Ask HN: For 10 years I've been trying various projects, still clueless

[superdario]

I have a lot of experience with side-projects and startups. I will briefly explain my experience. I'm coming from small eastern European country, so my perspective on everything might be different.

1. My country is too small and market is small. You can do something here, but everything is so limited that it's terrible. 3.5M people and then when you target certain people who wants your product or service or app or website, you get super small amount of people

2. The Balkans (group of countries around my country where people speak the same language) is a better story, but every nation is so isolated. I asked yourself, how often do I use products/app/websites from the other countries and vice versa? Very rarely. Every country is in its own bubble.

3. European market. Every country has its own language, culture, mentality, etc. it's hard to get into those countries especially if you don't know the lang.

4. The US market is great because it's unified, it's easier to go viral, the language is the same, purchasing power is great, but it's a bit of a problem because me as an European don't know their habits and thinking, I have no connections or friends there, I don't know where and how to start. The market is saturated, something is happening there all the time, and now you have to break through with something new.

5. The UK is ok market, they are more related and similar to the USA. For example OnlyFans is from the UK, MillionDollarHomePage the same etc.

I had quite a lot of partners, it didn't really work out. But I think it's me, I think I function better alone. Everything I tried failed, and I tried exactly in those countries that I mentioned. Worst of all, I wasn't persistent enough.

I have the feeling like I'm trying impossible. I had no money or capital, everything I did I relied on word of mouth, but that's shit. Without good capital that will support the marketing, it's all a shot in a dark.

Sounds like I'm complaining here or trying to find excuses but I'm not, I'm still trying to make it. I'm just confused, I don't know what to pursue, where to try, which market to try

[kebsup]

I'm from central Europe and while I agree with some of your points, I see it as an advantage. If I manage to get 1-2k in passive income, it would completely cover my expenses, so the bar for success is much lower than in the US.

[superdario]

That is true, I lowered by bar also. Right now I think the same as you, even though it will not satisfy my appetite in a long run

[js4ever]

Focus on B2B products, if you are able to convince 5 customers to pay 5k per month or 50 customers to pay 500/month it's enough for you as a solo entrepreneur.

B2C is another beast and indeed needs tons of capital.

[superdario]

Isn't B2B even harder when you have to convince businesses to use your product instead of existing one, so they have to completely move to your product. Then of course attend the meetings with them and so on. I'm not a salesman and for me it would be mission impossible. I don't feel comfortable in that role and I'm bad at it

[julienreszka]

You can make one feature that is lacking and that customers want. Usually the big competitors have apis and plugins so you just integrate it to the larger product

[DougN7]

Businesses, especially big businesses, are just people with a problem. The nice thing is they’re not spending their personal money so they’re more flexible. If you want to take over their billing system, that is a huge project and will take lots of meetings and time and you’ll fight huge companies. So focus on a small problem those people have - keeping track of one single resource, updating printer drivers, a desktop pop-up notification when the printer is low on ink, etc, etc. A $1 million market is too small for big businesses to chase but can make you quite comfortable.

[dionys]

I've had similar experience, also coming from a small Eastern European country. It feels like the market within the country is not big enough, including two nearby countries improves the situation, but you still need to deal with the language differences. To me it just feels there's not enough money, both from the possible customers as well as from investors.

My current employer is originally from the UK, but they started in the US. That included a corp in Delaware alongside the main office in the UK. The product is B2B and it worked quite well in the US, but expanding to European customers in the recent years has been more complex. Luckily since it's a B2B product, the language differences are less pronounced. The product itself is only provided in English and luckily we have European CS colleagues so we can offer support in other languages as well. I think the main challenge in this space was that in the US there was only 2-3 big players who we partnered with initially. In Europe, each country has 5 of them and each of them work slightly differently. The company never needed outside investment, we kept lean for a very long time and we were profitable very early on.

My recommendation - focus on US, English-speaking customers first. If you can, do B2B and provide excellent customer support. B2B customers have different expectations, but they are also easier to deal with from my experience. If you can, try to bootstrap and become profitable as soon as possible.

