27 ms·

I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it

• tpoacher 2y ago
  Reminds me of my (far less exciting) story when I opened a php forum for a small community I was in charge with, way back, only to come the next day and find it full of botspam. Forum didn't last too long after that.
• minkles 2y ago
  Similar experience. I built a very small online helpdesk platform in the early 00s. This was to support my own business mostly. I had several paying customers after 6 months. They were HELL, particularly when it came to paying the bill. I sold the whole business for pocket money after a year to a small tech company who rewrote it into a fairly well known commercial product. I couldn't be bothered. I have ZERO regrets about this. I still have the source code somewhere, which was about 25,000 lines of ASP in one file!
  • jinushaun 2y ago
    I’ve done enough freelancing and side jobs to know that I didn’t enjoy and—most importantly—didn’t care enough to get better at the customer service aspect of it.
• shadowgovt 2y ago
  Possibly the primary reason that software engineers don't just go into business for themselves is that running a business is a very different problem domain with different challenges and rewards. I have never envied any CEO, VP, or manager I've worked for their job. The hardest part of my day is crafting novel SQL queries or tricking C++ into compiling code that will work on all my target hardware in spite of an unknown number of undefined behaviors. I've never had to figure out how we're going to keep documentation in sync on our flagship project when the head documentation engineer is dying of cancer (and has chosen to finish out the week because he knows how screwed the project will be without him and he believes in it), or how to make payroll next quarter if the next investor says no, or how to keep the quarterly goals met when the President has just declared that all of our employees working in the country on a visa may suddenly not return to the country.
  • dtx1 2y ago
    I think certain personality types just have a really different view about risk than we do. I once talked to our CEO about it and he was like "I'd risk it all again, I like to play!". There are people who LIKE to take those kinds of risks, I'm certainly not one of them. But one must also not forget the upside: get really, really rich from the work of others.
  • lupire 2y ago
    What if you knew that the VP and CEO are dealing with those problems by letting the chips fall and making the ICs and customers work around it?
    • shadowgovt 2y ago
      If that bothers me I change companies.
• sklarsa 2y ago
  I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.
  • _se 2y ago
    No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.
    • btbuildem 2y ago
      Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to continue the conversation manually.
      • 101008 2y ago
        Once people notice AI is responding they will skip it and will request to talk to a human. AI will look the same as FAQs or Chatbots, people don't want to interact with them, they want a human being that is able to understand their problem exactly as it is.
        • wongarsu 2y ago
          Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human first-level support that's just following a script without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to provide a genuine improvement over that. AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively
• leapis 2y ago
  > Why on earth would you bet your money on some random tool you don't even understand? ... I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were. The tool is for drawing "technical analysis indicators", one of the most convoluted ways to ascribe meaning to a random process and something that will only ever be true in the self-fulfilling sense. I don't think it's a surprise that some users are willing to blindly trust the tool, when all users of it are blindly trusting concepts that are built on sand. Although I'm sure the author is burnt out from the experience now, I'd be interested in hearing how their next side project venture goes- is the experience more enjoyable when you're dealing with a user base that self-selects differently? Or do all users suck equally, just in different ways?
  • Lutger 2y ago
    At least half of the interactions that are presented as terrible, I feel are actually quite normal and potentially even pleasant. If you don't actually enjoy talking about your product with 'beginners' or even just normal people, then maybe reconsider the customer support role? For me this reads as 'I don't enjoy voluntary customer support' rather than my customers suck.
    • mannykannot 2y ago
      I see only one single sentence - "others had very basic questions, answers to which were given in the description of each script" - that might be referring to situations where people were seeking either clarification (including cases where the answer was in the documentation, but not obviously so) or advice on how to use the tool more effectively, (I exclude bald requests for 'hot tips' or source code from those categories.) For all I know, the author might have both received and responded substantively (with more than RTFM) to many such requests, but has not mentioned them here because they were not part of the problem.
• dspillett 2y ago
  > Others had very basic questions, answers to which were given in the description of each script. Oh, I feel that from DayJob. If it wasn't for the possible arguments is might cause about professionalism, my standard response to a client question in DayJob would be a gif from TaskMaster, looping through instances of Alex Horne saying “all the information is on the task”. > Somehow all those claims from 'people with large communities' never materialized beyond testing the trial. Very few people ask for something for themselves, they think they'll get a better response if they can convince you they are part of a larger interested group, or by suggesting what they are asking for would benefit “the community”. Neither of these things is new: I had some software out there in the late 90s¹ and it was much the same back then, just perhaps less intense. -------- [1] initially shareware-ish, then when the amount I made wasn't worth the faf of dealing with people (and payment processors), and talks with the couple of people who were interested in buying ownership/copyright annoyed me by going round in circles, it became open source so others could build take it on (no one did, they just all wanted me to continue to add features they wanted), then when I got more sick of dealing with people I buried the thing.
• jermaustin1 2y ago
  Side projects have always been the most exciting banes of my existence. I LOVE the initial rush of building and launching something. Even maintaining it is SUPER exciting for the first few months. The first customers are a rush of endorphins. Then the shine wears off. Life can't be kept on pause. Your partner wants a date night, but you have a backlog to work though. You got a frantic email from a customer that they accidentally deleted something and you currently have no way to recover that data. So now you have to add more resiliency to the application. In the middle of the night, your cron server dies, backups stop, emails stop, customers on the other side of the world can't log in. All for a few dollars a day in revenue. Then after a year of that, you get burnt on the project. Then after another year, you stop working on it as much, the bug reports build up until you are scared to even look at your reports. Your partner goes away for the weekend to visit their family, you get a renewed sense of pride in this project that has been limping alone. You fire up your code editor, you pull the last commit down. You start to re-familiarize yourself with the code base. Day 1 was wasted with remembering how you did things. Day 2 starts with a coffee after only sleeping a few hours. You begin to work through the small tasks on your list, because you feel the snowball will work. About 8 hours in, you've made a SERIOUS dent in the backlog. You are feeling good and decide you should eat something finally. Your partner comes home while you are eating your breakfast at 4pm. They start to tell you about their family drama. You start to fade. You walk back to your office and try to get back into the groove. You can't. The weekend is over. Work starts again in 10 hours. You now feel angry that you wasted your weekend, and have to do real work in the morning. And the cycle repeats.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • 2cynykyl 2y ago
    I recently read an HN post where a LOT of people reported having the same rather specific dream that I have had many times (about being enrolled in a class they forgot about only to remember on the day of the final exam). It literally rocked my world to see evidence of how similar all of our 'wetware' is. And now I'm reading you describing a scenario I have experienced so many times, right down to 4pm breakfast and distracting stories of family drama. I am now pretty much convinced we live in a simulation and we're all subclasses of each other.
• authorfly 2y ago
  Wow I can really relate. The customer support efforts when you don't feel like it, being ghosted after helping a customer, the random or fraud disputes. It's really tricky at that stage between hiring help and having the time/motivation to maintain those very non-tech parts while trying to continue doing other core parts of the side project / startup. The first sale feels great, as does first showing the prototype. By comparison, extra $100 MRR milestones don't feel so great, nor does dealing with customers/disputes eventually (it's a lot of negativity in general - pleased customers just leave reviews occasionally, negative ones email you). And a down negative month or two always feels like a stabbing and like it's all over. Really don't know how to avoid this. Scaling quickly? Via investment in most cases? Maybe.
