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Ask HN: What's holding you back monetising side projects?
I’ve noticed a few valuable projects that fail to charge users, which tends to lead to their demise.
A joke exists in the aerospace world of "what keeps aeroplanes in the air? money" which feels generally analogous to software projects' long-term survival & prosperity.
Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table?
- KingOfCoders 3y agoCoding is easy, selling is hard.
- mtmail 3y agoMoney and thus contracts add pressure. Suddenly a hobby for some evenings becomes a 24/7 operation where you need to have your laptop ready during holiday. Expectations rise. A fun website now needs terms-of-service, privacy policy and all kind of other legal setup. Sure, it's mostly boilerplate but an unhappy customer is more likely to sue for damanges if they believe you're a company (and thus have money) than a free no-gurantees side-project. Tax setup should be easy but it can be an annoyance especially if you already have a full-time job. Some people don't like dealing with taxes at all (I used to be one of them).
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI already have a job, why would I want a second one?
- tshirttime 3y agoWhat keeps aeroplanes in the air? Money. And what keeps the money coming in? Thousands of man-hours of sales, legal, tax, operations, and finance. Like someone earlier said, code is the easy part.
- JohnFen 3y agoLots of people have side projects as hobbies. If you start charging for it, the hobby becomes a job -- which pretty much eliminates its value as a hobby.
- legrande 3y ago> Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table? Sometimes I just want to do a project for fun and plop it on Github and see people's reaction. Not everything has to be monetized, and that can sometimes become an ulterior motive: 'If I keep releasing stuff with monetization I will profit' mentality creeps in.
- marssaxman 3y agoWhat holds me back is that "monetizing a side project" is another way of saying "running a small business", which is a form of having a job - but I already have a job, rather a nice one at that. Why would I waste my precious free time working a second, crappier job, when I could do things I enjoy instead? If I am building something in my free time, it is because I am inherently interested in that thing, because the experience of creating it is enjoyable, and because I want it to exist, for its own sake, because I find it personally meaningful. With that kind of intrinsic motivation, who needs money? Why would I bog a pleasant hobby down with a lot of accounting and paperwork and bureaucratic drudgery when I could focus on the fun part instead, by writing the code I want to write and then just giving it away?