Ask HN: HustlerUnderPressure - What Am I Doing Wrong with My SideProject?

5 points by aayush4vedi 5 years ago | 6 comments

*My Project*

I built Eurekea(https://www.eurekea.org/) - a Dataset of 250K+ SaaS, Apps & tech-products launched in the last decade.

*Why Did I Build It*

My intention to build it was to: Help people find validated niches for their ideas & build better products by learning from mistakes/reviews of currently existing products.

Because I believed that finding an idea for what to build is the biggest problem every makers here has to solve again & again.

*How Did I Market It*

Initially, I build just a landing page to get emails of how many people are interested in the idea. Got 60+ registrations, which was a fairly good response.

Then I launched the actual product on the first weekend of 2021 & posted it on multiple places- subreddits, IndieHacker & HackerNews.Even though the response was not as good as the pre-launch, but I got 2 people buying it in the first week(one just simply bought it & for the second, I had to exchange few emails to convert)

After one week, I launched on ProductHunt & it was a flop! My product remained the last product of the day from midnight(I guess maybe it's their ranking algo which induces some negative snowball effect).

Right now I just keep on posting on random-new platforms for side-hustles & sending a few cold-emails to users from PH & IH - which I got from my dataset :) along with those who registered early- trying to pitch them my product.But the site visitors rate remains infinitesimal & I haven't made a single sale afterward.

Please share your wisdom & tell me what am I doing wrong here? I still believe that my idea is useful to the makers community & don't want to give up on it.

brudgers 5 years ago |

I believed that finding an idea for what to build is the biggest problem every makers here has to solve again & again.

The evidence of your app suggests:

1. The belief might not be warranted.

2. Or the problem exists but the app doesn't solve the problem.

Iterate.

XCSme 5 years ago | |

Regarding the same quote, I think idea is the easiest thing to find, I am astonished that there are so many people searching for ideas or buying ideas. Ideas are useless without the right implementation. People already have so many problems or use so many low-quality products, it's really easy to find a problem and solve it, but you must:

1) Know what the problem is and who has this problem

2) Know how to solve it

3) Put in the time and effort to actually build it

aayush4vedi 5 years ago | | |

Thanks for the feedback @XCSme

Yes you are right-ideas are easiest to find. But finding ideas for which there is a demand & people are actually willing to pay for- is quiet difficult & iterative process.

My intention to build the product was to help people filter out already viable & successful products in their niche.And then just beat them in terms of better performance, pricing or by focusing on a particular feature or a user-segment. This will give the makers an unfair advantage to beat the competition out there.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - a quote Jobs stole from Picasso.

I agree that the placing & packaging of my product doesn't make it clear.Coming from Back-end Engineer background, this is quiet a challenge for me. Working on it for a re-launch :)

aayush4vedi 5 years ago |

@HN community, please advise me what am I missing with my side-hustle here.It's my first finished product & my main intention for launching it is to learn about the journey of a multi-hat wearing IndieHacker.

XCSme 5 years ago | |

I checked out the website but I don't understand what it does, how it can help me and why would I use it.

"Ikea for your next Idea." adds even more confusion, what does this mean? That I can purchase a premade idea/business and assemble it myself?

aayush4vedi 5 years ago | | |

Yes, My previous comment should make it a little more reasonable.

Eureka + Ikea = Eurekea

But it still sucks. I guess I'll be forefieting this domain & buying one with better name for the brand out of my pocket.