[superdario]

Isn't B2B even harder when you have to convince businesses to use your product instead of existing one, so they have to completely move to your product. Then of course attend the meetings with them and so on. I'm not a salesman and for me it would be mission impossible

[dionys]

Maybe it really depends on the industry and the size of your clients. But if you target small/medium business, they won't have crazy enterprise requirements. Of course they will want a good product and something that fits their criteria. But often times they won't need to replace their whole X solution, they just might need a small API/plugin that connects their platform with Y.

I'm not a salesman either, but I think it's easier to persuade 1 business person to spend $400/mo on your solution rather than persuading 100 individuals to pay you $4/mo. Individuals (even I'm like this) tend to have high, almost unreasonable, standards for the quality of service you get for $4 per month. Comparatively I think for a lot of business, $400 a month is nothing.

[tudorw]

'I have the feeling like I'm trying impossible', with no resources, network or prior successes, you pretty much are, this is not to put you off, but to acknowledge that what you experience is common to a lot of people.

Having great ideas, being able to code, understanding markets, understanding promotions and advertising, knowing how to craft and ship a product to your market is all well and good, however, look at the 'success' stories in detail, not to detract from the hard work and oft deserved success, on the whole there are some supporting factors that enabled the business, networks, grants, money, connections, wealthy family or friends or all the above.

I'm saying this not because I am mean, but to share that your experience is perhaps not so different to others around the world.

'I think I function better alone' I'd say this is going to need addressing, I work great when I am on my own... however, to get paid... at the bare minimum I need to function with a client, so there's 2 of us. Don't base future opportunity on previous partners, finding a partner is very hard, but in your situation, sounds like it might be a good plan, perhaps you could just make a few notes to yourself about previous partners, strengths and weaknesses, try and identify some core principles that you'd need a partner to fulfil.

To find that partner you are going to need to get out there, I would suggest that a partner from a non-technical area who has good knowledge of a business or user need, perhaps some experience in running a small business and demonstrated skills at networking and making new connections.

Re-reading your story, perhaps 1) reveals opportunity, perhaps there is a hyper-niche market you could address locally, perhaps one known to rely on your local language, unsupported by tools aimed at other markets, where the market would be accessible and your local knowledge an asset. If you could find 20 customers paying $300 a month would $72,000 a year enable you to grow?

[superdario]

There is some niche in my market that I'm trying to tackle and it's fun for me, I'm enjoying it. I will definitely try that one, but the problem is that mentality of people in my country is that they are so unwilling to pay for something or try, most people are like: "Do I need to pay for this? If yes, then I'm not going to".

[tudorw]

This is common here too, perhaps everyone, money is hard to come by :) However, this is not insurmountable, remember, you are looking for a small number of VERY satisfied customers, let's look at how the bigger companies address this inertia; A free trial period, with enough proprietary lock in aspects that's it's non-trivial to migrate. A free tier with tight limits that means you rapidly need to decide whether it's worth paying for, therefore your service ends up with committed customers and doesn't burn too much cash supporting unpaid use. Discounts for signing up, money back guarantees that are just enough hassle to enact that 80%+ won't file. If your market is real, as in you've got 10 people who agree that if your product delivers what you promise they would pay X for it then keep going, in my experience the step from zero to 10 gets a lot of the hard work done, you can exit that stage with a clear plan including expectations and commitments that if completed correctly give you the best shot at success.

[DougN7]

That seems like a sign that the problem you’re solving isn’t painful enough for the client. They pay for all kinds of things that are important to them. So either what you’re providing isn’t important enough to them, or it could be important but they don’t see it (they don’t understand how much they could benefit). You HAVE to be good at communicating to do this (or have a partner that can).

[ipaddr]

Then stop trying to sell a product and give one away.

[superdario]

Actually I did that, I made an app pro-bono, people are using it, but I get nothing out of it

[bhu1st]

Then what pays the bill?

[superdario]

I am, from my regular job

[beardyw]

> how often do I use products/app/websites from the other countries

Well, if the product is web based, the answer would be "am I likely to know?".

As to your market, you are well placed to do business in the Balkans in a way that a US start up is not - the opposite is not so true. Your appreciation of varying conditions in other countries is also to your advantage. If you make progress you will be less likely to have big companies trying to stifle you.