  • Waterluvian 2y ago
    I wonder if there's often a mismatch between what one thinks a business is going to be like, and what a business is actually like. One of the things that keeps me away from doing stuff like this is that I _hate_ every part that isn't the engineering part, and the engineering part is a minority share of what it takes to run a business.
    • zerkten 2y ago
      We know the answer to this even before modern tech businesses existed: running a business is a very different experience from what people expect. This is exacerbated with certain experiences that create worldviews which are closer to the opposite of running a business. This is why startup people straight out of school are often unencumbered with ideas that impact their mission. If you go into a large organization, you are exposed to a reality that can distort your perspective. It's a myth that people can't move between large and small organizations, but the differentiator is their awareness of and desire to embrace the current circumstances. Many end up preferring the luxury and ease of large organizations and fail because they don't make the switch. Many startup people don't make the move in the other direction (even if they are exceedingly successful and it might be practical move.) Similarly, a desire to only focus on engineering is something you feel will inhibit your ability to run a business. Over time you might be able to discover ways to reduce your hate for the other work. People here love to prescribe advice for situations like this, but it's really hard to give good advice without knowing a lot more about you.
• jakey_bakey 2y ago
  You haven't built a side project, you've built yourself a job. This is why I've always been scared to make any commitments to paid subs other than "I'll send you all my blogs early"
  • parpfish 2y ago
    agreed. this isn't a "side project", this is a "side business".
  • steve1977 2y ago
    And this is why I would make to sure to log all the time that I spend on that side job, so that I can make some estimate about what my hourly rate would be with the earnings I make. This might then allow a better decision on whether it is a worthwhile endeavor or not.
    • hinkley 2y ago
      At the very least you might be able to write off some of that cost and get some money back/owe less money to Uncle Sam
• Y_Y 2y ago
  It sounds to me like the really valuable product here isn't the harmonic charts but the little automation platform (based on n8n?). I can imagine there are plenty of devs with even less tolerance for customer service and actually running a business, but are happy to build software and sell it to people.
• fasteo 2y ago
  Over the years I have had some good (to me) ideas for side projects, but I have always hesitated to build them rationalizing that the potential market was way too small (a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of developers). If anything, this post shows how wide - or deep - any internet niche is. Silly me.
  • rockbruno 2y ago
    Well, this is interesting because what you described is the best way to start a project. Trying to build something too broad from the get-go is very likely to fail, starting small/specific and expanding from there usually works considerably better. If you research famous large companies you'll find that almost all of them did precisely this.
• shash7 2y ago
  Very candid experience - I love it. I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. Over the years I've learnt a lot of tricks in this area. - You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support. - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future. - Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues. I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.
• btbuildem 2y ago
  This was a fascinating read, really. The potential customer base being basically suckers waving wads of cash to be taken from them. The wild contrast of how nice the author tries to be to every single person that interacts with the project -- despite majority being the equivalent of single-celled organisms poking the fb markeplace "is it available" button. Reading some of the messages from potential users is so eye-opening. I don't know if there's a sane way to deal with the entitlement, other than just plain ignoring those interactions. How would one handle this type of project in 2024? Route most of the rote communication via an LLM, automate as much as possible, ignore all feature requests, dogfood everything as you continue to use the project yourself? I really like the learnings the autor took from this experience. Seems like most of them came from adopting "I give up" attitude when flirting with burnout -- which inadvertently seems to follow the 80/20 rule.
  • pc86 2y ago
    I've done exactly one legit "SaaS startup" type venture around 2012-2015. I still think about the absolutely insane customer service requests we'd get. It was a very niched down Eventbrite competitor, so we did things like PDF ticket generation, QR code generation, attendance tracking, there was a big fundraising component as well so lots of payment infrastructure. We charged a percentage of ticket sales so any one event or even customer was not worth very much (a positive IMO). I still remember someone emailing me directly with the "oh we'd love to give you money but you have to add these features for us first" so they could use this event ticketing and fundraising platform to ... run their dog grooming business. As many have learned, the people actually paying you money are usually pretty reasonable. It's the people who haven't paid you a cent who have all these crazy demands.
    • authorfly 2y ago
      Yup yup yup. Big reason for avoiding free users is avoiding those requests. This is the kind of thing no startup puts in their year one budget and (alongside supplier cashflow issues) is why those projections don't work for
      • 2y ago
• creesch 2y ago
  Interesting article to read. Part of the issues also seem to come from a few contributing factors like the unusual platform and expanding from this platform including whatever limitations come with it. Meaning you implemented things in a reverse order than people might otherwise do as they don't start out with a product on a platform trying to make it fit a subscription model. I can imagine the specific type of user base also increasing specific types of annoying support requests. Although customer support almost always ends up being one of the things that at some point will annoy the hell out of you. Even on open source projects, the entitlement can be incredible. Although there you can get away with a remark like "You are free to uninstall <open source product>, we will give you a full refund!". Automating a lot of that certainly was the right call, as well as filtering out all the low hanging fruits of bullshit requests. If people can't be bothered to read instructions (assuming they are clear instructions) then they certainly will also run into various other issues making them not worth the effort. The one thing I don't entirely disagree with is "Be nice" which I personally have replaced with "Be civil" over the years. It still means listening to peoples requests, helping them where reasonable, even be courteous where applicable. To be fair, there might also be a cultural aspect involved here. In communication with US companies the "being nice" mantra often seems to be taken to such a degree where I am less wishing for someone sane to just help me swiftly with my support ticket and be done with it. Overall, nice write up of the experience though!
• rockbruno 2y ago
  This is a perfect example of how attaching money to a hobby is guaranteed to ruin it. Dealing with customers is a gigantic pain in the ass, it doesn't matter if it's a large product or some niche esoteric project. I have the exact same issue regarding support with a simple app I have on the App Store, I can perfectly relate. Despite being a really simple app and extremely cheap, every once in a while I have to wake up to angry e-mails from disgruntled users.
• tmaly 2y ago
  Is it me or are there a lot more posts on HN where people are just complaining in the title?
  • smokel 2y ago
    No. I just checked the front page [1] for each August 21 from 2014 to 2024, and there is typically no or one complaint in the title. Some lamenting here and there, an uplifting tone every now and then, but most of it is neutral. Perhaps you are running into some negativity bias? [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-08-21 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2014-08-21 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
• a13o 2y ago
  The wording in the fraud cancellation emails gave me a good laugh. "My payment provider said you used a stolen credit card. Why did you do that? I've revoked your access."
  • pc86 2y ago
    That gave me a chuckle too. The list of "reasons someone would use a stolen credit card" is what, 2 options?
    • justin_oaks 2y ago
      There are 2 options? I can only think of "I'm a person with poor ethics who wants to get something without paying for it".
      • pc86 2y ago
        The other actually happened to me recently, my wife answered one of those automated bank texts checking on a transaction with no, which cancelled the card (and marked it stolen), and I tried to use it before she told me about it. But yeah those are the only two I can think of and yours is the case 99.99% of the time.
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    I feel this should be shortened into a haiku.
• gizmo 2y ago
  Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by simply charging more. Another strategy is making it harder to purchase the product. For example by disabling the checkout process until people have completed the tutorial, or only allowing purchases after the free trial has expired. These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.
