
From idea to revenue in 5 working days, thanks to HN - remyp
http://jeremyphelps.com/blog/from-idea-to-revenue-in-5-working-days.html
======
jimmies
It's kinda amazing that OP already made money with 3k unique visitors from HN.
I am glad you received what you wished for.

Making it to the front page of HN is amazing. I am fortunate to have several
entries and projects making the front page of HN in the last couple of months.

My little story that has nothing to do with money. I am an international grad
student. Recently I moved to a new city with very few friends, the girl I was
seeing for 4 years in grad school stopped talking to me, my grad school thesis
was tougher than I thought, I needed to find a job while waiting for my EAD
card being stuck in the queue, my driver's license was expiring and I couldn't
renew it because of the darn EAD card didn't come, it was just too much to
handle. I was feeling lonely, demotivated, confused. I became numb, I loved
computers all my life yet didn't have the passion to program, so I tried to do
a lot of things to escape reality. I wrote a lot both programs and blogging.
One of my "fun" programming projects that I did in 1 day waiting for it to
compile has recently been on HN front page, then it made its way to
/r/raspberry_pi, hackaday, /r/android, androidpolice, zdnet among many others.
I got hit by 60k unique visitors in the last 10 days and I made exactly 0
cents from it (and I made a stance to not ask people for money). I have people
sending me emails and tweets thanking me every day since. I guess to me at
this point, passion is worth more than anything in this world. When I was
answering questions from HN and reddit, sometimes my eyes got really wet
because I was really feeling hopeless, but then the optimism and kindness of
people I don't know were something I could feel. I can't be more thankful for
what I received from the HN community. I couldn't ask for more.

I'm just telling you all this about my life because I figured I can't be the
anonymous jimmies like I was before anymore. I have a real story, not very
pretty and successful, but I guess a story worth telling because there might
be other jimmies who are desperate and sad in this world reading this: don't
ever give up hope, keep creating cool shit, you'll be alright. I have another
blog post that made HN front page 5 months after I published it. No one ever
mentioned it being cool to me: it has 0 people reading it before someone
submitted and made HN front page. You thought the world doesn't care about
you, but you never know when your honest efforts will pay off.

(If you're curious, it's called getcrankshaft.com - a GNU/Linux distro for the
Pi that makes it a makeshift android auto)

~~~
ernsheong
I also had an app that made it to HN front page last year:
[https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com) (web scrapbooking, aka
personal web archive)

Ultimately it didn't take off as hoped, and it wasn't the advertising type of
app (unlike OP's). It is, however, steadily getting some paid subscriptions,
for which I am hopeful and thankful. Anyhow I'm back at a job for now.

------
seriocomic
Great story - you got an extra click, but then I bounced due to your 3.2mb PNG
image on the homepage.

I ran that same image through imageOptim and it came out identical at 200kb -
could even be better. I'm on adsl and "felt" it, also you just killed 3mb x
3000... It might not matter for most, but for some it does.

~~~
zero_iq
You don't even need any fancy image optimizer, just loading and resaving it in
a basic paint program is enough to reduce it to <400K.

I'm guessing the image file on the site has been saved without compression
enabled. It's noticeably slow to load. Not only that, but it reloads every
time I visit the page, so they might want to sort out their caching policy
too.

~~~
atacama
It's not really fancy, it's actually the easiest way to do it without thinking
much.

------
ttamslam
Thanks for this write-up, it's really nice to see the process start to finish
in such a straightforward way.

Is your intention to continue letting the user base grow naturally, or do you
have plans to post about this in other communities?

Also, I think the sponsor revenue model is really interesting. Can anybody
point to stats on the effectiveness of project/podcast/video sponsorship vs.
more conventional internet ads?

~~~
remyp
I'm a generally terrible marketer, so I'm mostly planning on growing it
naturally. There are already loads of interesting people on the platform that
will sustain it for some time, so I'm happy with that.

I built it for fun -- there's no need for it to grow to be a real business.