> Worst of all, I wasn't persistent enough.

You need to overcome that! I had big plans for a subscription based product. But early on I realised that growth was likely linear and cancellations would be proportional. As a mathematician I could see that would tend to a limit. But I persevered, and even though I was right I got a decent income from it until I retired. Modest growth beats none at all.

[WheelsAtLarge]

Doing it alone is a big disadvantage. You need people with diverse backgrounds to get a business running for the most part. You are the tech brain now focus on finding someone that can sell and manage a business structure. All countries have businesses so it's possible where you live. Start small so you can figure out what it takes to have a continuing business then build upon that.

[superdario]

I agree, definitely harder working alone. So far I spent energy on my partners trying to keep them motivated, trying to make them work and constantly pinging them, it was time, energy and motivation wasting, I could have focused on the project itself instead.

It happens all the time. Even when I had a partner with their own project. They start super motivated and within a month they drop and stop contacting me, so I have to contact them to work on their own project. Either they don't have time so I do all the work

[Jimmc414]

"The brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things" - Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/

[dave333]

Some areas don't depend much or at all on language such as games and puzzles e.g. Rubik's Cube from Hungary. However creating a viral game is hard. Some niches are easier and less demanding such as daily puzzles for seniors or bedtime story sites for parents with young children just use Google translate or it's API.

[DougN7]

It sounds like you believe in “overnight success” which only exists via lottery tickets (with similar odds).

I spent 10 years of weekend and evenings before my product sales could support me comfortably full time. That was a single project.

When you’re small/starting out, your only competitive advantage is persistence and patience.

If you somehow MUST be the next tech billionaire, move to Silicon Valley and try there. Or buy lottery tickets.

[namanyayg]

What all have you tried and how did each of them fail?

[superdario]

Blitzer - hangout application, you put a pin on the map that is active for up to 1 hour and then you can meet people for anything. The problem was the geolocation, because it is hyper-geolocated so I would need to get many people in one small place, like one city.

Mimic - if you know what TikTok has duets now, Mimic was supposed to be that before TikTok existed where you imitate a person, mimicking person. The problem was marketing, no budget and no idea how to market.

xoxoSnap - what OnlyFans is now, xoxoSnap used to be where these models could sell their content, but without a subscription. I gave up without a reason, but I had interested models. This was the worst decision I made with my projects.

SMS Schedule - enable people to automatically send some SMS at a certain time, such as for someone's birthday or Christmas, so that you never forget to congratulate someone. I didn't feel like it would be used.

Gay sex site - Current gay dating is all about sex but covered as dating. So I wanted to make it what it actually is, about sex. Mostly profiles are empty without pics so I wanted to tackle that problem. The problem is again location, need to get people from one city otherwise website makes no sense.

JustBelievers - OnlyFans for believers. Type to subscribe to a priest or pastor who preaches. Nobody was interested

Timechat - a chat application that forces you to answer as soon as possible, otherwise you lose points and fall in the ranking. I didn't do it because I didn't know how to promote it

PhantomChat - a chat that has no history, there is already a bunch of it

CryptoAdults - OnlyFans with crypto. Not working because crypto isn't really used and it's complicated for people

A website selling fetish stuff like farts in a bottle, panties, piss and so on. I didn't make it because I want to find supply before I look for demand. So I need to connect with women who want to sell those things. But then again why would they do it through my site when they can do it via IG or Twitter

[ipaddr]

I see your issue: marketing. Each of your products can succeed if you spent 99% of your time/effort/money on marketing.

Blitzer seems simplifier. You pick a city, a local one would be easier. You join local groups, connect with local media, setup local events, talk to people locally. Put up fliers with qr codes.

Maybe you have a big prize somewhere in the city gl and you get everyone excited to look for it in some geo search game.

Follow that and you will succeed. My guess is you don't want to do that. That's not fun, or technical. That's what it takes to succeed.. and it can work in any industry from selling t-shirts to rocket fuel.

Most people want to come up with a unique idea or twist, create the site/application and expect everyone to come because of the quality of the idea. This rarely works unless your product is 100x better than what exists and even then you still need to get lucky go viral. Meanwhile everyone thinks your idea is great and is now copying it.