  • asplake 2y ago
    Agree with all of those, and such a business has B2B potential also. That describes mine pretty well. And while I’d love to make more B2B sales, I hate dealing with purchasing departments. Dealing mainly with professionals definitely has its upsides.
  • commodoreboxer 2y ago
    > You can optimize for revenue/agony instead. That's a great way to put it. I'm going to start using that one. Tangent: I'm a programmer at a small company, which has three programmers total. I make a decent wage, but one that's significantly smaller than I could make at a larger company. I often get questions from people who can't believe that I'm not jumping at these other opportunities, but I make nearly six figures, my team and bosses trust me, I have nearly unlimited flexibility to choose what I work on and shape my software the way I feel is best, and I get to work full remote and basically make my own hours, giving me all the time I want with my family. It would take an incredible raise to give this up just for better pay. An agony-per-dollar ratio is a perfect way to frame the calculation, and it factors into so many places in life. Many forget that it's not just optimizing for the most revenue possible, but a balance of maximizing revenue and quality of life, and often getting diminishing returns when pushing hard on the former.
    • hermitcrab 2y ago
      Sounds great. Also, if you went to work for BigCo and got a big pay rise, you would probably very soon get use to it and it wouldn't make you much happier. I wrote a bit more about this topic at: https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programming/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programm...
• j45 2y ago
  A business can be worse than a job because there’s even more required things to be done that can’t be ignored. the way to get the doge project to not take your time is learning to hire for existing tasks while you figure out new ones. Also if you can use some of the funds towards a required like a vacation that you and your partner can enjoy guilt free
• shash7 2y ago
  Can relate, I've been in a similar boat running a small B2B Saas over the last 2 years. It does get easier over time. I've learnt a few tricks for managing early stage pain points. - You need to develop a polite but curt tone of voice for customer support. - Once your core product is built, its worthwhile spending some time automating the heck out of everything. This will save a TON of time in the near future. - Invest in good docs, even if you're not running a api saas. Good docs + consistent ux + rock solid support will solve most of your support issues. I think a lot of literature around running a online biz has been boiled down to rather basic advice and its hard to find anything solid in this area. I've been running a small blog where I document these issues(operational.co) if anyone wants to check it out.
  • thehappyfellow 2y ago
    Do you have an example of “polite but curt” tone? I’m struggling to see what you mean.
    • xyproto 2y ago
      Thanks for reaching out. The issue you’ve described seems to be on your end. Please check your settings or consult our docs for further guidance. If the problem persists, feel free to get in touch.
      • Gustomaximus 2y ago
        Would it be worth putting a price to investigating? Message like: "Our premium support can investigate this for $XYhr. If the fault is at our end we will waive any fees. Please let us know if you wish to proceed."
        • zie 2y ago
          Oooh, the Microsoft approach! :)
        • filoleg 2y ago
          Take my advice with a grain of salt, as I am a customer rather than someone running a product with customer support. I would say this would only feel justified if the product pricing page already had clear tiers outlined for paid support. Putting a price per hour on customer support otherwise would make me feel like I am just being milked behind closer doors for more money, and non-paying customers are getting shafted. If a paid customer support tier is something you offer, imo it should be clearly outlined on publicly available pages with explicit explanation about the differences between free vs paid customer support. You suggesting it in private communications only would feel suspicious and shady to me as a customer. However, if the customer themselves suggested to pay you extra for that personal support, that’s a different story.
• anticorporate 2y ago
  Some advice: If you're going to monetize a side project, and you do it in a way where you're providing direct support, be sure the customer base it targets are people you actually want to deal with. Whatever the niche, imagine the worst people you've encountered on it, and be sure you want to use your spare time talking to them. Otherwise, the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.
  • danenania 2y ago
    That's good advice. Unfortunately though I think the nature of support is that on average it selects for the more difficult people in your customer base, for the same reason that doctors spend a lot of their time with hypochondriacs (despite hypochondriacs making up a small percentage of the population). Something that helps to offset this psychologically, and is also a good thing to do anyway, is to proactively reach out more frequently to all your users. It can be the case that 95% of your users are happily chugging along, while 5% are unhappy and complaining frequently for whatever reason. If you rarely hear from that 95%, it can start to irrationally feel like no one is happy with your product, since that's the message coming from most of your support interactions.
    • crtified 2y ago
      I guess the old 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle somewhat applies to the support distribution for many products. That is, 80% of the support resources are taken up by 20% of the clients. (incredibly-vaguely-speaking, naturally) The variable is "20% of what type of client?". 20% of Taylor Swift concert attendees, or 20% of assembly coders? Each comes with its own unique challenges!
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    I'm sure there are good and bad people in all walks of life. But, yes, people in some markets are definitely (on average) less pleasant to deal with than others.
  • sam_perez 2y ago
    How do you ensure this? Are you suggesting more analysis pre-building the product, or doing things like increasing the price until you've effectively filtered out enough of the people you don't "want to deal with", assuming that works.
• malwrar 2y ago
  > When I get an email, I try to answer it as best as I can. Years of working with clients taught me to explain things in a simple and easy-to-understand way. So, I spent hours patiently answering questions from potential customers only to never hear back from them. I’m a big believer in choosing your battles when communicating online. I’ve found bad grammar, lack of focus, confusing content, etc are all signals that the sender didn’t put much effort into their communication, and if I respond to those at all I usually put in proportional effort. Rarely have I experienced low-effort comms leading to high-reward outcomes, and I found my mental health benefits from the “justice” of proportional response. I’m curious though, the writer seems to imply that lack of active communication led to a decrease in sales. I wonder if/how my approach could be sabotaging me.
  • lupire 2y ago
    Also, shipping a broken product is a signal that you didn't put much effort into your development.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• pc86 2y ago
  What is the name for the economic fallacy or paradox where I see an article like this and thing "$15k over 4 years is not worth my time" but if you were to ask me if I wanted $15k or a small fraction of that right now with no recurring aspect I'd take it in a heartbeat? That's how I feel reading any of these side project pieces. I look at the total revenue and how long it took them to get there and I groan thinking how I'd hate to do that. Maybe I'm just too focused on hourly rate?
  • lupire 2y ago
    That's called rationality. The paradox is thinking it's worthwhile to squander the few free hours you have to make a number go up. OP made $15K selling snake oil of a specific nature that, if it were a legitimate product, would have made far more than $15K if he simply used his tool himself instead of productizing it and selling it to rubes and crooks.
  • maerF0x0 2y ago
    I just see that as opportunity cost. I want $15k. But I want to not work 2000 hours for it even more.
• password4321 2y ago
  Appreciate OP's post and the other anecdotes shared here. This side of things doesn't get much coverage since it doesn't sell books or increase subscriber counts!
• kebman 2y ago
  I think in terms of official correspondence, I don't think it's a good idea to ask criminals why they did a certain thing, ref the reply to the scammer about his access being revoked. Yes, it might feel good to berate him and ask "Why did you do that?" But what if he answers? Would you really entertain valuable business time arguing with a fraudster? In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature requests, unless the person is showing willingness to pay hourly for that extra bespoke service. I personally prepare for eventualities like that, so I can answer in a polite and productive way. "No, sorry we don't offer that feature, but if you want to enter the Bespoke Service Subscription for $10000 a month, then I can do everything you wish and mow your lawn!"
