
Side project income 2017 - simon_weber
https://simon.codes/2018/01/09/side-project-income-2017.html
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jcadam
Thanks for posting this. Very informative read

I think my most successful side-project stagnated at about $100/month in
monthly revenue (which was roughly break-even given my operating costs). When
I couldn't get it to grow beyond that, I eventually killed it. I actually
didn't have much churn, but getting new signups was difficult (and expensive)
and I just wasn't charging enough to make the whole thing worth my trouble.

Things I learned:

\- Spending money on Adwords was basically the same as setting my money on
fire.

\- Paying bloggers to review your product seems sleazy, but the popular
bloggers in your niche expect it (and the more popular they are, the more
money they demand) and it actually works better than CPC advertising.

\- If you think you've found an under-served market, chances are other devs
have noticed it too, and they probably have access to more money and resources
than you do as a solo founder (it's always great to see a competitor with
better stuff launch 2 months after you, so you cut your price, then they cut
theirs, so you cut yours more, thinking: "I'm a lone dev, this is a side-
project, I don't need the revenue, I can surely win a price war." Which
ultimately ends with subscriptions priced too low to be worth the hassle. But
at least it was a boost to the ego that those other guys saw me as a
competitor).

\- If you whip up something really quick-and-dirty in Ruby-on-Rails, there's a
good chance you've failed badly at architecture and adding new features to
keep up with the competition will be difficult :)

\- Just use a third-party mail service like mailgun, mandrill, et. al., All my
transactional email was going to people's spam folders until I spent many
hours learning about DKIM, etc.

\- Stay away from the education market :D

