As a marketer, I see countless great projects that were abandoned. What seems like a promising project goes dry when, presumably, the dev can’t market it.
Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life.
I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren’t making money on it, versus building something brand new.
100000% agree. Chances are the OP already has a number of finished things that he/she can sell. Sales and marketing sales and marketing sales and marketing.
I have 3 side businesses that make between a few hundred and a few thousand per month. All 3 sat idle for months after completion as I groused about no revenue. When i stopped building the next thing long enough to sell the finished things it really wasnt a problem.
Cold outreach. Built an email list using free email databases and linked in. Used Mailshake to create cadences to ask for a 5 minute call. Did the call myself to close the deal. I'm a sales person by training so that part wasnt hard for me once I got the engine going.
Would be interesting if there was a thing to match people with marketing skills with people who have side projects that need better marketing on a cut of the revenue generated basis.
I have this problem myself. I've got a product that sells itself within its target market but the market is kind of niche so I have no idea how to get it in front of that audience. I tried Ad words but it seemed like a waste of money and didn't move the needle.
Reading your other post that described the niche market, I think I might be able to really help you out! Please feel free to reach out bitbybitbybitcoin at gmail
Low cost high wattage 12 Volt power supplies. I make adapters that let you recycle old server PSU's that otherwise have zero value because of their proprietary connectors. It primarily has applications in Crypto Currency mining. The real money is in targeting industrial scale miners who need them in volume. I had one really good year in the 5 I've been selling them, mostly by dumb luck.
A list of these would be hugely useful to a large portion of the HN community, and I bet you'd get to use some of those projects gratis (or at least see them brought to market).
Yeah, I don't get it. People put all this time and effort into something and then murder it, and post their "self-fulfilling victimhood apology letter" "why we shutdown and left our customers twisting in the wind."
Build something that doesn't cost much to keep going and let it simmer at least 5x longer than you think. And, make copyright dates self-updating. ;) Furthermore, if it's not losing copious amounts of money, pivot, restructure it or sell it to somebody else.
Shutting down usually == disrespecting money.
Or they become slightly successful and abandon it, like they have self-harm tendencies.
Sometimes the problem is that it takes 10 years for the thing to finally start generating real money, but by this point everyone involved has moved on and you have customers that you don't want to let down, but really the thing is Rails 3 and the $100k of profit per year it is bringing in aren't really worth the headache of upgrading everything.
I think in the next 5 years someone is going to invent an entire stack for long-lived apps. Where every level is as simple as possible and the only updates that are issued are security updates. We need computers to be able to run 30 year old software without having to stress, and the only way I can think of doing that is to minimize feature development and complexity.
Wow. I can't imagine any (legal and moral) thing I wouldn't do for $100K. Well, maybe working for a really toxic boss, but we're talking about self-employment here.
Why is Rails not a stack for long-lived apps? Or "JAM", MEAN, LAMP, .NET or any of the other popular technologies people have chosen over the past quarter century? Sure, it might be harder to find someone willing to write PHP now than it was in 1998, but that's how things work when new technologies are constantly being invented.
With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.
I think gp is referring to the ongoing effort to keep an app up, running, and secure; not any feature of the platform.
You can of course buy Rails LTS (though from a quick glance the pricing can be very expensive if you have eg a deploy per tenant rather than multitenant). But gems move on from your version, apis change underneath you, etc.
Keeping a moderately complex rails using say 100 gems with okta + google SSO and various other integrations up and running on a permanent basis can easily consume 1/2 a ft engineer.
So if you're in possession of an app that earns say $150k/year, you have to decide if you want to put that half eng year in or if there are more productive ways to spend your time.
This is even more painful if you bet on, for example, a javascript framework that fell out of fashion.
Serverless on AWS is the closest thing to an “eternal” stack. Utilize only managed, auto scaling, self updating services, and your app will keep running for a long time. Occasionally the Node.js major version in Lambda gets deprecated, but even so I think old deployments still keep running.
Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life.
I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren’t making money on it, versus building something brand new.