  • authorfly 2y ago
    In payment disputes bank dispute resolution often requires a response of any kind from the customer to consider rejecting the dispute. In addition, the submitted forms/disputes often have nonsensical or no information on why the dispute occurred so you truly have no background. Lastly, disputes can be initiated by people without emails or just different emails so you have no chance to connect it to relevant support cases. That's why he's curtly asking why the dispute was raised - yes in part to pressure the guy directly on his BS knowing he responds, but also because you need any kind of response to win disputes.
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    >In general, I also think it's a bad idea to entertain feature requests A lot of the best features in my products originate with feature requests from customers.
    • kebman 2y ago
      Yes, in bulk. If 100 people all mention essentially the same feature, it might be worthwhile. If just one person does it? Well, if it highlights something you never thought about, it can ofc be valuable, but it's not something I'd spend a lot of time on - especially if it's just adding to the overall feature creep.
• calibas 2y ago
  When you're going into business for yourself, you're no longer a programmer. You are the head of customer support, you are the president, you are sales, advertising, and accounting too. It requires a large set of skills that you either have to learn, or you'll struggle.
• urbandw311er 2y ago
  I can relate to so much of this! I've had a couple of relatively successful B2C products take off as side products in my time, and it is very hard not to develop a personal involvement in the support requests; whereas the detached, time-boxed, semi-automated approach is by far the best way to prevent it from taking over your life. Ultimately you're not a charity (unless you are) and, unless you specify an SLA, you owe these people almost nothing: I tend to suggest offering an automatic refund to anybody dissatisfied for this reason: then invest 95% of your time in whatever makes 95% of the profits.
• micromacrofoot 2y ago
  > Fighting disgruntled customers over $20 is not a good way to spend time. Absolutely. The advice I'd give for anyone in these situations is that if someone is stressing you out, tell them no, give them a refund, and move on. Always be nice about it (well explained in the post). You don't have to answer every question either. It might not be the best way to do customer support, and it may feel like you're failing, but you have to protect yourself. You can spend your whole life attempting to appease overly needy customers, it will never end and they'll never be happy. It's ok to care more about your project than its customers.
• jszymborski 2y ago
  I never considered Gumroad because of their high prices, but I must say that chargeback and fraud interaction seemed pretty painless which is nice.
• blantonl 2y ago
  I do all the direct customer support for my 2 businesses (radioreference and broadcastify) which typically equates to 20-30 Zendesk tickets a day addressing login/password issues, payment issues, technical support etc. Boy can I relate to burn out and frustration. It's shocking to me how many times I have to deal with things like customer mental health issues, extremely disrespectful customer behavior, some of the wild ways in which customers will try to get out of payments that they directly authorized, and of course the occasional edge cases that customers can get themselves into which will really have you as a developer questioning your sanity. But the truly perplexing situations are folks that will click through and pay for a product, such as your most expensive subscription plan, and then instantly have buyers remorse and just go off the deep end demanding refunds, implementing chargebacks, blaming you for being misleading, and dishing out wildly disrespectful behavior. "I didn't know what I was purchasing" is a common support ticket. ... and my business does not do recurring billing or automated subscription renewals. You literally have to renew any subscription you have with us when it comes due. I actually had a customer file a class action lawsuit against my business because we sent him a reminder that his subscription was about to expire and if he wanted to renew it he could, and he subsequently filed this lawsuit claiming we were violating a Florida consumer protection law which doesn't allow debt collectors to contact people during certain hours. That cost me a cool chunk of change to get dismissed. A lot of it is enough to give a sane person PTSD and to drive the most patient personality to throw a chair through a window in frustration.
  • cyral 2y ago
    I'm actually surprised he didn't include any screenshots about "I never authorized this payment" or "You charged me even though I cancelled!!". I see these a lot and it's on the customer 100% of the time. People will be so rude even when they know they are lying, maybe because they think it's the only way they will get a refund, when if they just asked nicely and said they forgot about the subscription, I always refund it. Lot's of people also end up with two accounts somehow and then think we are maliciously double charging them.
• mandeepj 2y ago
  OP had to think a bit bigger to get a great ROI. He got himself neck deep into performing tasks or small minuscule work items. I wish he had thought about evolving it into a trading platform or even started with that, something like Robinhood
  • cyral 2y ago
    I'm sure he got some emails like this, "why dont you add trading?" when becoming a brokerage is more like a 100 person project
    • mandeepj 2y ago
      If you know how to handle it, then it doesn’t https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/WzVPRQQgh0 https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/WzVPRQQgh0
• gnutrino 2y ago
  The amount of fraud and scammers out there is insane. I worked on a platform that only had a few hundred in revenue a month (just starting out). We did many smaller transactions, and getting hit with disputes was a killer. If someone did 15 transactions, they could get hit with 15 chargebacks up to 3 months later. So for every transaction, even if it only generated $3 in revenue, the chargeback could be potentially $15. (And you lose the revenue!). So for one customer who only spent $45, you could lose $270. Even when we knew the person was legit, and just wanted a refund, they would do disputes. We only won a handful of disputes. The bank / credit card company will almost always side with their customer, even when provided receipts / terms of service / conversations with the customer where they admit the product met their needs.
  • cies 2y ago
    Chargebacks are a creditcard thing. In some countries people are willing to pay with methods that do not allow chargebacks. Also chargebacks do not work for wiretranfers. So you can ask them to do a wire transfer instead
    • IAmGraydon 2y ago
      You honestly think someone is going to set up wire transfer for an online subscription service?
      • cies 2y ago
        In some countries this is not uncommon.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • RicoElectrico 2y ago
    How come the chargeback value could be that much higher than the revenue? (NB: revenue, not profit) If I buy a $3 product and chargeback, then I get $3 back, right? Or does the payment processor bill you $15 for each chargeback no matter the transaction cost?
• joshuaturner 2y ago
  Before Reddit changed API access I built an iOS app called Pager (https://pager.app https://pager.app) that allowed users to set up alerts for content posted on Reddit. It had a lot of success but the issues you highlighted here kept me from monitizing the project. Users became so demanding and I felt like if I began to take money from them it would only get worse. Looking back on it I'm not sure it was the best choice, but at least at the time the application being free felt like an important defense against users that you really could never satisfy.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    The usual suggestion, often given by HN's patio11, is to charge, and charge more. For some reason free customers are the most demanding, and the more you charge the more people self-select out of the customer base.
    • 1024core 2y ago
      There's this old story about an old farmer and his horse. You see, this old farmer had a horse that he loved dearly; took great care of it and pampered it. But he was getting old, and wanted to retire to the City, where he could not keep a horse. So what do I do with this horse, he wondered? He asked a wise friend, who told him: sell the horse for the highest amount of money that you can. What?!? replied the farmer; I love my horse dearly and would never think of selling it like some goods. The wise man replied: if you give it away, whoever gets it will abuse the shit out of it, and treat it like a workhorse, whip it every day, etc. because they got it for free, and won't value it. On the other hand, if you sell it for a huge sum, the buyer will pamper it and take good care of it, because it's an investment to them.
      • Eisenstein 2y ago
        Or, give it to someone who can't afford a horse but really needs one, because it will be worth more to them than to someone who can afford to overpay for it.
        • 2y ago
• encoderer 2y ago
  Dealing with this crap and actually wanting to do this for years is, in part, why software is expensive.