Your comment here tells me you understand this: "But then again why would they do it through my site when they can do it via IG or Twitter"

Why would anyone try to sell farts through you? Have you build up a fart audience? That's your first step. Find a way to get people who like farts to visit your fart content farm. Once you built that you can approach fart suppliers directly or buy thier farts and resell at a higher price.

Spend 99% of your time creating a community. 1% of your time coding.

[thatguymike]

This: these products are all community products, the value of them is in the community, and therefore almost all of the hard work is in building a community. If you don't like working with people... better to build a utility product, or a B2B, or something that doesn't require mass adoption and therefore large amounts of community building work.

[defrost]

Looks like you have experience prototyping certain kinds of social sites, you're looking for subscribers that check in daily for fresh content with a side serving of chat and some sense of fan like interest.

There are wider circles for this kind of thing and it can span countries starting from your region (maybe).

Perhaps look into how people trade and talk about fresh goods daily (vegetables, meat, fish, farm goods), land and houses (real estate deals, land release data from local government), stock and investments (daily public releases from whatever stock exchanges serve your nexus of countries).

That adds to your challenges as you might not know anything about these markets, you are still left with the challenge of finding sufficient core subscribers and promoting for expansion, but it might be the kind of poke in the eye that makes you look about with a different mindset at the wants and needs of those with money doing deals on a daily basis.

[superdario]

Ah yes, those are actually social sites. I never realized I tried to make so many of them. I guess it's because I think that those might drive larger amount of people on the site/app

[bags43]

Dude you need to find girlfriend and normal 9-17h job.

All these ideas just show how immature you are.

My advice is to find real problem that people have in that region and try to solve it.

[superdario]

Why do you assume I don't have a normal job or a girlfriend or boyfriend?

[greazy]

Amazing list. The only one which i think solves a real world problem is the gay dating website.

I think if you focus on the issues facing every day people and try to solve them you'll find a good niche.

I'm in Norway atm, i found an app that collates all the supermarket pamphlets in a nice layout. It's very useful due to the remoteness of sum parts of Norway.

There's an app in Australia called fuelspy that's widely used to find the cheapest petrol/ notify when best time to buy.

These are all small shops creating and maintaining these apps/websites.

Also have you considered freelancing instead of building these apps?

[thunderbong]

That's quite a list! Congrats on building so many apps.

However, all of them seem to be social apps, though. Have you thought of making apps for individuals? What I mean is trying to identify a pain point that many people face and creating an app around that?

Just my two cents. All the best!

[superdario]

Of course, but in what sense for individuals? Like some tools that they can use without engaging other people?

[julienreszka]

Dont make any feature that you dont know how you can make it profitable aka estimate the cost and the revenues it will generate

[superdario]

Yes, probably should not do that

[FriedRice123]

Blitzer - Immediate thought comes to me, how are you going to make money. For example, a normal meetup app (with a very original name - Meetup.com) has massive problems on monetization and is basically sold around like a hot potato that nobody wants to have because it's just bleeding money with no idea how to turn the ship around. Your idea is to niche down even more. Are you going to be able to convince a group of 10 people meeting up on your app to each pay you a $ for your service? I highly doubt that. Also, you need to be more active when acquiring users. You said it's hyper-local, well you can start in your local area. You go to your country's subreddits, forums, facebook groups and just start advertising your app. If it gains traction, maybe, maybe you can scale it to other areas too, but again, monetization problems. You probably shouldn't even attempt this idea unless you have a VC person on your speed dial that is willing to burn money on scaling.

Mimic - not sure how would this app work when you are fighting for attention with behemoths like tiktok, youtube, instagram etc. Also no clear business model so the project is already set for failure.

xoxoSnap - unironically one of your strongest chances to succeed. You are making an app in an industry that already has established business model. There are paying customers! And you said you had models interested in your app! There can be more than one baker in town. Onlyfans takes 20%? Well we are only going to take 10%. They run skeleton support crew? Well, we will offer 24/7 support in multiple languages, etc. etc. Yea you won't print money like OnlyFans does, but if you give good enough offer to users (models) you might eat a piece of OnlyFans's pie, and the pie is BIG!

