Hallway started as a fun side project / "toy app". It creates temporary video rooms in Slack for teams to connect and make working from home less lonely.
I wanted to ask if anyone has any ideas about how to think about turning this into an actual business given there seems to be some interest?
It costs server money to run, a couple of take-away-coffees per week's worth. In the past I did agonise about putting ads on it, or otherwise monetizing it.
But at some point I decided that as I was lucky enough to have a paying job, the marginal returns I would get by trying to monetize the site wouldn't be worth it, and I was happy to pay for it like any other hobby. The grateful emails I get every couple of weeks make it worthwhile.
That was a very liberating decision. Mix business with pleasure and it stops being fun.
Will add my experience.
The project is not the problem. The problem is the mindset. A mindset for business has, at least in my experience, a very different set of goals than one to make a hobby project, not even a product.
If you make a business, money must be your driver, your hobby time is just a mean to achieve an end. So it's transformed into a background task.
Also, don't forget that if your business fails, then you'll most probably have to stop your hobby project as well (too many bad memories...). You may have to kill your baby, which is very difficult to do.
A business oriented person transforms opportunities into business/money; another opportunity, another business. A programmer raise his program-child. If one has to make another one, he'll have to kill the previous one (unless he has infinite time to work on both :-)). Making hobby project assume you're emotionally involved in it. That's not compatible with business I think.
Ah, and doing business, you'll attract other people who're in for the business. The kind of people who'll put a price tag on what you do (which will be so less worth than what you think, very tough to ear)
So, be sure you have the business mindset.
Example: I did a project for a hackathon at UT when I was in college. The idea was that in this day and age it's still hard to get a file or snippet of text from one device to another unless they share some kind of account sign-in or something. People still email things to themselves.
So I made a website called "Catch" where you can upload a file or a text snippet, get a throwaway 6-digit code with which you can download the thing from any web browser, and after ~15 minutes the artifact is deleted from the server. The whole appeal of it was having absolutely minimum friction.
When we presented our project one of the first things they asked was, "how will you monetize it?". It was something where any sort of sign-up or payment step completely defeated the purpose, so the answer was, "we won't".
But I don't think that's the case for every fun-project. Especially if you take a freemium approach or show ads.
But, with that caveat, it's https://www.folktunefinder.com
It's a mix of clojure and java. And there's a half written rust search backend waiting for a rainy day...
They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetized.
This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
I'm honestly expecting to be down voted for this, and that's fine, I can understand why my reaction would be seen as negative, unconstructive, and so on, but posts like this go on indiehackers.com, not HN (unless they're genuinely a hobby project on the side.)
My email address and main job / company are in my profile btw.
- You now have some idea of channels to market - ten people signed up because of a facebook post or because of a linkedin article or a google search - so choose a channel - facebook / linkedin / SEO. Just produce ten articles or pay for ten adverts - and see what traffic changes you get - stick at it - you are looking for a channel to market. Somewhere somehow there is a way of reaching a potential audience - with a sales pitch you learnt from above you want to find where that sales pitch reaches the most of your potential audience
- pricing - this matters less than the above especially as you are aiming at busiesses - I would say Slack has a pricing norm so you may want to charge per user but aim for 30/55/75 or there abouts.
- keep trying new sales pitches, and vary the channels you try slowly.
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Regarding channels, we posted on product hunt and then I think they are mostly word of mouth
Find one customer today. Just one. Call her, email her whatever. just one. Today.
As for channels, you need a channel that you can drive - product hunt is a one shot affair. Word of Mouth - you cannot control it. its great. But it is totally passive on your side. If I give you 10 million dollars to exapnd your business how do you spend even one cent on 'word of mouth'?
We love the idea of building great new products that sell themselves. And great products do - once the flywheel is spinning. But you need something where you pay x dollars and that turns into a customer paying you x+y dollars. (And those dollars paid might be your time to write evergreen articles on your website that go viral and sit at top of google page 1. But even so its your time you paid for)
(And no SEO never does that anymore)
Your existing users might be good leads, or they might not. At the least they see enough value in your offering to use it for free. Talk to them and find out what they think you’re adding, and figure out if that’s something people might pay for.
Great point. It is possible that a lot of the existing users only use your service because it is free, perhaps because they simply don't have a budget for paying for any service, or perhaps due to some other reason, e.g. they work for some huge organisation where they may need to fight through a lot of red tape in order to get a new service approved for use and paid for.