• jokethrowaway 2y ago
  Great article! I'd add another tip: Use marketplaces to get visibility and traffic. Maybe part of your success was being on Gumroad to begin with (which is not just a MoR) 3K MRR here after running for 5 years and the projects are on autopilot too. Growth is very slow, zero marketing efforts made on my side. I think it's hard to get more value from this product though, hence why I focus on other ventures. Not that many support requests. A few customers racking up bills for thousands; 3-4 never paid and I didn't persecute them, the rest did. You were lucky on chargebacks resolution, generally the b**rds always side with the scammer customers trying to get service for free. I've tried arguing many times but it's completely useless. That's also why I'm afraid of doing a project where my margins are smaller. Plenty of them then try to resuscribe Right now hosting is 50$ per month, so if someone steal access to my product I don't care much. Merchant of Records saved my life, F*k Europe VATMOSS, Sales Taxes, GST and every other crap governments add just to kill small businesses and make them flock to Amazon. Paddle support is pretty bad, I wouldn't go with them if I would do it all again. Probably I'd try LemonSqueezy (now acquired by Stripe). Selling the business: I was offered money for the business but I don't think it's worth it, given how much it's on autopilot.
  • NightlyDev 2y ago
    Can confirm that Paddle support is really bad. Onboarding and calls was very hands on(at least before they opened up for all), but everything after that was terrible and frankly idiotic. At least they can switch to using LLMs now, cause even those would do a better job. And yeah, VAT and GST is annoying. Terrible for small businesses.
• tracerbulletx 2y ago
  I think a critical business skill is learning to communicate and receive communication without letting it greatly affect your internal mental state. Communication about your business has to just be information and a tool.
• ncruces 2y ago
  Why I like the stuff that can support itself for free with a reasonable level of adds. No expectations of amazing customer support. No refunds. No I'm bound to keep offering the service because it's already paid for.
• kaplun 2y ago
  Seb! Look at who reached the top of Hacker News today! haha!
• usernew123 2y ago
  [flagged]
• ruffrey 2y ago
  I strongly relate to this post. Having grown mailsac.com to above average side project revenue, the admin overhead isn't crazy, but it's exceptionally repetitive and boring. So much time is spent on fraud and normal "running the business" really sucks the enjoyment out of a side project (for me as an engineer). I think that having a side project co-founder who is a relentless business operator is more important than having a decent technologist.
  • skrtskrt 2y ago
    I would personally never get into a side project for anything that requires decent fraud prevention (email, telecom, payments, etc.). I have worked at medium-sized startups in these areas struggle to keep their heads above water on fraud prevention even with well-staffed and well-paid teams of experts. It's a never ending battle where you cannot win, you just manage to not lose so badly that lawyers and federal regulators pound you in the behind or users abandon your platform.
• morning-coffee 2y ago
  > (look, I'm sorry, I also cringe when I write those words) Just came to say I laughed and really appreciate the honesty in that statement. :)
• edweis 2y ago
  It is ok to let some fire burn. Say no more often, and focus on the core of your business.
• kebman 2y ago
  I remember the the BBC would upsell on requests from artists visiting their studios in London. Artist management: “Hey, can you fix XYZ beverage, towels, etc, in the stage ante room?” BBC: “Sure! That will cost....” Most would stop pestering at that time, but ever so often you got artists who were willing to pay for the extra service. Conversion to the mentioned case: Individual feature request: “Hey, amazing script, I rated it 5 stars! Can you implement the take profit levels for me?” Generic reply: “Thank you for your interest in Project X! We get thousands of feature requests each week so sadly we cannot cater to individual ones. If you need help on setting take profit levels, I'm afraid you'll have to revert to TradingView's official documentation. Sorry for the inconvenience. Hope you have a nice day!” Continued pestering: “Ok, but can you please put them for me? I follow this [insert some YouTube crypto day-trader], and he uses [some very specific take profit levels]. I would like the script to draw them for me.” Up-sell: “I'm sorry, but we sadly cannot cater to individual requests unless you're a Diamond Member. But if you still want bespoke service you can sign up to the Diamond Member Subscription. Please bare in mind that it entails a 1000 monthly retainer with a 300 hourly consultation fee beginning after the first 15 minutes. Please inform me when you want to sign up, and I'll send you the details so we can get started right away!”
  • sushid 2y ago
    I did this very recently for a wedding vendor and it worked like a charm. There was no stipulation that I'd have to provide dinner to a vendor who would come in after the dinner ended. The owner insisted a few days before the wedding that the staff can come in earlier and would be able to eat, would be energized and appreciate the dinner etc. I was annoyed but said I can charge him (the owner) the exact cost for a plate if this would mean that much to him and he instantly was willing for forgo dinner for his staff, lol...
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  One suggestion is simply increase the price. Price is strongly correlated with quality of customer. Price also acts as signaling that this is a tool for professionals who make actual money and so shouldn't be bothered coughing up something trivial like $100 for a subscription. You end up making more with far less customer support.
  • 7bit 2y ago
    I find it hard to believe that this is true. For 100$ a month I expect a far more polished product than for 20$, where I can look over a lot of missing features. If features don't work as advertised, I will absolutely make no distinction between a 500$ or 1$ product, and will demand a fix. But I will more likely have more patient if the service is cheap, before migrating away. And then, if your customers are businesses, do you think the employees really care how much the product costs? No.
    • dghlsakjg 2y ago
      Having run my own tourism business (so dealing with consumers directly, rather than b2b), and having spoken to many other business owners, this is counterintuitively true. My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or are otherwise looking for a deal. My theory is that people that happily fork out for an expensive product have already seen the value. There are exceptions, but a lot of business owners see the same pattern.
      • Marsymars 2y ago
        > My worst customers were the ones that ask for discounts, or are otherwise looking for a deal. I get where you're coming from, but it's hardly surprising that a business's favourite customers are those who are happy to get fleeced. And as a customer, if you're not already a subject-matter expert, you have no idea which business is trying to fleece you or not unless you price compare and try for discounts everywhere.
        • dghlsakjg 2y ago
• digging 2y ago
  > But for now, the $200 I get every month with almost no work is a nice passive income. Wow, not that I wouldn't enjoy having an extra $200/mo, but it would be a pretty insignificant chunk of my budget. Stepping back from the author's initial perspective (wanting to help people and grow business) - was this ever worth spending more than a couple hours a week on?
• TheCapeGreek 2y ago
  I think the merchant of record bit is a bit overblown for a lot of side projects. Tuvalu isn't going to extradite you for not paying them their $5 VAT. If you're frequently dealing with multiple jurisdictions (especially with EU) and the fees don't add up to 10% or higher (which MoRs can do if you're in a less popular jurisdiction), it can make sense to take care of admin headaches. That might be many projects, but it's certainly not all. I've written about this from the "third world" perspective over here: https://nik.software/building-global-wealth-from-south-africa-the-complete-guide/#to-mor-or-not-mor https://nik.software/building-global-wealth-from-south-afric... (and the "Accepting Payments" section above it)
  • sunnybeetroot 2y ago
    I agree if you can guarantee your project isn’t going to make more than X a month. But like the author said, it’s painful to change merchants later when you start needing to care about tax.
• jimbokun 2y ago
  This reminds me of the book 4 Hour Workweek. That book is really about Tim Ferriss figuring out how to automate and delegate everything in his business, until he only has to put in 4 hours a week to keep it going. Until you reach a similar point, as this article shows, you don't really have any "passive" income. You just have another job.
