Lessons Learned Launching a Side Project in 48 Hours | Hacker News Reader

Lessons Learned Launching a Side Project in 48 Hours

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117 pointsingve22 comments

Some ideas (take it with a grain of salt)

1) You should have a rating system for experts and award different level of badges and users should write reviews also experts with high scores should have a higher pay rate

2) interviewing experts is not going to scale not only you will not have the time but you also need internal experts to interview the Become an expert" applicants (you need some fast vetting process or rely on the rating system)

3) You should collect data from StackOverFlow and other sites and see which questions novice folks are having a hard time getting answers to and try to get experts on those topics (this could become your competitive advantage)

4) You can scale this to businesses - they would certainly appreciate the on-demand help aspect of this thing. Businesses specially small ones may have support account subscriptions with vendors like Red Hat, IBM, etc...which can be costly for them. If your experts are reliable they would rather pay you only when they need help instead of paying the vendors monthly/yearly.

5) As your experts are working the problems you should keep a very organized knowledge base of the issue and resolution (maybe you can monetize this data later on or it maybe useful somehow)

Thanks for your input! The are a ton of challenges ahead, and scaling experts is one of them. But as for now, getting demand is harder than supply. Although the demand is surely affected by the quality of the experts.

Nice. So how do you handle scaling this up? Working a full-time job, how would you expect to give this the man hours it needs, in order to determine if this is a viable business model? This is the main issue facing my side projects.

That remains to be seen! Depends on the growth, definitely.

I think you should simplify the service and make it strictly about fixing bugs in small programs. Why: because information is essentially perceived as worthless by the majority and almost any question a person could hope to ask is already one Google search or Stackoverflow question away from being answered. This pervasiveness of information contributes to the assumption that a person is entitled to it all for free (and that the person producing it ought to do it for free) - which is one of the main reasons businesses models built on content are so shitty.

"Please help me fix a very specific bug that's only in this one implementation in this current universe" is a lot easier to monetize than "please teach me how a for loop works." See what I mean?

Hm not necessarily so. Some people could struggle to understand a concept even with all the information available, and could really use some tutoring from a professional. That's when you start to notice the difference between just getting information from an article, and receiving wisdom from an expert. This service could certainly help with that.

You assume the person needing help knows what to look for, and how to express the problem in such a way they can find it on google. Stack Overflow can also be intimidating for many. There are those who don't want to appear ignorant in public or get a condescending reply.

The problem with bugs is they can have a widely varying complexity... it's a lot harder to turn a profit that way (either the requester pays a lot since it turned out to be hard, or the solver gets a bad deal if it's fixed price). Plus it seems very inefficient - you have to page the whole surrounding program into your head at once to understand what the bug is doing, and then you can't use any of that information for the next bug.

So although I don't dispute your point about information not having much perceived value, the bug-fixing thing seems much harder to make profitable.

I disagree that any question can be found on stack overflow. I see this service as filling the niche of answering questions I have that stack overflow ISN'T for. For example, when learning a new framework: "What's the idiomatic way to do _____?", or "From the documentation, it seems like [this feature] was accomplished with [this line of code], but in other tutorials, there's [this line]. What's the difference?", or "This paragraph in the get-started tutorial makes no sense. Could you explain this to me?" Just small lapses in understanding for subtle concepts, or practices in the real-world.

This site is actually something I've wished for in the past, while reading and learning new things online. I think the article explains it very elegantly: the service is like raising your hand to ask a question. I'll bet I'm not the only one who's wanted to raise their hand while learning by reading a guide or documentation before.

I like this idea. I personally think you are charging too little though. I know you want to make it affordable even for students but I feel that may only open it up for lower level programmers who are okay with working for low rates.

There is already a ton of help available online for low prices or free. I would like to see a service that focuses on instant help like this but with very experienced developers. I would have no problem paying over $60/hr or even a $100+ per hour for a guarantee that my problem will be solved. I would even fork out that kind of money for my employees to use a service like that. Something that I can deposit a certain amount of money per month into my employees account wallet which they can use towards live support issues and it only gets deducted if the problem was solved.

I may not be the norm though so take what I say with a grain of salt ;)

interesting. please email me at andreas@bugrex.com, as I would like to discuss that option with you.

From a different perspective: As a student, I can confidently say that I do not think your prices are too low (from the demand side).

I came here to say this as well. I could see enterprise uses for companies with smaller budgets who can't hire a full time senior engineer but might need or make good use of one's time for an hour.

You could potentially even add scheduling, so Dev X could be scheduled for an hour every week with Client Y.

There's a lot of neat paths you could take, and there's some decent theories about the science of choices and human decision making you could read up on if you're interested.

Enjoyed the article, as someone with a near constantly full plate it's nice to read about a very substantial start in a bite sized time frame and makes me want to try to set aside a weekend as well.

Interesting idea regarding scheduling. That would require a bit strickter rules for our experts though. As for now, one of the benefitd the experts like is that it's 100 percent flexible. You answer chats only when your'e interested.

Would love to hear about those human decision theories, got links?

Congratulations, a great example of MVP. Thanks for sharing learnings. very helpful.

Yes, /r/programming is much more ruthless and honest in my experience. Listen to their comments and give them a bit more weight than most other forums.

I'm confused -- does the hired developer make the $10/20min or does the site creator get it? Or what's the split?

Nice! I hope this project goes somewhere.

Me and a friend of mine built something similar a while back but never really got to push it more. (https://www.ladr.io)

We always thought there was a gap between Upwork and Stackoverflow.

Hey, author of the article here. Let me know if you have any comments.

What an odd coincidence? I had a similar idea yesterday. Except, I think your solution should be more general; A site that lets anyone pay to talk to an expert on any topic. The user should post their question and the experts compete to be selected; it is important that only the experts that care about the question are selected. Kind of like uber for conversations. I don't think it should be a TaskRabbit clone. The experts only provide information; they don't do the work.

For example, I want to talk to someone about selecting an alibaba manufacturer for a specific niche. I also want to talk to someone about how to get products into retails stores. And so on.

There are many related services. For example, you can have translators connect people. I think there is also a need for translators for people with poorly formed ideas; the translators would communicate with the experts who don't want to deal with those people directly.

Great input!

However, it's quite hard to get that kind of product off the ground. Easier to start with a niche and work our way out to broader subjects.

We actually started with ReactHelp.com, then went wider to HTML,CSS and JS. And now, we have Ruby, Python & Java experts as well, so it's going in the direction of more subjects.

We’re working on something like this: http://www.officehours.io

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