Ask HN: What should I do with this web app I built? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should I do with this web app I built?

1 pointmarilyn4 comments

For the past two years, while at a full time job, I spent my free time building List Central (http://listcentral.me). Essentially it is a social network for lists and list lovers.

My motivation in building LC was both a desire to improve my abilities as a web developer, and a to dream to build an application that people use, and hopefully brings in some money.

While I was building this, the economy fell apart and now it is obviously clear that advertising as a business model is undependable at best, but given what users are accustomed to getting for free now, I can't imagine charging for List Central.

I now find myself with this app that I think is pretty neat, and I find useful, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I would love to get it out there, and see people use and enjoy it, but I am hesitant to invest much effort and/or funds into promotion due to it's lack of a sound business model.

I ask you HN, what would you do with List Central if you were in my place?

How much time does it take to manage? I can't imagine it's too demanding if the lists are user-generated. I say keep it...it could be that if the site gets a food sized following, you might be able to make a fair amount from advertising. I have a friend who runs a site with scraped news articles and a forum, and he's making $80K a year on ads alone. Of course it took 10 years to get to that point, but he didn't have to touch the site more than an hour or two each month.

I would love it if LC could be a 80K/year site in 10 years!

I'm expecting there to be considerable effort involved in user acquisition, which is an area I'm not terribly experience with. If anyone has advice in this arena, I'm all ears!

The quickest way is to buy interested eyeballs (adwords or some other route). You can set you budget for the month and grow the budget as the user base and advertising revenue grows. But if you want to see astronomical growth, you have to have a compelling reason for people to refer you via word of mouth. As well posting to aggregators like this is not a bad way to get people to take a look. Just don't get too spammy with it and by all means don't violate other sites terms of use trying to get your name out there.

Clickable: http://listcentral.me

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