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    Does anyone really believe that Tim Ferris only works 4 hours a week?
    • maerF0x0 2y ago
      I think it's common sense that the title was chosen for marketing reasons, not as a factual description. (iirc He even talks about testing titles for the book in the book) I do believe there could be weeks where it's only 4 hours of maintenance. But no one in their right mind believes they can build an asset base of recurring income sufficient for living on 4 hours of total effort per week. The real message of the book was about arbitrage. Geo arbitrage to live somewhere that costs 1/2 the price to work 1/2 as many hours. Eliminate the "80%" of the low value work. Use the same arbitrage to outsource the remaining low value/low skill work. Only do the high value hours yourself. That's the idea at least.
• s-xyz 2y ago
  Very relatable, had a similar experience.
• fsndz 2y ago
  I understand the struggle. Finding and keeping customers can be a challenge, especially in B2C. But $15K is good, so I would continue fighting for it. To reduce the stress, you should automate everything as much as possible. I’m also currently learning Pine Script, so thanks for giving me a side business idea.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• leiaru13 2y ago
  I've heard that people have had success selling side projects with https://acquire.com https://acquire.com (haven't used it myself, though) – have you looked into it?
• johndhi 2y ago
  Tomorrow I begin teaching a college course, in addition to my full-time day job, that I've been creating and working on for months. Work has been very busy lately and I'm worried that my experience with the class will make my life hell. I'm having to approach it in a really different way -- one where rather than doing my usual over-preparing, I'm trying to just get confident that I can do my best and see how it goes.
• dartos 2y ago
  I’ve been working in software for 15 years and have been doing it for fun 5 years before that. Seeing this does not make me love my job. I miss making little toys and learning random things. The more I work in this field, the more I realize building products isn’t what I love, it’s just what pays the bills.
• gwbas1c 2y ago
  A couple of thoughts: As a customer, if I see firm boundaries set, (IE, read XXX before contacting me,) I usually assume that someone is under stress from nonsense like this. Then I try to be on my extra-best behavior. I know a lot of people suggested raising your price. Some alternatives are to: 1: Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the $100 / month is supported. 2: Consider some of the feature requests, but as a consulting. "Yes, I can make that for you. It will cost $30,000 and you will have exclusive access to it." Some bozos may pay it. And finally, it doesn't hurt to do one-line responses to dumb requests with "Please read the doc at LINK". It also doesn't hurt to openly state, in such a doc, things like "I am not implementing new features. Custom consulting is available."
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    >Offer two price points: The $20 / month gets no support, the $100 / month is supported. Someone is paying you money and you won't help them? They are going to cancel and possibly badmouth you on social media. Also, how are you supposed to improve your product if you don't interact with most of the userbase? I try to help everyone who uses my software. Even if they are evaluating and haven't paid me a penny. Commercial issues aside, I feel it is the right thing to do.
    • hinkley 2y ago
      Have you ever called your cable TV operator?
      • hermitcrab 2y ago
        Cable TV isn't really a thing in the UK. Also, just because some companies treat their customer's terribly, doesn't mean I have to.
    • gwbas1c 2y ago
      Differing levels of support based on price point is very common for a subscription software. > Someone is paying you money and you won't help them? $20 a month is not a lot of money, and isn't enough money for personal attention. The kind of support that the author was providing costs at least $50 an hour, if not more! This is why, for example, Lawyers charge hundreds of dollars an hour.
• treetalker 2y ago
  I just want to express my admiration and thanks for the practical information and advice both in the post and throughout the comments. Threads like this one make me happy and thankful to be a part of this community. I’ve upvoted the post and the best comments — but threads like this make me wish I could upvote certain posts and comments more than once. Thanks again, everyone, and go HN team! :-)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• withinrafael 2y ago
  Great write up and relatable. Just wanted to warn you that PayPal will eventually get annoyed and lock up your account for reason `$($RANDOM)`. I would prioritize draining the account very regularly, if you're not already.
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    PayPal used to be famous for this, years ago. But I haven't heard any stories recently. Is it still a thing?
• al_borland 2y ago
  This sounds about right. The ongoing support is why I don’t think I could ever be an indie dev. If I ever do put something significant out publicly, it will be free and offered as-is. Not because of any grand philosophy on what software should be, but simply to avoid the support obligations without being riddled with guilt. Automation can help, but there are limits to what it can handle, not to mention something needs to happen enough times to see automation is needed. There is also the question of time invested vs time saved. It’s not the silver bullet I’d need it to be.
• sylware 2y ago
  In software, there is no perfection, only compromises which you will feel appropriate some days, and not some other days...
• IAmGraydon 2y ago
  One thing I didn't see the author mention in his list of lessons learned: You shouldn't be surprised that you have to deal with a lot of idiots when you make a product for idiots. His market here is the bottom of the bottom of the barrel, and there's a price that comes with that.
• konschubert 2y ago
  I have a moderately successful hardware side project (eink calendars) and I am constantly torn and questioning myself. Am I spending * too much time on it, given how little money it makes? * or too little time on it, given that it’s already making money and maybe if I worked on it more, I could grow it enough so I can quit my day job ?
• justinl33 2y ago
  two tips that I've found that help take the load off support: - document everything obsessively; 80% of support tickets can be answered by 20% of your documentation - use subreddits and discords and let your users help one another
• hermitcrab 2y ago
  Good write up. One of the things I have learnt from nearly 20 years running a small software business, is to choose your market and customers carefully. My main product is for event planners and they are generally pleasant people to deal with (if not the most technical!). But I know other people that sell software products in other markets where people are (on average) less pleasant (e.g. real estate). Also I have found that the cheapest products get the worst customers.
• nurettin 2y ago
  > You could even write your own scripts using an abomination of a scripting language called PineScript Sorry to derail from the subject, but why on earth would you call pinescript an abomination? It is a perfect blend of imperative looking syntax yielding vector based calculations similar to datatables. Even conditional statements are computed as a series acting on the underlying data stream. I'm actually jealous that they did this first and sad that it is proprietary to the platform.
• myfavoritedog 2y ago
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• yagudaev 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing that honest experience you had. Here is a link to an audio for those of us who like to listen to it instead of reading : https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2310-ive-built-my-first-successful-side-project-and-i-hate-it https://www.audiowaveai.com/p/2310-ive-built-my-first-succes...
• 56j7j65j567 2y ago
  [dead]
• transcriptase 2y ago
  277 comments at the time of this post and nobody is going to point out that technical analysis is the astrology of the stock market world ? I expect better of HN.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• drpancake 2y ago
  I can relate to a lot of this. The customer emails in particular. I was experiencing flashbacks while reading the article. Back in 2014-2015 I created a platform for building crypto trading bots in the browser with Python scripts. You could write a bot, backtest it and trade live on multiple exchanges. It was a lot of fun to build, initially. I kind of stumbled onto the idea without any trading background. It got some early traction. So I raised $100k of funding and went all in on the idea. I worked like mad. But I slowly realised that all of my customers were "technical analysis" bros. Basically horoscopes for trading. I received endless support requests for exotic new indicators and obscure features. I added a marketplace that let you sell your bots to others. It quickly jumped up to $10k/mo in commission after the fee I took. That seemed bananas to me as a 24 year old. But the bots being sold were pure snake oil. I distinctly remember that the guy who sold the most didn't even run his bot with his own money. I felt like was running a gambling site. After 14 months of this I was completely burned out. I quit and I wasn't able to work at all for four months. Glad to see you figured out a smarter solution.
