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How I Built a Side Project

• userium 11y ago
  Author here, happy to get feedback!
  • reacweb 11y ago
    "monthly costs of running the service" was your killing argument. Why didn't you migrate to a cheap hosting ? My single host at scaleway (3.59€ per month) can handle many toy projects and gives me all freedom.
    • skariel1 11y ago
      Scaleway seem to be out of stock now, for a few months already. They don't accept new customers
    • funkyy 11y ago
      I find Scaleway tricky when deploying apps since it is ARM - the price is kick ass, but I wasnt able to go around limitations with my Python apps. Do you ever run in to issues like that? How is uptime?
    • mintplant 11y ago
      Or OVH, where ~$4/mo gets you a VPS with 2GB of RAM.
  • animeshjain 11y ago
    Was pretty surprised that it cost you almost 250$ for a month to run this. Perhaps you could have tried hosting elsewhere. For eg. this would be easily acoomodated in AWS free tier I think. Could have given you a longer runway to iterate. Anyway, cool idea. Few hundred visitors a day is not bad!
    • jnmandal 11y ago
      I'm pretty surprised as well. It's basically a simple CRUD app. I think that a single digital ocean box could have done the trick.
      • feketegy 11y ago
        Especially when the website does not work (I have an SSL error, see my other reply above).
        • userium 11y ago
          It's no longer live on that domain. The checklist is nowadays here: https://stayintech.com/info/UX https://stayintech.com/info/UX
      • userium 11y ago
        True, I should have perhaps looked at cheaper options. Dynos were cheaper on most months, that example was the 'worst' month. The wildcard SSL certificate for subdomains was a bit expensive.
        • Killswitch 11y ago
          I really dig the idea behind the site. I am not a UX developer, but I am improving and the service would be invaluable. What can we do to help get the iteration back in place? I assume the reason for not going with DO, Linode or AWS was you're not a devOps guy, which is understandable. We can help you with that.
        • dham 11y ago
          Hey man if you sign up for Cloudflare you can get SSL for free. Plus a lot of other goodies. If you need help with setting up a Digital Ocean box with Phusion Passenger, Capistrano, Ruby, let me know.
  • feketegy 11y ago
    I get a "Secure Connection Failed" on Firefox/Chrome when trying to access the userium.com website: SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. (Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)
    • userium 11y ago
      It's no longer live on that domain. I should have maybe titled my post 'post-mortem of a side project'? :) The checklist is nowadays here: https://stayintech.com/info/UX https://stayintech.com/info/UX and the Wayback machine holds a copy of the old website.
  • danielsamuels 11y ago
    Would you consider open-sourcing your work now that it's no longer live?
    • userium 11y ago
      Good idea!
      • huiwenzhng 11y ago
        +1
  • dyladan 11y ago
    Please don't do that with drop shadows. The combination of the non-3d image and the 3d drop shadow makes for a really disconcerting distortion effect. Are the corners of the image curled up or not? A simple 2-3 px drop shadow on the right and bottom edges would look much better imo.
  • estefan 11y ago
    I remember scanning your site when it was on the front page a few weeks ago. It just looked like a checklist to me. I wouldn't have thought you could charge for it. Perhaps the idea was just a bit too static to be able to turn into an app and charge for?
  • kentt 11y ago
    Would you sell it? Email me hirowatari [at] gmail
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• 10dpd 11y ago
  Here's another checklist style app, only built on PHP AppEngine. So far there hasn't been enough traffic though to make a reasonable estimate of cost. http://www.fallinloveapp.com http://www.fallinloveapp.com
• level09 11y ago
  I like this kind of posts, a side project helps creating side projects. it was a matter of time until I figured out that to make money you can simply teach people how to make money. who wouldn't want to learn that :)
  • yaworsk 11y ago
    Agreed. I like reading these. Kinda disappointed to see the project abandoned though. Seemed like you were really on to something and like others are saying, you probably could have found cheaper hosting to keep it going. Also would +1 seeing the project open sourced if it's not continued.
• overcast 11y ago
  I don't really understand the costs involved here. You can get a pretty powerful DigitalOcean droplet for $24 a month, which I personally run multiple side projects on with no issues. This could have stayed up indefinitely to tinker with, while you work on other stuff!
  • mcone 11y ago
    That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.
    • overcast 11y ago
      $225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.
      • mcone 11y ago
        I'm a former Linode employee, so you don't have to sell me on the advantages of the VPS. :) I think we need to remember that people new to programming don't know about all of the available tools and services. Costs could have been reduced by using a VPS, but they also could have been reduced without becoming a *nix expert. For instance, the author talked about buying SSL certificates, something that comes free with a CloudFlare account. They could have also used a CDN to reduce the load on their dynos.
