

Ask HN: What should I be doing next? - moron4hire

I have a hobby project with no revenue, low costs, and a handful of real users. I think it could make money if I took it seriously. But I only have enough time to work on one thing at a time. Is it better to (in order of perceived difficulty, from easiest to hardest):<p>Work on the platform-specific difficulties that give a less-than-ideal experience to 12% of visitors?<p>Work on the platform-specific, show-stopper bugs that make the site almost useless to 24% of visitors?<p>Work on more big, competition-differentiating features for the 64% of visitors who already get the best experience?<p>Work on design and new-user-onboarding (some of the more important features are not placed obviously)?<p>Advertise more to get more users? I spent $5&#x2F;day on AdWords for the last month and that probably got me about 75% of about 1000 unique visitors last month. The other 25% is from two or three times I was able to get a modicum of attention to the link on HN and LifeHacker (but no comments). There have been 5 or 6 other attempts at social media marketing that led to essentially nothing. I&#x27;ve bumped AdWords up to $20&#x2F;day now, which if it scales linearly should match the biggest social media bump I&#x27;ve had so far.<p>Figure out a way to make money off of the project that sits well with my ethics? Part of the ethos of the project is minimalism and having ads on the page will ruin that. I hate the idea of charging a monthly fee.<p>Find some other source of funding?<p>Or some other option I haven&#x27;t considered?<p>The technical stuff is easiest for me. &quot;Release early, release often&quot;. It&#x27;s out there, I make changes and fix bugs regularly. Clearly, the mantra requires more to be done with advertising. I also have a personal problem that I&#x27;m trying to overcome in using activity in technical work to procrastinate administrative work.<p>If I put significant resources into advertising, I fear the defects losing me a significant chunk of the &quot;15 minutes of fame&quot; and missing &quot;critical mass&quot;, so to speak.<p>If I seek funding, either through investments or crowdsourcing, I fear nobody taking it seriously without being able to demonstrate a plan for revenue or more than a dozen users.
======
hnnewguy
> _" having ads on the page will ruin that. I hate the idea of charging a
> monthly fee...Find some other source of funding?_"

Receiving funding or investment isn't a business model.

I'm not sure why people are so averse to charging monthly fees. Why not ask
your users?

~~~
moron4hire
Oh, I understand that completely. My concern with money right now is to cover
living expenses so I can work on the project. My day job makes me a fair
amount of money, and I'd be fine on less, but not 100% less if I don't already
have a real plan for revenue.

I guess I shouldn't have written "find some _other_ source of funding".
Really, those two thoughts were meant to be separate. I think I could
bootstrap the project on my own, if I just had a plan for revenue that makes
sense.

Where funding comes in: Steve Blank writes: "a startup is an organization
formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."
([http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-
princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/))
I seem to remember PG writing something similar.

Right now, the project is nothing more than desktop software that just so
happens to run in the browser. There is no server component, it's all client-
side JS. My concern with a monthly fee is that, as a user, I know I would want
something of monthly value for that fee. To charge a monthly fee at this stage
would basically be holding the users' own data hostage, data they are already
hosting themselves. I've thought about it a lot and I don't think a monthly
fee suits the current state of things because there is no unique, recurring
service that the project provides. It's 100% software right now, not service.

That is not to say that I don't think there couldn't be a service-oriented
component for which a recurring fee could be charged. Just that it bothers a
lot of people that Adobe charges a monthly fee for Photoshop, software that
runs 100% on the user's own computer.