• zoogeny 2y ago
  This comes at a decent time for me. I am pondering a new piece of software and customer service is the number one thing on my mind. I've mostly decided that the first hire I would make if it were to become any kind of success would be customer service. But the economics of hiring are brutal. Customer service don't get paid a huge amount but if you consider vacation, benefits, taxes, and all of the other costs of employees then somewhere in the range of $100k/year is reasonable. Then it is just math: how many subscriptions do you need to cover that cost? Even if you price your product at $100/month then you will be losing some large portion of that to taxes, payment processing, etc. It's unlikely you'll see it all but that is maybe $1000/year. So you need over 100 stable customers at that rate tier to cover one customer service employee. Going from 0 to 100 customers paying you $100/month is risky. I can't imagine the pressure if you are closer to $10/month (or $100/year) where you need 1000 stable customers to cover the same cost.
  • jaza 2y ago
    Surely you can just outsource customer service to an offshore provider that is (a) cheaper, and (b) just a company that invoices you for their time (i.e. not your employee therefore not directly owed benefits taxes etc by you)? I haven't looked into it, so I don't know exactly what price range is involved (and I don't know if it's a price that one could justify, depending on the exact income involved in your side project - but let's assume it's a fairly modest income), and I don't have any names to recommend. But from what I've heard, Philippines is the go-to for this sort of work these days (not that it's the only country, there are other options).
    • zoogeny 2y ago
      Outsourcing, or even part-time contracting, is a totally valid option. The main reason I want to invest in in-house customer service is that I see the role as more than just customer service, but also as a means to build community. I think it is natural to see customer service in some industries as the kind of thing that gets tucked away into a call center or similar type of industrialized or factory-line like situation. However, I have seen the result when the customer service team is embedded within (or at least closely adjacent to) the development team. Often these roles are more like "customer success" and they border on account management in many cases. They are part community building, part moderation, part customer training, part evangelism, part technical support. So this wouldn't be a role in the vein of "answer X tickets in Y amount of time" but rather a much wider remit of ensuring overall community happiness by engaging in forums, answering questions and escalating technical problems, contributing to FAQs, etc. My feeling is that trying to fill that kind of role with temporary workers, especially ones that are managed by some other company, would mostly defeat that purpose.
• richardw 2y ago
  I very much feel you. Choosing customers is crucial. Patio11 has some great write ups on the type of customer who will suck your life force: Retail, not much money, not very busy. Rather have business clients who are less price sensitive and have better things to do than argue about font choices. I had one lady who spent 75 emails sending me on wild goose chases for a $30 app. At one point she mentioned a refund and I processed it before she could change her mind. She then offered me a job. Noooooo.
  • Crier1002 2y ago
    this sounds like a cool story to write about!
• maerF0x0 2y ago
  I've noticed a lot of the world has no idea how little they matter relative to the opportunity cost they impose. Like you see Karens complaining about their experience with something. They represent at most $100s of ARR. For a great engineer that means they should spend maybe 5 minutes looking into their issue and "helping". Sure, in aggregate it adds up. But on an N of 1, nope. It makes common sense to some people that if they want a plumber to come look at their leak, they have to pay the person to even show up and look. Even if the plumber does nothing it's gonna be $100+ So, when someone complains about $20, or wastes more than a few minutes of time on easily google-able (chatgpt-able) stuff, they've lost my attention, because they cost more than they're worth.
• swayvil 2y ago
  Maybe you need a good mystery. I too had a big long project. But the moment I solved the main design riddle I couldn't bear the sight of it. A proper mystery gets peeled back to reveal more, and more. Design can be incestuous tho. After the big taboo is transgressed it's just boring.
• aussieguy1234 2y ago
  I have a side project. Its fairly easy to use and self explanatory. I get about 2-3 emails per week, that is with around 15,000 monthly active users and ~$400/month in revenue which is growing slowly over time. The service is stable and I don't usually have to keep an eye on it. For any "difficult" enquiries when a customer is not happy for any reason, I just refund them, its not worth my time arguing about $10 a month. Over the life of the project that has only happened once or twice. By the time the emails get hard to manage, i'll probably already have hired someone else to respond to them.
• r0fl 2y ago
  That was very well written, wow! I don’t remember the last time I read that long of a blog post in one sitting! Funny that OP brings up @levelsio and he is the latest guest on Lex Fridman
• reassess_blind 2y ago
  This is relatable. I started a side SaaS project that saw some success so I put payments in, and it slowly grew into a small business. The product was targeted towards digital marketers, but also unfortunately appealed to scammers as part of their scam "flow". It was a constant fight in moderating the userbase, a bunch of Stripe disputes, etc. It was profitable but the headaches in moderating the userbase and dealing with disputes (which cost $25 on top of the refund, by the way), support tickets from obvious scammers etc. was draining and turned me off the project all together. I started another product in a different niche which also showed some success and eventually overtook it and allowed me to quit my 9-5. I shuttered the original product as it wasn't worth the hassle. The quality of the customer in the new niche is so much higher and therefore the mental drain is a lot lower.
• counterpartyrsk 2y ago
  You're not charging enough, you need to weed out the poor losers. Sad (and maybe rude) but true. The more you charge, your customer base will shrink, but the quality of customers will increase exponentially.
  • sodapopcan 2y ago
    Would love to know from OP and others why this isn't the most sound advice. I worked for a very small online retail company recently (I know it's not exactly the same but in the same vein) and raising the price for $18—$40 items by $5 had zero affect on the number of people placing (sales weren't amazing but not bad). But ya, in the first line you say you made $15k over....... FOUR YEARS? Obviously that's a bunch for some people, but certainly not MOST people in tech?? You could have made much more and had a lot more fun bartending or even being a barista. Having read the whole post... keep it up! Just raise your prices by... like, a LOT! Like, a lot a lot!
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    This is actually good advice, someone who pays a lot of money for a service will have high expectations but they will also be vested in getting things working. I don't know the original attribution but it's something along the lines of "don't be afraid to fire unprofitable customers." If you have a customer who is drowning you in support tickets, and just not "getting it," politely tell them "sorry it's not working out" give them a refund and cut them off.
• rr808 2y ago
  Anyone hired some offshore outsourcing people at a super cheap rate that are slow and mostly useless but cheap and act as a first line barrier? Something like Dell support line. I hate dealing with those people but realize a cheap product wont have a highly paid developer hand holding me because I wont RTFM.
• ksdino 2y ago
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• tppiotrowski 2y ago
  Customer: You never emailed me the link I paid for. You ripped me off! Me: I see an email was dispatched to bob@fmail.com 15 minutes ago. Can you double check your inbox? Customer: Oops, typo. I meant bob@gmail.com (Happens multiple times each week...)
