
Ask HN: What should I do with my side project? - hbcondo714
A few years ago, I developed &amp; launched www.last10k.com as a side project while working full time to fulfill a need for individual investors to easily use SEC Filings &#x2F; financial disclosure documents for researching stock investments.<p>Over the years I added some unique features including sentiment analysis but aspects in my personal life have now changed where my job + traffic + being newly married is where my time is spent now so not much has been put into the site lately.<p>The site is fully automated and is receiving just under 3K users a day via SEO with an average time on page at 5 min. It used to make over $1K&#x2F;month in ad sense revenue but Google just started penalizing us for invalid click activity but the site could use a redesign anyways, particularly mobile.<p>What are your thoughts on what I should with this side project? Should I leave the site as-is, sell it, quit my job (which I&#x27;m not happy with) and re-launch it or just work on something else? Any insight on this is appreciated. Thanks!
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mindcrime
Well... $1K/month probably isn't enough to live on, so the question I would
have would be "what can you do to scale the thing up, or find additional ways
to monetize it"? And does the answer to that get you to a place where it makes
enough money to support you? If so, I'd be thinking hard about the "quit and
work on it full-time" thing, although that would obviously depend on a lot of
other factors (savings, etc.)

Other things I'd be asking:

Do you have other features or aspects in mind that could make the site even
more useful / appealing? Are you planning to say purely ad-supported, or do
you have any kind of subscription model in mind? Are there any useful
partnerships you could explore? Is an "acqui-hire" scenario a possibility?

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hbcondo714
Thank you for your quick reply! Yes, I do have a few features in the backlog
such as comparison functions but it will take some time to develop. I was also
thinking of sticking to the ad-revenue model as similar sites are paid
subscription-based.

In terms of the job, the company I'm at just had layoffs so working on the
site instead of looking for another job crossed my mind. Thankfully savings
are plentiful but I don't want to burn through it.

To generate revenue to make a living would require scaling the site to at
least 5 times daily volume it's at now so was thinking about investing in
marketing. There are some business development opportunities I would like to
pursue as well but I have found doing that with my day job difficult.

