Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

Automate as much as possible. Payments ? Slap a stripe checkout form (unless you happen to be in a country where Stripe is still not supported) or Paypal for others.

Onboarding: Make it as easy and smooth as possible for clients to get started after signinup. Show them exactly where and how to start.

Documentation & FAQ: Create tons of it. If a client has a question, thy should be able to resolve it through your documentation for the most part. Don't let little simple questions to come to you EVERY time.

Setup a Support Ticket system and only answer via emails/support ticket for questions that cannot be resolved via your documentation. If a client is not aware of documentation, point them to it before answering the same question again and again.

Get a decent smartphone and answer the tickets/email through that. You could even do it sitting at your desk or during lunch break

If you absolutely need to schedule phone calls, schedule them during lunch break and find a relatively quiet place where you can talk. If not quiet enough, tell the client that you are travelling and they may hear background noise. As long as it is not a screeching train, clients won't mind specially if you already told them.

Hustle. Do whatever it takes to get the first few clients except illegal activity of course. You may have to cross a few lines at work (lying about lunch plans etc) but I personally think those are reasonable to do.

Contrarian view: don't spend time automating things. Spend any extra time you have selling and building the product people need. If someone needs your product, they'll probably be fine with an invoice.

Spend the early mornings before work prospecting and reaching out to potential customers. If you're on the west coast, even better because you can conduct sales calls with east coast people who are already at work.

After work, you can check-in and see if anyone got back to you.

Track it all in a Trello board or spreadsheet.

I highly recommend reading Predictable Revenue and putting as many of its practices in place as you can.

The naive answer would be to automate it: put up a Stripe or Paypal form and let them pay for your product.

However, if you're in B2B, the client would need to trust you, as in meeting you, the sales process, even training. What I would do is not automating the sales process, but the leads process: so you don't waste time in leads that are just passing by or checking out your product. With those you could arrange a meeting and then perhaps close the sale.

After you get some clients, you could hire someone to do the sales process you can't do. Or, if you have some savings, you can hire right away and ignore the previous paragraph.

Another option would be to have a sales co-founder, but that's another story.

- Keep your product really simple. The more complex it is, the more you need to teach and sell. If your product does one thing well and can communicate its value clearly on a homepage, it requires a lot less work from you.

- Tactically: you don't need to respond to emails M-F 9-5. Yes, that's when many B2B customers are working, but they don't know what timezone you are in, and it's not uncommon to have a delay in answering emails. Just be sure to answer emails before work and after work.

- Create lots of FAQs (using https://helpsite.io – shameless plug) so you aren't answering the same questions over and over. - (Actually you'll still have to answer many of those questions, but at least you'll have a quick link you can send them)

- Focus more on inbound marketing (creating blog posts, SEO, AdWords, etc.) rather than outbound sales, which requires a much higher amount of active work that you can't do with a full-time job.

We ran our side-project, https://emailoctopus.com, for around 3 years before going full time. As a low-cost platform, our sales are quite low touch, so we'd be able to set up our marketing projects (Facebook ads, email campaigns) in the evenings and just let them run on a schedule.

Support was a little bit more tricky, however. The only solution we found here, other than outsourcing to an Upworker, was to try to minimise support. Make your help docs as useful as possible and spend time on improving error messages.

I would also advise you to switch to working on the project full-time as soon as you can afford to. Our growth went through the roof (we'd spent around 3 years getting to £1k MRR and tripled that in the first full-time month). Some reasons why? We could spend time with our customers and focus on improving our metrics, the stuff that you just can't automate away. We also began treating it more as a business and valued our own time spent on the project more, which resulted in increasing our prices and getting across our value proposition better.

Myself and a colleague are in this same position... we've just launched a store selling physical products, with a 2nd product store (with a completely different product set) launching in a few weeks. And then we're also working on an app that should be ready in about 3 or so months (at current projections).

Our approach has been approaching people or businesses in similar fields or related industries, and pitching the products to them and getting them them to sign up as affiliates. It reduces our income quite a bit and we make very little off it, but instead of us trying to reach the people they know and are in contact with all on our own, we effectively use them and benefit from them doing our marketing. They are keen to do it, since they have a good incentive to do so. Se make it worth their while. The long term goal is building up a brand, and then profiting off of that. In the meantime, everybody wins if they generate sales, but we dont have expensives if there isnt.

And yes, we met with potential affiliates during our lunch breaks, or after hours, etc. A couple were also generated through friends, family, and social group contacts.

Hah, this is really something. I literally gave a talk at Dropbox entitled "how to start a side business without quitting your day job," and a lot of it was about B2B SaaS sales. You might enjoy it: https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0

Here are some quick ideas:

Use your lunch hour.

Sell to businesses outside your time zone before and after work.

Hire a part time sales person.

Send postcards.

Improve your online signup flow.

Don't, until you've gone over it with your current employer and had them sign off on your ownership of the project and its potential intellectual property.

If they won't, you'll need to keep it as a side project while you're working for them, unless you're okay with relinquishing some rights to it.