In both cases, these could be kinds of users that are difficult to turn customers of a viable business: in the former case, because they won't pay you money, and in the latter case, because they can't pay you money unless you first invest 18 months in an enterprise sales cycle with the hope they sign up to your "call us for pricing" enterprise plan that offers RBAC, integrates with their baroque SSO implementation, and offers support for white label branding (or whatever it is that the various stakeholders deem as mandatory features).
> Talk to [your users] and find out what they think you’re adding, and figure out if that’s something people might pay for.
This is much more actionable and useful advice compared to my speculation!
My app is $3.50 and at such a low price, I don't feel obligated to ship many updates - it stays a project I can be passionate about and happy to work on, rather than feeling obligated and indebted. Maybe a good strategy in other situations.
Read about MVP (Minimum Viable Product) the Wikipedia entry is fine, then the decision tree is as follows:
Do you want to try to make a MVP out of this? YES / NO
IF YES: establish a budget, a timeline, and tangible metrics and go for it
IF NO, new decisions tree: Pivot existing product OR scratch it and start a new one (using the knowledge acquired building this and the MVP knowledge)
This is always a great resource for keeping that product market fit loop really tight.
The answer to that question is going to be a mystery to anyone reading your homepage. "make working from home less lonely" - I don't know what that means, but I don't know many individuals that want to pay $30/month for it, and it's not a very compelling argument for a business either when the economy is in the toilet and getting worse every day.
Ask for a monthly fee. The only way to know if users are willing to pay for a service is to make it mandatory to pay and see if people pay, as long as you refuse to do that you will never know :)
relentless.
It's awful and kinda soul drain and I have no stomach for it but every one I have ever seen that managed to pull it off did so by getting as many eyeballs as possible and then getting as many ears possible... or getting impossibly lucky.
They've got two massive companies that I know of using their service: Pivotal and Coursera. They've already got a pricing model in place so it's already monetised.
This is an add. People up voting this and acting like it's a sincere request for help have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
What about this product could motivate someone to buy it?
Maybe target this to "Indie Hackers" rather than companies? They have they own spend decision and might be happy to pay for A. not being lonely and B. the opportunities chatting to a cohort once in a while might give - so there is an opportunity benefit.
But, that said. I'm not the target audience for it, and going to the current users and talking to them or figuring out why they signed up and what would sweeten the deal for them is probably the best method forward. There might be a bit of a pivot that would make paying worth it for them.
- Sell it as a cost-saving technology
- Figure out how much alternatives are costing them and tell what they could be saving
- Offer the paid plan for a trial period
- Limit the size of the organization, but open the free plan to more than one-on-one
Microtransactions. "Excavating your hallway. Time Remaining: 90 minutes -- Want it now? Buy TNT for 10 Gems!"
Gems can be bought for cash, or you can have some mined by paying Stars. The mine yield is somewhat random and the dwarfs need frequent breaks, but it sometimes includes loot like stupid hats you can use in the video. You only get Stars by referring people, connecting social media accounts, signing up for mailing lists, etc.
Gotta go now -- I can hear the RCMP riding in and these maidens aren't going to just tie themselves to the railroad tracks. Let me know where to send the bill for consulting!
Lower free tier to 5 chats.
Get more users.
We can look into adding tiers
Things that snuck up on me:
1. I thought it'd be the same work as before, but more of it. But when your side project is promoted to your full time job, you want to keep it that way. You start focusing on different things, like making sure you make enough money to keep going. My project used to be ~90% free, and after six months of "that's okay, I'll just build more paid features" it didn't work out (that's a whole post on why) and I was forced to move a lot of free stuff behind the paywall, which comes with all the user backlash you'd expect.
2. Apart from building paid features, learning how to do so and funnel people into them is half a full-time job in and of itself. YC's free Startup School was a fantastic resource here.
3. The more people pay you, the more you feel beholden to them. You'll spend more time doing customer support than you want because of the guilt. You'll think you can resist this or engineer it away, but it just keeps coming.
Before: - 10k MAU - Net negative $300 a month
1 year of full-time later: - 13k MAU - Net positive $500 a month
Uplifting result, but not salary-like, so I'm moving on and demoting it back to a side project. Nonetheless I don't regret this; if I hadn't done it I'd always be wondering "what if".
What am I missing here?