SMS schedule - this one actually sounds the most useful app out of all the ones you mentioned and to you it's the opposite LOL. I assume you are from Bosnia, based on what you wrote. Well, there is a startup from your neighbouring country called Infobip. What do they do? They are B2B company that help companies send bulk sms, scheduled SMS, etc etc. They are multi-billion company so clearly there is a market for SMS services. If you approach it from B2C way, you could have a similar service that you already described and you could expand it so much more. Example: send bulk sms to all your friends 1 hour before you are supposed to meet, as a reminder. Self-reminders, don't forget about X thing you have scheduled. I'm not super deep into SMS myself but I know that a lot of people prefer SMS over pretty much any other form of communication/apps so there is market out there 100% and it's quite unexplored in a world where every company is obsessed with capturing users into some kind of app.

Gay sex site - not really a tech problem, you need read some research on how modern relationships work and read couple of sociology books to tackle this problem. There is a whole science on this, not only on relationships/sex but also how people perceive their own actions and why sometimes we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel better. Like saying, you are only dating app to get into a relationship but really you are just looking for sex. If you get a deep understanding on this you will also find ways on how to market your app to potential users and find where your competitors are lacking (Match Group).

JustBelievers - Not really sure what the obsession is with the OnlyFans (in the spirit of a pastor I will tell you that you maybe need some deep introspection on what attracts you so much to the OnlyFans and the sex industry). Drop the OnlyFans angle and you might have a good product, the priests and pastors are already figuring that they need to keep up with technology if they want to retain their followers. Have you talked to your local priest/pastor? Have you gave him an option to test it out? Because for example, our local priest is young and very much into social media. He posts daily on Facebook and Instagram. He probably makes more content on social media than person-to-person and do you know what? Religious people in our area actually love it.

Timechat - not really sure what the idea behind this is or what aspect of human psychology are you targeting with this, so I'm not really going to comment on it.

PhantomChat - good idea, but as you already figured out on your own, there is a ton of competition and the whole shebang with needing to get the ball rolling with users AND the whole idea on how to monetize besides selling your app to Facebook.

CryptoAdults - Great idea. You mentioned that crypto is complicated for people like it is some kind negative thing. I would argue that is a positive thing. You need to do things that others (companies) don't want to do. Everybody wants to make the next big crypto exchange/pyramid scheme/scam coin etc., but so few actually want to work on onboarding people into crypto system. Learn how to efficiently teach users to crypto to pay you and you have a good business. I'm not in any shape or form a crypto fan but sex industry is probably one of the better areas to use it as a payment form. You have business giants like MindGeek and OnlyFans getting railed from behind by credit card processors. Using crypto is one of the ways to bypass that problem.

There is limited amount of information on you, but i'm going to guess that you focus way to much on the tech aspect of business. You need to find how you will bring value, how will you present that value to your users and how are you going to make money of your users. The tech might or might not fit in somewhere along that.

Also being a small market (compared to global) can be advantageous I will give you one example from my country. A guy solo made a competitor to UberEats/DoorDash for the home market. One guy vs 10000 engineers and his app was more successful. He said he was profitable since day 1 of launch and later sold the company for good money to one of the big guys in the deliver sector. You know what he mentioned as the hardest part of the company? The programming? The tech stack? The hosting/microservice/cloud computing/(insert latest fad)? Nope. It was onboarding the restaurants onto the ap. Literally the hardest part was getting off his ass, go to a restaurant, talk to the owner person-to-person and teach/convince him to get the restaurant added to his app so people could order online.

The way I see it. You need to rethink how you approach your projects. Sorry for the long post and if the whole thing came off as too preachy.

[meiraleal]

I'm absolutely impressed by the quality of your answer and the effort put to reply every non-interesting idea of this list.

[superdario]

Great feedback :D it was really great to read this even though I dropped those projects but maybe I can start a new one as a combination of those

[meiraleal]

Your ideas look quite bad, honestly. I can't see one that would be motivating to work long term, they all seem very meh. Maybe your problem is the lack of a catchy idea?

[go_discover]

I know you said you aren't looking for partners but if you change your mind I would like to build something with you. Contact me at [e-mail]