Ask HN: What side project did you work on that's now your full-time job? Curious to get an idea of the scale of side projects that people managed to turn into a full-time job. If you either bootstrapped the entire thing or only took VC money late please mention that if you don't mind! |
The business was a grocery price comparison app. There were some legal issues with crowdsourcing prices, so instead we decided to just create a generic recipe app. Instead of monetizing that app with ads, we would use it to sell groceries.
But first we wanted to test out if there was any market for recipe apps that sold groceries. So we narrowed it to a subset of keto diet recipes.
I hacked together this 'market test' app in 2 weeks. A lot of it was hardcoded which ironically made the app faster than anything on the market. We added a hacky chat just to get feedback, but turned out to be a core feature later. It was also done in Malay language, so we could limit any damage to a very small group.
We released it, and within 24 hours, got 1000 downloads.
The "buy groceries" tab was just there to collect analytics on whether people were interested. About 3% of the users really wanted it. In fact, there was a huge market for keto diet ingredients especially in less urban areas, where these ingredients were hard to find.
We got a nice cash flow, but trying to get VCs was the downfall of the company.
Despite really good traction, VCs thought the market was too small. We joined a couple of accelerators where everyone thought it was surprising how well it did, but wouldn't fund it. We had a couple people who nearly invested, but they probably got buyer's remorse before putting the money in. A year later, a large startup we were renting space from offered to merge. I told them I'm tired of the broken promises and just wanted to sell the company. They gave us a good sum, a little more than what we expected to raise in seed, except that it ended up in our pockets.
The other downside was that we created a monster. We made a keto community, a group of people obsessed with losing weight, to the point that they would pass out. There were some ridiculous recipes proposed, like people who ate fried fish with chunks of butter (heart attack central).
The startup mantra is going after a few customers who love you rather than many who kinda like you. Our customers were cultists. Our suppliers also told us they faced the same issues so we chose to ditch the market.
Post-acquisition, nobody wanted to focus on the cultlike keto customers. We rebranded and targeted a subset of health customers. But this was one of the many businesses they were running. The bosses were too busy splitting their focus on multiple things. It was different to a small startup where this was the only thing going on and we just had to make it work. Eventually, it became priority #3 to a lot of people and died of neglect.