
Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016? - umut
From idea to release and first paying customer, how long did it take? What were the challenges? Encountered anything unexpected?
======
ezekg
I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side
project called [https://keygen.sh](https://keygen.sh), and am finally wrapping
things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my
mailing list, so that's a plus.

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.

~~~
perfmode
When I view your landing page, the graphics spaz out. Is that intended?

~~~
ezekg
Yes. I wanted to try something a little different for the design. It's meant
to give off a 'hacker' vibe (complete with a few Mr. Robot references).

~~~
raquo
Damn I really like those glitchy visuals.

------
aeharding
9 months: January to September. It took 2 weeks after launch to get the first
paying customer.

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.

[https://financier.io](https://financier.io)

[https://app.financier.io/humans.txt](https://app.financier.io/humans.txt)

~~~
noidax
Wow awesome job you have done there! Mind sharing how you manage to get your
first client?

~~~
aeharding
I believe I got my first client by posting on Reddit, and from there it
organically spread by people sharing it.

It is a side project though, and I'm not under pressure to acquire customers.

------
fundamental
For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole
process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was
roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and
most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it
to a real release.

What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source
musical synthesizer: [http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-
fusion.html](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.

~~~
arximboldi
Btw, I see that you are following a Libre Software + pay for the binaries
model. How is that working out financially?

~~~
fundamental
The response is leagues better than the old donate button, but it's certainly
not what I'd call good. If I consider only the main sprint on this sub-project
(last few months which included a fulltime period of work) and current sales
(40-50 last I checked) I'm getting roughly $4/hr for the time that was spent
on this.

Looking at other open source projects this sort of funding difficulty isn't
unusual at all unfortunately.

------
jasonkester
I had the idea for the feature that would eventually turn into Unwaffle [1]
back in July. It was initially just going to be an internal tool to track
trial user actions for S3stat so that I could detect trends to predict who
would convert on their own and who would need intervention.

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
    

No paying users yet (and no means of processing payment). With luck, and
assuming the first round of trials go smoothly, it should get a proper
"Launch" in January.

Naturally, feedback is always welcome.

[1] [https://unwaffle.com](https://unwaffle.com)

~~~
joss82
Awesome!

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](http://www.parseur.com) by the way.

------
WereBooks
We're still working on getting our 501c3, so that was unexpected. I knew there
would be a lot of legal work and IRS work, but the sheer _volume_ of it still
staggers me.

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.

------
jetti
I started in 2015 and launched an early access in November of 2016. The
product wasn't hard to make, per se, but I was stuck in analysis paralysis.
Plus I went through a bout or two of depression which took away my time as
well as I was writing a book which took even more time.

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.

------
Huhty
We're actually launching our new SaaS for bloggers in January 2017 called the
Blog Enhancement Suite, but we've spent most of 2016 working on it.

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](http://www.snapzu.com) (platform)

[http://www.blogenhancement.com](http://www.blogenhancement.com) (SaaS for
bloggers)

------
gurkendoktor
One of my perpetual problems with releasing software is that I hate writing
for humans. Marketing blurbs, blogs, emails to the right people. It all sounds
so easy when native speakers write or talk about it, but I'm so shy about this
stuff that I'm never looking forward to finishing a project.

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.

~~~
Mz
Yes, there are low cost services that will write copy for you or rewrite your
copy, such as Textbroker. You could also hire a freelancer independently. (I
do this kind of work.)

~~~
gurkendoktor
Yay! Thanks. Bookmarking your post for after the holidays :)

------
aminozuur
3 months to build a new video chat platform. The first release was very naked,
live video chats worked, but there was no text chat on the side. Since then,
we've fixed a lot of connection bugs, added Twitter login, and had to scale to
a new server with 15 times capacity.

It's called Harf, would love to hear anyones opinion:
[http://harf.io](http://harf.io)

~~~
levimaes
Hi, can I ask what features you're going to implement next? Also, is harf.io's
main advantage supposed to be that it's essentially a committment-free,
platform agnostic videochat service? Who do you think would use it most;
Craigslist patrons requesting remote, "hand-on" previews of listed products
with constraints to iOS' facetime or Google's Duo?

~~~
aminozuur
Harf.io's main difference is that everything is public. I cannot watch other
people's conversations on Facetime, Skype or Duo. Let alone call in and
interact with them. But I can on Harf.

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.

~~~
levimaes
Wow, so it can host topic-specific (like subreddits) video discussions! It
makes me think of a kind of cyber theatre or video-torium.

~~~
aminozuur
Yes, but usually people give the room a title, and 10 minutes into the
conversation they will start discussing all kinds of other stuff as well. It
all depends on who else decided to call in or comment.

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.

------
RepressedEmu
I spent a few months working on a biz lead generator for web dev freelancers
which still hasn't been released. Then I spent a couple months on a news
summarizer called Kiwi which never got finished enough to be useful to anyone.

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.

------
oliv__
About a week.

I launched DesignerJobs
([https://www.designerjobs.co](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.

------
Stanleyc23
I started playing with computer vision toolkits like OpenCV in the late
summer, took a couple months to play with different tutorials, then it took
another couple months to launch a simple iOS game with face and mouth
detecting. As an MVP, I avoided any features that might turn into a time sink
and didn't even include in-app purchases.

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](https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i)

------
pesfandiar
I had an idea of a static JavaScript practice website with little to no
maintenance required. It took me about a month of part-time work from idea to
having the website up. I took a month or so to add more content to it.

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/](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-...](http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-
hosting-static-site-cheaply)

------
mrcabada
I haven't launched completely, but it's been around 5 months since I started
it. I'm building a visual-programming environment to build chatbots with pure
drand and drop. Still lots of stuff to do, but I launched a successful beta.

You can see it in action: [https://talkbot.io](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".

------
evanelias
I've been taking a circuitous route with a side project: first just building
an open source command-line tool that scratches my own itch, and then
evaluating traction from there. If companies find the tool useful, I've been
keeping in mind ways to build out a SaaS/enterprise version. Or if it doesn't
get much traction, worst-case at least I have something that's useful to me!

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.

[1] [http://github.com/skeema](http://github.com/skeema)

------
soared
Less than a day.

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.

------
kirubakaran
I've been working on
[https://instantexporter.com/](https://instantexporter.com/) I'm surprised by
how much longer it actually took me to build the v1, compared to what I
initially thought it will take (5+ months vs 1 month!). Also, I thought that I
wouldn't fall for the common psychological pitfalls as I know about them well,
but here we are.

~~~
soulchild37
Great idea! I have thought of this idea before previously but wasn't sure that
if this is something user wants. I tried the demo, after pressing export to
Google Sheets the window got blocked by pop-up blocker by Google Chrome by
default.

~~~
kirubakaran
Thanks, I'll see if there are ways around that behavior... perhaps by
redirecting to do oauth, instead of the popup.

I'm also trying to find out if there is a real need for this :-)

------
panorama
We started working on customer development in May part-time (full-time
starting July). It wasn't until mid-September that we actually knew what we
wanted to create, and that's when we bought our domain. From there it took til
early November to get our first paying customer.

------
nymeria
Nymeria ([https://www.nymeria.io](https://www.nymeria.io)) from inception to
launch was one month. If you do any cold emailing for your own projects you
may find it as useful as I have!

------
crispytx
1 month per project, but nobody uses either - they were just for fun.