I just sold one of my side projects, Ipify (https://www.ipify.org/) for a reasonable amount of money just a month ago. It's something that I built on my free time, and ran for several years successfully.

I was contacted with a purchase offer, did some negotiation, and ended up selling it several weeks later.

I realize this isn't the sort of sales you were asking about in the title, but figured it might be useful information. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Realistically speaking, you should do research and just talk to people with problems and try to figure out how to convince them. Then start setting realistic goals, how much do you think you can handle per day and then per week.

You have a busy schedule and so does your client, first thing is to not automate if you're starting out because you have to design out the system you're going to use gradually. I've tried straight-out automation but just like code most times you have to tear it down a couple times.

I recommend trying to figure how to get people to reject their current software or their current ways if not using software and use yours and find a common theme you can talk about to other prospective customers because I think that will be the main bulk of your sales and marketing efforts as we live in more software-saturated times.

I'm just beginning to push my product (it's been around for 6 years) and have certainly noticed the customer requests increasing.

I agree with a lot of the advice here and in particular I've just started building out the knowledge base in Intercom to mitigate some of the support queries.

Sales is tough but can be worth it. I've spent lunch hours walking round the business park where I work on the phone and those calls have led to multiple other leads where I've been working with a consultant rather than the end client. Putting the time in does help.

One thing I would say: be honest that the app is a side project whilst you grow it. I've found customers very understanding and willing to accommodate calls at specific times or accepting of slight delays in support queries.

Good luck.

What worked for our SaaS (https://ipapi.co):

- Extremely responsive and flexible with customer's requests. We've implemented some features overnight in response to a customer query. Turns out, some of the features have helped us with revenue growth :)

- Honesty. Even though you might lose a subscription in the short run, word of mouth helps to win back a lot more. It's delightful to break your rules if it eases a cash strapped customer. We frame such "thank-you" e-mails for motivation.

The goodwill garnered has helped us grow by word of mouth.

I have a lot of trouble with this too as I work 9-5 and have had a couple side projects with a few customers. I always suck at the sales and marketing bit.

My latest tool has been just building a huge checklist of (mostly) passive things I can do to drum up business and focusing on just two or three of them every week: https://github.com/karllhughes/side-project-marketing

This helps me stay focused.

B2B Sales can mean a lot of things... from very low-touch to involving a lot of in-person time. To help you better, we'd need to know more about your product and your market.

Hire someone to do it for you and automate as much of the process as possible. Mind you, you dont necessarily need an outbound sales person. You may do with an inbound marketer.

I think the best thing would be to run a PPC campaign when you're at work, so you can acquire emails, and then email those leads through automation (you can do this with Mailchimp) just to confirm their interest.

Then, you have to use your lunch hour or anytime you can sneak away to get the deal done.

That's if you have a budget.

If you don't, I like the idea of hiring a sales person.

P.S. I wrote a book on branding and marketing. If anyone reading this want a free .pdf copy, feel free to email me at bj@bjmendelson.com

The best thing you could do would be to take Weds or Thurs afternoons off. See if your employer will let you re-arrange or reduce your hours.

Funnel leads to book demos on those afternoons you are free then follow up in your lunch breaks when back at work.

You could argue with a full time job you aren't available enough yet to be there to support B2B customers. It might be worth the 10% pay cut to take a half day each week if you truly want to give this a go.

Make sure you do a fivesecondtest.com for your landing page. Thats a make or break. Everything follows after whats the first impression.

Most of the responses in this thread now revolve around collecting money from already paying customers. I think we need a proper definition of what the OP meant with "sales": Acquiring new customers? Onboarding them? Or billing existing customers?

Maybe see with your employer if you could start working part-time? Taking two hours off every day, or one day per week or something like that might be enough to help move your project along. Best of luck!

Hire a salesman?

Seriously, B2B sales tend to require "touch", and it's often reasonable for sales to require as much or more man-hours than developing the actual product.

This advice has been given but from my experience, do not try to automate things unless you have enough customers and revenue. Spend time selling and promoting.

Automate everything. I did the same with my side project (www.deepartistry.com). Use templates and third party integrations like Stripe whenever possible.

Pay someone else to handle it. It might actually cost you quite a bit early on, but a relative or friend might be happy to help.

Learn from PgModeler.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with its author.

Go work for a company in another time zone

Are there any sites that help me estimate how much it would cost me to run a consumer facing site using Amazon’s service (or others)?

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, quit your job and do it full-time.

Stripe is US only and very bad charge back fees and worst dispute resolution. After losing a lot of money by using Stripe as a small time side projector, I recommend using PayPal, they have all that Stripe provides. I don't understand why people go behind Stripe. Because Stripe is cool ? Paypal has everything Stripe has plus zero dispute fees. Stripe has 15$ fees. You will feel the burn when you have lot of disputes which are common. Stripe has statistically favoured customers in disputes as far as my sales. So I ditched Stripe way back. Let Stripe be equal to PayPal. Otherwise using Stripe do not give you much advantage.

Edit: Stripe is not US only, but the countries that they support is very limited. Not recommended if your product has worldwide customers.