
How I Built a Side Project - lillukka
https://stayintech.com/info/sideproject
======
AKifer
Aside from the free nature of the app, I think what's missing was a consistent
growth strategy. In your opinion 1/ how much would be a fair price for such a
service 2/ which/who sales/marketing saas/specialists would have helped it
attract customers 3/ what would be the next features appealing enought to
convice users to try it, use it more frequently, and invite other, should this
app continued to live

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dcole2929
It sucks that you had to kill your project because of costs but honestly I
don't blame you for going the Heroku route. It does it all for you with some
"mininmal" configuration. I like linux and have done enough maintenance on
various sites so I generally don't feel lost but I'd kill to have someone walk
me through the process of setting up a production ready web app just once.

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bootload
_" To learn more about my users, I sent a short list of questions to 1222
recipients."_

brilliant read, one thing I'd modify is ask some/all these questions on signup
or login. Tweak enough questions and techniques to ask [0] so as not to
discourage. This way you can gain more info as as people use/try/login.

[0] Must be numerous ways to gain info building it into actions of tool.

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seanwilson
For all the people saying Heroku is too expensive: a basic single server, 10M
row database and SSL is around $50 a month on Heroku:
[https://www.heroku.com/pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing)

Personally, for the reduction in admin tasks (which I think people greatly
underestimate), improved deploys and rollbacks, and improved uptime about $50
a month is completely worth it compared to a standard server.

I don't know why the monthly bill in the article is $250 though.

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jassa_
Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side
project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer
to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and
your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.

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ahstilde
How do you keep your costs so low?

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level09
I like this kind of posts, a side project helps creating side projects. it was
a matter of time until I figured out that to make money you can simply teach
people how to make money. who wouldn't want to learn that :)

~~~
yaworsk
Agreed. I like reading these. Kinda disappointed to see the project abandoned
though. Seemed like you were really on to something and like others are
saying, you probably could have found cheaper hosting to keep it going. Also
would +1 seeing the project open sourced if it's not continued.

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10dpd
Here's another checklist style app, only built on PHP AppEngine. So far there
hasn't been enough traffic though to make a reasonable estimate of cost.

[http://www.fallinloveapp.com](http://www.fallinloveapp.com)

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juandazapata
Iteration 3: Die

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sumsted
This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday,
[https://www.goodui.org/](https://www.goodui.org/). If your site was still up,
I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting
solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have
plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.

~~~
corobo
It's mildly frustrating that that site mentions "Press J for next K for
previous" at the bottom of the page after I've scrolled through them all..

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onion2k
_I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients._

Great!

 _The open rate of the email was 45,8%_

That's excellent.

 _...and 27 people replied._

Oh. Oh dear.

 _~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended
the tool for a friend or colleague._

96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to
an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond
is _by far_ the more important number. If the people who'd tried the app were
a random sample of the population then 2.2% might be enough to suggest there's
a valid premium business model there, but the people who tried the service
weren't randomly selected - they were a self-selected group of people who are
interested enough in user testing to sign up for the service. If you can't get
a significant response from a group who are (alledgedly) interested in your
type of product then you clearly have a _big_ messaging problem.

~~~
nezza-_-
> The open rate of the email was 45,8%

How was this number calculated? There is not really a way to reliably detect
this. Methods like the tracking-image do not work on Gmail.

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myth_buster
From MailChimp's website

[http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-
rates](http://kb.mailchimp.com/reports/about-open-and-click-rates)

~~~
nezza-_-
And: [https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-
affects-...](https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-
tracking/)

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userium
Author here, happy to get feedback!

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reacweb
"monthly costs of running the service" was your killing argument. Why didn't
you migrate to a cheap hosting ? My single host at scaleway (3.59€ per month)
can handle many toy projects and gives me all freedom.

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funkyy
I find Scaleway tricky when deploying apps since it is ARM - the price is kick
ass, but I wasnt able to go around limitations with my Python apps. Do you
ever run in to issues like that? How is uptime?

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overcast
I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty
powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple
side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to
tinker with, while you work on other stuff!

~~~
mcone
That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people
who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and
maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid
those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application
development.

~~~
overcast
$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning
aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a
part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo /
mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

~~~
wuliwong
My experience as a one man operation is that you always have to make trade
offs between building something yourself (especially if you actually need to
learn a new skill-set to do it) and using someone else's solution. Honestly,
in general this is essentially always the debate even at my regular job.

For me, Heroku has always been the choice over AWS or Digital Ocean. I haven't
had it block me from doing anything I've wanted to do and my monthly bill is
around $10 (for multiple sites). For my projects, I could never make a solid
argument that moving away from Heroku would actually change the product for
the end user in any meaningful way. And with the greater amount of time and
energy I would need to focus on a non-Heroku server-side, it would likely slow
progress.

~~~
overcast
Honestly, I don't really care what you use if it fits your needs. The main
point here is that the author shut down his project, because they were
spending $250 a month, to operate a very basic setup. Pick your favorite host,
but a car payment to do so, is ludicrous.

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brandon272
I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can
set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few
commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against
intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

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skywhopper
And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL
cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance?

I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the
other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and
maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the
business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of
scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining
backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your
$10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services
cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin-
level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep
up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for
every subsystem. There's just too much.

The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.

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brandon272
How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that
checklist app has next to no users?

I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250
a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a
month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I
had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have
hundreds of paying customers.

The moral of the story is that you should choose the right tool for the job. A
$250/mo. Heroku app for a developer who wants to fiddle around with it for a
tiny side project is not a good value as far as I'm concerned.

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drchiu
Agree with brandon272.

$250/mo is not a viable business plan.

As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save
my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper.

For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and
it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache
things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server
costs can take you.

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ahstilde
What sort of infrastructure?

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drchiu
Bare Metal. I typically use something like OVH's offerings.

