3 ms·
Ask HN: What should I do with my side project?
A few years ago, I developed & launched www.last10k.com as a side project while working full time to fulfill a need for individual investors to easily use SEC Filings / financial disclosure documents for researching stock investments.
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.
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/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.
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'm not happy with) and re-launch it or just work on something else? Any insight on this is appreciated. Thanks!
- mindcrime 9y agoWell... $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?
- hbcondo714 9y agoThank 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.