• LarsDu88 2y ago
  Anything that's live service aspect is a pain in the ass to run. That's why I decided to make my side project an old school (VR) videogame with a singleplayer campaign. Basically you can sell it and sleep on it if you want to do something else. Everyone expects to get multiplayer though... :(
• jwindle47 2y ago
  This was an amazing read, and frankly inspiring with regard to your final thoughts. I’ve yet to build anything substantial on the side but still searching for that idea
• ahmed_ds 2y ago
  I will try my best to not make this sound like a veiled promotion. Short answer is you need a VA. What I do mostly act as a filter. I have seen this happen with my clients. People often think that it is just too much hassle to running a small sideproject and not worth the time. But geez man, do you have to do everything?? Why bother with the grunt work. You have caught the lightening in the bottle, but for the rest do not invest any more in terms of emotional commitment. These are grunt work, you need a task monkey essentially. What I do is just translate this communication in binary response or options to pick. After you made your first dime from a sideproject, you need to outsource support. Everyone complains about bad support on everything they use, but the reality is that you can not afford to commit yourself to do support work. Being entrepreneur means you have to create barrier between things that require emotional investment. You may think hiring a 7 dollar an hour dude from a random country is a risk, but it is worth the gamble if you have a business that is profitable. And the risk is not a big risk. I am not self depracating myself but the reality is VAs like me are "disposable". You try out a VA for a week, see if that person solves your problem, if not try another one.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    which is to say, the best thing about running a business is that you can just pay someone else to deal with the problems you don't want to. hate invoicing? there's a service for that. hate doing the books? get a bookkeeper.
    • ahmed_ds 2y ago
      I think the difference between a VA and conventional employee is the idea of specialization and frequency. Doing VA work I have to do all things ranging from graphics design to support to crm stuff. Now, I am not the best guy out there to be great at one thing but I will try to be adaquete. The lack of specialization is made up by the fact that VAs are cheap, and you do not have to have that commitment to keep paying for them. If it is a 5 hour work week that will do. These days, I just have my clients on whatsapp. They give me a random task, I give a deliverable time.
  • lofenfew 2y ago
• mavamaarten 2y ago
  This is extremely relatable. I have a similar experience with a free (!) watchface and a paid watch app I made a good few years back when WearOS was all the hype. There's very friendly and thankful customers, there's unfortunately also a lot of needy and annoying ones. How do they not understand that I work for free, they always ask for more. Add to that Google that is behaving like a toxic god, changing the rules of their walled garden every few months. I kid you not, one day they rejected my watchface because _it needed a splash screen_. And because my description mentioned "WearOS" and it should have been "Wear OS".
  • hermitcrab 2y ago
    A significant part of my time is spent jumping through hoops created by big suppliers, such as Apple, Microsoft and Google. It drives me crazy. Support can be annoying, but at least I feel I am helping people. BTW I couldn't get a renewal on a US government database because my business address was different in 2 other databases by exactly 1 comma character. This was blocking a big order. It took over a month, several phone calls and chats, lot of emails and an 'expedited' payment to the UK government to get this sorted. Fun times.
• shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
  There's a saying in the indie hacking community, never quit your full-time job until your side project(s) come close to your current salary. I think your first successful side project got stuck somewhere in the middle and you also lost interest along the way managing it.
• lovasoa 2y ago
  I think getting support requests from users who don't know what they are doing is actually a great problem to have. I have a project that allows building web applications out of SQL queries [1]. When I started receiving support requests by people who did not know SQL and were basically learning it along, I was thrilled. I was happy that my tool had a greater audience than I initially envisioned. In any given domain, specialists are the minority. If the thing I am building is unexpectedly appealing to non-specialists, I rejoice, even if it means getting strange support requests. In the end, it helps me making the project more approachable and easy to use for everyone. [1] https://sql.datapage.app https://sql.datapage.app
• Fokamul 2y ago
  Feels weird to me, that you must login to platform to manually give someone access or strip access. This should be automated through their API since day one.
• indulona 2y ago
  15k in four years is not really worth the time alone, unless it is a hands-off product.
• campervans 2y ago
  Great work! It reads like a pitch to work in B2B, higher professionalism, less needy customers, higher margins, fewer sales etc...
• seydor 2y ago
  Wait, he was selling the script for money. That's nothing. Imagine if he had been giving it away for free, the abuse would be much higher
• andyish 2y ago
  There is something worse than building a side project and not having enough users, and that's building a side project and having enough users to make it a full-time job but you don't make enough money for it to be your full-time job.
• theapache64 2y ago
  what a great story! ton of learnings
• justmarc 2y ago
  If you hate it hand it over, and try to make sure it stays successful and grows to its fullest potential by giving your guidance.
• AshlynLee 2y ago
  [dead]
• JerryFan117 2y ago
  If you really hate it, after maintaining existing customers well, you can actually expand to the next sideline
• nkrisc 2y ago
  Key point IMO: > If people really wanted a trial, they would eventually read the two-sentence instruction, click the link, and fill in the form. Did this affect my sales significantly? I don't think so. Most of the people asking basic questions would never convert to paying customers anyway. Maybe leaving some money in the table but saving a whole lot of sanity in return. Some customers are better not to have unless your product is self-service, as-is.
• celltalk 2y ago
  Hahaha this must be wake-up call for me, but I will just close my eyes. I am almost doing the same thing at: https://indicatorinsights.co https://indicatorinsights.co It's very quick and dirty, not finished. Still, I am having fun (showcased in about page). Hope not to lose it.
• taylorius 2y ago
  Thank you for this article. It was genuinely fascinating reading. I am in a similar situation to you, though at the very beginning, so it's fascinating to read about your experience.
• wuliwong 2y ago
  I dabbled in writing scripts for TradingView a while ago. It is a little rough but also fun to be able to add your own stuff to the platform. I actually pay for Scott Carney's harmonic trading software for trading view. As much as you are posting words of warning, it kinda makes me want to take another stab at it. :) One startup I made, that actually gained some traction, turned into a struggle for me as well. I made a site to share and find tutorials for the new Swift programming language. I released the first version the day after Swift came out and it was actually getting used all over the world even. I expanded the platform a bit and I had a number of tutorial creators regularly cross posting their stuff on my site but ultimately, I myself did not jump into learning Swift and I just didn't have the continued drive to keep working on it. It is funny because this Swift project was probably the startup I was the least passionate about building but it really was the only one that has ever garnered any real traction. Some of my take aways from it are how important timing is and that I get very enamored with the initial building phase but as you talked about in your writeup, the amount of work _after_ launch dwarfs that initial rush.
• scubakid 2y ago
  I bootstrapped a side project into a 5k customer B2C SaaS over the past 3 years. I just finally started getting help with support, and wow -- I wish I had done that sooner. Instead, I let it build to the point where like 60% of my day (and night) was fielding questions and requests. Can't recommend enough getting a good system in place for support early, with as many self-serve help resources as possible.
• jldugger 2y ago
  > This was sad. I built a tool for people who knew what harmonic patterns were. People who had an investment strategy and only needed a tool to automate the drawing of the charts that they would normally draw by hand. Not some gung-ho investors whose entire investment strategy consists of "this random script I found five minutes ago says that stock X will go up, so I buy." Technical analysis is pretty much magical thinking, so, no, you pretty much built a sales funnel for "people who believe investing money is magic and can be easily parted with it." The customer support story seems pretty predictable as a result. Well, I guess you're mostly piggybacking on TradingView's funnel. > Sometimes, I would get a job offer. Yay! For writing PineScript for a living. Nay! Reasonable, but then why bother with a hobby project like this?
• frays 2y ago
  Fantastic read, thanks for sharing.