        • wuliwong 11y ago
          I've had a site running on Heroku that has 200-300 visitors a day for almost 2 years. I'm still on the free dyno package. I wonder if I am just below some tipping point where I would need to bump up to the non-free stuff. My site runs fine and there are never spikes of traffic, it's pretty constant all throughout a 24 hour period.
• sumsted 11y ago
  This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday, https://www.goodui.org/ https://www.goodui.org/. If your site was still up, I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.
  • corobo 11y ago
    It's mildly frustrating that that site mentions "Press J for next K for previous" at the bottom of the page after I've scrolled through them all..
  • Namrog84 11y ago
    Thanks for that link. I found it quite enlightening. I know quite a few sites that have some horrible ui that could benefit from that site.
• onion2k 11y ago
  I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number. If the people who'd tried the app were a random sample of the population then 2.2% might be enough to suggest there's a valid premium business model there, but the people who tried the service weren't randomly selected - they were a self-selected group of people who are interested enough in user testing to sign up for the service. If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (alledgedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a big messaging problem.
  • mattlutze 11y ago
    > but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number. I think the more helpful baseline is likely the folks that opened the email (we can't infer a lot from the ones that didn't -- email services may have simply junk-mailed the message for the other 54.2%). 27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible. 1 in 20 people who saw OP question about the service were compelled enough to provide a response. That's not bad. > If you can't get a significant response from a group who are (allegedly) interested in your type of product then you clearly have a big messaging problem. I really wouldn't be so down on it. What's the average read-to-recommend on the average unsolicited call to action message? How many people actually provide extra details when an application on our computers crashes and the OS wants to send a bug report? How many actually send the bug report? That's just a button click. Providing their email for updates is a good indicator the base pitch is interesting, true. But it's an almost mindless activity. How many times a month does the average technophile give away an email address? Enough times, is how many. And enough times to likely forget more often than not what they'd signed up for a day ago, let alone continue to really, really care about it. I'm sure OP could have built a more compelling email campaign that used the right communication strategies to elicit a greater response. But, I'll take 5% over 0.
    • 11y ago
• brandon272 11y ago
  I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.
  • skywhopper 11y ago
    And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance? I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your $10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin-level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for every subsystem. There's just too much. The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.
    • fapjacks 11y ago
      Yikes. Or break all that down and get it all for free elsewhere. For a mechanical engineer that doesn't know much about doing this on their own, I suppose it's not a raw deal. I think lots of people make this argument about all those other services "not being free" and while that's true, that seems more to me an excuse for not having learned how to do those things quickly. I can set all that stuff up in a very short amount of time. My cost for doing that is almost nothing. The barrier to entry for that kind of thing goes down extremely quickly, in fact, I'd say the cost is only "high" the first time you do it. Every time after that it costs much, much less.
    • brandon272 11y ago
      How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users? I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have hundreds of paying customers. The moral of the story is that you should choose the right tool for the job. A $250/mo. Heroku app for a developer who wants to fiddle around with it for a tiny side project is not a good value as far as I'm concerned.
• juandazapata 11y ago
  Iteration 3: Die
• dcole2929 11y ago
  It sucks that you had to kill your project because of costs but honestly I don't blame you for going the Heroku route. It does it all for you with some "mininmal" configuration. I like linux and have done enough maintenance on various sites so I generally don't feel lost but I'd kill to have someone walk me through the process of setting up a production ready web app just once.
• jassa_ 11y ago
  Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.
  • ahstilde 11y ago
    How do you keep your costs so low?
• seanwilson 11y ago
  For all the people saying Heroku is too expensive: a basic single server, 10M row database and SSL is around $50 a month on Heroku: https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing Personally, for the reduction in admin tasks (which I think people greatly underestimate), improved deploys and rollbacks, and improved uptime about $50 a month is completely worth it compared to a standard server. I don't know why the monthly bill in the article is $250 though.
• AKifer 11y ago
  Aside from the free nature of the app, I think what's missing was a consistent growth strategy. In your opinion 1/ how much would be a fair price for such a service 2/ which/who sales/marketing saas/specialists would have helped it attract customers 3/ what would be the next features appealing enought to convice users to try it, use it more frequently, and invite other, should this app continued to live
• bootload 11y ago
  "To learn more about my users, I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients." brilliant read, one thing I'd modify is ask some/all these questions on signup or login. Tweak enough questions and techniques to ask [0] so as not to discourage. This way you can gain more info as as people use/try/login. [0] Must be numerous ways to gain info building it into actions of tool.