duh) and rushed to deploy the features. Got my first customer on Monday! From there, I contacted a lot of companies with open positions for designers and eventually added more sales, one after another. So far things are going pretty well, I've added features, companies and I'm trying to maintain growth.
The biggest challenge for me was/is marketing. I'm finding it's actually pretty easy to code and design anything, but marketing/reaching out/selling whatever you have is what truly separates having a website from having a business.
Working with the libraries was unexpectedly easy since I looked at a lot of sample code and tutorials.
The challenges are to come when I have to dig deeper into combining different image processing techniques to boost my particular tracking needs. Additionally, I'll have to learn about 3D graphics from scratch if I want to make the game more immersive and dynamic. Lastly if I want to add stuff like an in-game economy, that will take time away from experimenting on the computer vision stuff.
Check it out and send me feedback! https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i
It was never meant to make any money, so maybe your definition of side project is more specific than mine. I got about tens of clicks on the affiliate links and made a grand total of $0.00.
The website is at https://javascript.onl/ and I wrote a high-level blog post about how I did it at http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-...
You can see it in action: https://talkbot.io
Website took 2 days to build, the idea, webapp and server took around 5 months.
I haven't charged a penny to my clients, because it's still in beta, but I'm on my way on making it no-beta soon and start monetizing.
Unexpected: Got featured in some blogs and it rained clients and e-mails, too demanding for one-person project. I wasn't ready, nor my product, marketing was going to happen later.
P.S. I'm the only coder and designer, should've been faster with more people on the "team".
The tool is called Skeema [1] and it allows you to manage relational database schemas as code -- a bridge between git (or hg, svn, etc) and SQL DDL. You can use it to export CREATE TABLE statements from a DB to a repo, and then auto-generate and run DDL based on changes to that repo. Currently it just targets MySQL (due to personal familiarity, and the historic complexity with schema changes there), but if it's successful I could envision porting it to other DBs.
The open source CLI is still in alpha, but getting very close to a first release candidate. I've spent 9 months of working 5 to 25 hours/week on it so far.
Some unexpected challenges:
* Even for entirely text-based command-line tools, building a nice polished interface takes a lot of time! My goal has been to make Skeema's CLI paradigms immediately intuitive to users of Git and MySQL, in terms of option-handling, subcommands, and config file format. Even little things like exit code values, and STDOUT vs STDERR for different types of output, matter a lot for building CLIs that are friendly to pipelines.
* None of the existing Golang CLI/config packages were the right fit. After a couple attempts at hacking/forking popular ones resulted in overly-awkward code, I scrapped all that and wrote my own. I should have done that from the start, but it felt like yak-shaving.
* I eschewed unit testing at first, going with the common side-project wisdom of only prioritizing functionality. But as the codebase grew, I really wished I had spent more time writing tests from the start. I suspect it would have been a net time-saver vs the manual ad hoc testing I was doing initially.
I had been thinking about it for weeks/months and knew exactly how it would work. Having mentally worked out all the problems simplified the creation so much. While putting things off is usually bad, sometimes continuously thinking about it solves problems before they come up. The only challenges I had were with learning new tools and not execution.
Wrote a hn post (on an alt acc) and sent a few emails and it had a couple nice traffic spikes and news/blog articles. I haven't touched it since though. I won't link it because I don't want my name attached to it.
I'm also trying to find out if there is a real need for this :-)
I hope some day there will always be 100+ rooms open at any given day. Just imagine, you could be having a conversation with anyone about anything, at any given moment.