------
220V_USKettle
Wasn't kismet a wifi security tool?

~~~
bojo
I knew that name rang a bell. That is exactly what it is:
[https://www.kismetwireless.net/](https://www.kismetwireless.net/)

------
wastedhours
Really fantastic execution! Been playing with a similar idea for internally at
large companies, where you get intro'd to a new person in a different team
every week, and get a flavour of what they're about (it's not a tested use
case, but something to scratch my own itch).

Signed up, great second stage marketing for the audience with the follow-up
post!

------
owens99
I applaud the effort, however, I was expecting that you would have a business
model, not 1-off revenue from a sponsor. You could argue sponsorship is a
business model, but it is certainly not a scaleable one at the level of
impressions or unique views your business has.

/rant

Nonetheless, great work and congrats on getting the idea off the ground. It's
still impressive to get so much attention and I can empathize with the problem
you are solving.

~~~
remyp
Thanks! I do expect to continue offering sponsorships so that it can at least
cover its costs. At the moment I'm just happy people are using the product and
seem to like it.

If continues growing, who knows? Maybe it could become a real business.
Evolving and iterating is the name of the game, right?

~~~
owens99
> If continues growing, who knows? Maybe it could become a real business.
> Evolving and iterating is the name of the game, right?

Absolutely!

------
jjoe
_I had tentatively been planning on a freemium model, and I could not have
been more wrong. Users were unanimously and strongly against it, so I had to
find another way_

This took me by surprise. Why is HN against freemiums? I'm debating whether to
introduce a freemium plan into my project [0] and would appreciate some
insight on this.

[0] [https://www.cachoid.com](https://www.cachoid.com)

~~~
mikekchar
The general consensus is that customers cost money -- not just in terms of
infrastructure, but also support. Customers who do not want to pay, will never
pay, but will still cost you money. It's better to aim your product at people
who want to pay. Customers who want to pay will not baulk at paying (by
definition). Freemium is a loss-leader marketing scheme. There may be other
effective marketing schemes that don't continuously cost you money.

------
captainbland
> That's right: I wrote something in jQuery in the year 2018.

JQuery - it's simple and it works without any fancy tooling or non-standard
HTML/templates which makes it pretty great for projects where you want a quick
turnaround.

------
deveshkhanal
This is cool. You should consider expanding this to other communities besides
HN if it works here. I’m a marketer and this would likely be received well in
marketing communities I’m a part of.

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crispyporkbites
You should charge for this upfront, to make it more exclusive. Realistically a
busy person will follow up on maybe 1 a week at max, so I want them to be high
quality intros

~~~
imron
Maybe have tiers of pricing and the option to only be introduced to people at
the same (or lower) tier.

~~~
eat_veggies
Matches are bidirectional by definition, so the lower tier user in any match
will have gotten a higher tier match without paying the fee. It also raises
some ethical concerns with segregating users by social class.

~~~
imron
Yes matches are bi-directional, but the match is at the higher tiered user's
discretion. That is, by paying more, you have the option to more finely filter
matches.

Regarding ethical concerns, I'm not imagining tiers in the hundreds or
thousands of dollars, but something like a one-off $1, $10, $20 payment
wouldn't be segregating by social class in any significant way while still
providing nominal filtering ability.

------
kome
> That's right: I wrote something in jQuery in the year 2018.

ahaha what? Indeed it's a pity it wasn't just html and css, but we will
survive...

------
jpamata
Is it just me, but when the site has fully loaded I can't use my arrow keys
and the page up/page down keys to scroll the site?

~~~
remyp
I...never noticed that before. That's super annoying. Must be something with
the template, thank you for pointing it out!

------
bmccraw
Great success in just 5 days.

------
senatorobama
Wish I could do this and ditch the blithering idiots at my work.

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sametgursoy
great, nice idea

------
chapill
Here's an archive link since the original is not secure and fails to load
without JS.

[https://archive.fo/CpUwi](https://archive.fo/CpUwi)

~~~
Springtime
I'm always baffled by straightforward sites that can be seen to load their
stylesheets and content only to finally blank out at the last moment when
finally complete because JS isn't enabled. This isn't necessarily a knock on
the OP since I know many sites use templates.

~~~
zaarn
I know what you mean and I hate it.

Tvtropes does that a lot, it's incredibly annoying and I switched to
allthetropes instead since they manage to load just fine.

------
linkou
hasura.io is also a great discovery

