Ask HN: How to turn a “toy” side project into a business?

[memn0nis]

We launched http://hallway.chat a couple weeks ago and since then hundreds of teams have signed up. They're all free users, but daily usage is pretty high.

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?

[afandian]

This isn't the answer you want. But I have a hobby side project that I've kept going for a decade, and which gets high enough use to feel like it's worth keeping going.

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.

[wiz21c]

This.

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.

[_bxg1]

I don't think it's impossible to mix the two successfully, but I think it varies greatly by what the project is. Some things monetize very naturally, other things would completely lose their appeal if you tried to contort them into a product that people pay for.

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.

[hkiely]

There always different types of projects. Some are platforms where If you can get multiple thousands of users, you can generate revenue from advertisements. From there you can scale into different business models such as freemium. The key issue is to know what problem you are solving and who you are solving it for.

[gordon_freeman]

Mind sharing the link to your Hobby project for me to check it out? :)

[afandian]

I'm reluctant to because I've had zero time to dedicate to it for a couple of years and there's a laundry list of improvements I have been intending to make.

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...

[stevage]

I have a list of 30 things you need to change about it immediately!

[Igelau]

This is great. Perfect for when you need to find that Slip Jig you can't remember the name of, or when you quickly need a list of alternate titles for An Phis Fliuch.

[mgreenleaf]

This is really neat. Thank you for sharing! I love folk music, and this is an interesting way to discover new pieces and play around with them.

[cbzehner]

Thanks for sharing what you've been building. Very cool!

[1123581321]

So cool. Thank you for being willing to share!

[gordon_freeman]

Very cool project! Thanks for sharing!

[movedx]

This is an ad. This isn't a genuine request for help. They have everything in place to monetize this.

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.)

[memn0nis]

It's not an ad. It's genuinely a hobby project... We have not made any money on it. There are teams at those companies using our app, not the companies themselves.

My email address and main job / company are in my profile btw.

[movedx]

Is this you as well? https://mightydash.com/

[bobbyz]

These are the same guys that were astroturfing mightydash.com on reddit several days ago.

[bryanrasmussen]

I think you're right, probably an ad, but then why didn't they just show Hn?

[lifeisstillgood]

- Actually phone up at least one new sign up per day. Ask why they signed up, what they use it for, how it compares the the others they have used and what would they pay for - unlimited time, number participants whatever. They will try to be nice - assume they lie. most importantly how did they hear of you. Pay attention to the vocabulary they use. What you are trying to get here is your elevator pitch - but told to you by your customers "Video chat right in Slack"

- 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.

-

[memn0nis]

Thanks for the advice! We don't store phone numbers, but that's great advice to ask users for language to use.

Regarding channels, we posted on product hunt and then I think they are mostly word of mouth

[lifeisstillgood]

Get some way of reaching the real customer - email, slack channel (!), just hunt them down on linkedin. You have had people who looked at your tiny offering and went -"Yes please I'll have some of that, lovely". You want to understand their brains and their situations inside out.

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)

[kd5bjo]

The same way you turn anything into a business: figure out who will pay how much money for what. Then, figure out how much it will cost you to provide that to them and tell your future customers that you exist. If the former is more than the latter, you might be able to make a viable business.

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.

[shoo]

> 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.

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!

[snarf21]

Interest is measured in how many will pay and how much. As said above, you need to talk to your users and figure what features have value and what that is. Rinse and repeat.

[memn0nis]

We've priced it relatively high at first, but we've also put the language "If you want to get on the paid plan for Hallway, but don't want to pay, just email us at [e-mail] with a link to yourself sharing Hallway on social media and we'll give you a discount"

[hopia]

That's a good idea. Does it work?

[yboris]

I have no experience in this other than my app[1]. In my case, I chose a price that was so low that even if a customer encounters a bug, they are still very happy about the software overall.

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.

[1] https://videohubapp.com/

[yboris]

ps - I also made Video Hub App into MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

[margani]

Can I ask why you did it?

