I've Built My First Successful Side Project, and I Hate It

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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"

These strategies don't maximize revenue, but you don't have to maximize revenue. You can optimize for revenue/agony instead.

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."

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?

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!"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"My payment provider said you used a stolen credit card. Why did you do that? I've revoked your access."

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-afric... (and the "Accepting Payments" section above it)

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 ?

It requires a large set of skills that you either have to learn, or you'll struggle.

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.

If anything, this post shows how wide - or deep - any internet niche is.

Silly me.

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.

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.

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.

I expect better of HN.

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.

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.

I still have the source code somewhere, which was about 25,000 lines of ASP in one file!

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?

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.

This side of things doesn't get much coverage since it doesn't sell books or increase subscriber counts!

Just came to say I laughed and really appreciate the honesty in that statement. :)

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?

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.

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.

I think your first successful side project got stuck somewhere in the middle and you also lost interest along the way managing 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.

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".

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.

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!”

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...)

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.

Also I have found that the cheapest products get the worst customers.

> 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.

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.

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.

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! :-)

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-succes...

It's very quick and dirty, not finished. Still, I am having fun (showcased in about page). Hope not to lose it.

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.

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

I hate dealing with those people but realize a cheap product wont have a highly paid developer hand holding me because I wont RTFM.

Basically you can sell it and sleep on it if you want to do something else. Everyone expects to get multiplayer though... :(

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.

No expectations of amazing customer support. No refunds. No I'm bound to keep offering the service because it's already paid for.

Forum didn't last too long after that.

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

It reads like a pitch to work in B2B, higher professionalism, less needy customers, higher margins, fewer sales etc...

Say no more often, and focus on the core of your business.

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.

Imagine if he had been giving it away for free, the abuse would be much higher

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.

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.