[yboris]

I made the app open source as one customer emailed me asking for the code, hoping to make some changes. When first releasing the app (v1.0.0) I was worried about making it open source (perhaps someone would steal it) but after almost a year 'on the market' it seemed safer. I don't know how common it is for that fear to materialize in reality, but at least in my case it seems like no one made an identical copy (or even a similar copy for that matter) and started distributing it (my other fear was someone creates a virus-ridden copy).

Making the app open source improved it significantly: the customer who asked for is initially contributed some excellent code making screenshot extraction better (and faster). Others have added bugfixes or features. I'm really glad I did it. I also gave a talk touching on the open source question at AngularNYC in February (still waiting for the recording to be put up on YouTube).

PS -- my app is Charityware - I wrote a blog post about that too: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

[willart4food]

OK, so now you have version 1.0 of a product.

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)

[armatav]

https://coda.io/@rahulvohra/superhuman-product-market-fit-en...

This is always a great resource for keeping that product market fit loop really tight.

[memn0nis]

Great article, thanks for sharing

[riceluxs1t]

Long time League of Legends fan/player + a hedge fund SWE here. Got intrigued into modeling basics (data engineering/research/simulation/pnl monitoring) and decided to try a quant approach to Daily Fantasy Sports for LOL, which has been empirically successful because the game is against other human participants, not the house. Wanted to share my experience of turning a real life hobby+job experience into a side income generating project

[bachmeier]

First question you need to ask: why would someone pay you $30/month to add something to Slack?

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.

[memn0nis]

Yeah we need better language. It's just a fun way for teams to stay connected. So for $1 a day a company can add it to as many channels / use it for as many teams they want.

[polote]

Make paying mandatory after 45 days of use for new users, keep it free for the current users.

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 :)

[Avshalom]

relentless self promotion.

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.

[movedx]

You know I think you're right.

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.

[quickthrower2]

I guess you'd need to find companies that care about spending money on this during a tough economic climate. And "making your employees happy" by having them take breaks might be a tough sell (even though I know yes breaks are a good thing for productivity!).

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.

[mgreenleaf]

$30 seems a bit steep for the upgrade in features. If I was signing up, the basic feature set in free seems like it would be sufficient for my needs, especially since I'm already a Zoom subscriber. Lowering the price and shifting the feature parity might do something.

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.

[kelvin0]

Well Coursera, Nextdoor and others are already your customers aren't they? You did it, it's now a business!

[gentleman11]

I am considering a kickstarter for a game this summer as the core gameplay gets closer. Anybody have any experience with this? I think a playable, good prototype and pre-creating a mailing list probably matters a lot

[numakerg]

- Cold call marketing

- 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

[Igelau]

(Twirls moustache)

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!

[hkiely]

You do customer development and make sure that you are solving an exerting pain. If there is no pain, there is no value proposition.

[wolco]

Price is too high for most. Needs a third pricing tier. 8 dollars 50 video chats. Highlight as most popular.

Lower free tier to 5 chats.

Get more users.

[memn0nis]

We've priced it relatively high at first, but we've also put the language "If you want to get on the paid plan for Hallway, but don't want to pay, just email us at [e-mail] with a link to yourself sharing Hallway on social media and we'll give you a discount"

We can look into adding tiers

[memn0nis]

Btw we just added the paid tier today!

[glacials]

I started a side project in 2013, and when I (for other reasons) left my job at the beginning of 2019 I decided to go full time on it. I timeboxed myself to one year to show salary-like profits.

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".

[tarr11]

I thought Slack has video rooms?

[memn0nis]

Yeah they have video rooms... Hallway can use any video room software

[codingdave]

I'm 100% unclear what this product does. Slack already has video, or you can use any other video room software to also do what it already does?

What am I missing here?

[memn0nis]

Oh it posts hangout rooms every X hours in any channel you want so you and your colleagues can have a 10 minute chat. It's a fun break from work

[duiker101]

seems like you already have a paid plan. if that is not working maybe your free tier is just too giving or the jump from free to paid it's too big and worth it.

[swyx]

stripe atlas.