From idea to revenue in 5 working days, thanks to HN | Hacker News Reader

From idea to revenue in 5 working days, thanks to HN

jeremyphelps.com

173 pointsremyp32 comments

It's kinda amazing that OP already made money with 3k unique visitors from HN. I am glad you received what you wished for.

Making it to the front page of HN is amazing. I am fortunate to have several entries and projects making the front page of HN in the last couple of months.

My little story that has nothing to do with money. I am an international grad student. Recently I moved to a new city with very few friends, the girl I was seeing for 4 years in grad school stopped talking to me, my grad school thesis was tougher than I thought, I needed to find a job while waiting for my EAD card being stuck in the queue, my driver's license was expiring and I couldn't renew it because of the darn EAD card didn't come, it was just too much to handle. I was feeling lonely, demotivated, confused. I became numb, I loved computers all my life yet didn't have the passion to program, so I tried to do a lot of things to escape reality. I wrote a lot both programs and blogging. One of my "fun" programming projects that I did in 1 day waiting for it to compile has recently been on HN front page, then it made its way to /r/raspberry_pi, hackaday, /r/android, androidpolice, zdnet among many others. I got hit by 60k unique visitors in the last 10 days and I made exactly 0 cents from it (and I made a stance to not ask people for money). I have people sending me emails and tweets thanking me every day since. I guess to me at this point, passion is worth more than anything in this world. When I was answering questions from HN and reddit, sometimes my eyes got really wet because I was really feeling hopeless, but then the optimism and kindness of people I don't know were something I could feel. I can't be more thankful for what I received from the HN community. I couldn't ask for more.

I'm just telling you all this about my life because I figured I can't be the anonymous jimmies like I was before anymore. I have a real story, not very pretty and successful, but I guess a story worth telling because there might be other jimmies who are desperate and sad in this world reading this: don't ever give up hope, keep creating cool shit, you'll be alright. I have another blog post that made HN front page 5 months after I published it. No one ever mentioned it being cool to me: it has 0 people reading it before someone submitted and made HN front page. You thought the world doesn't care about you, but you never know when your honest efforts will pay off.

(If you're curious, it's called getcrankshaft.com - a GNU/Linux distro for the Pi that makes it a makeshift android auto)

I also had an app that made it to HN front page last year: https://www.pagedash.com (web scrapbooking, aka personal web archive)

Ultimately it didn't take off as hoped, and it wasn't the advertising type of app (unlike OP's). It is, however, steadily getting some paid subscriptions, for which I am hopeful and thankful. Anyhow I'm back at a job for now.

Great story - you got an extra click, but then I bounced due to your 3.2mb PNG image on the homepage.

I ran that same image through imageOptim and it came out identical at 200kb - could even be better. I'm on adsl and "felt" it, also you just killed 3mb x 3000... It might not matter for most, but for some it does.

You don't even need any fancy image optimizer, just loading and resaving it in a basic paint program is enough to reduce it to <400K.

I'm guessing the image file on the site has been saved without compression enabled. It's noticeably slow to load. Not only that, but it reloads every time I visit the page, so they might want to sort out their caching policy too.

It's not really fancy, it's actually the easiest way to do it without thinking much.

Thanks for this write-up, it's really nice to see the process start to finish in such a straightforward way.

Is your intention to continue letting the user base grow naturally, or do you have plans to post about this in other communities?

Also, I think the sponsor revenue model is really interesting. Can anybody point to stats on the effectiveness of project/podcast/video sponsorship vs. more conventional internet ads?

I'm a generally terrible marketer, so I'm mostly planning on growing it naturally. There are already loads of interesting people on the platform that will sustain it for some time, so I'm happy with that.

I built it for fun -- there's no need for it to grow to be a real business.

Wasn't kismet a wifi security tool?

I knew that name rang a bell. That is exactly what it is: https://www.kismetwireless.net/

Really fantastic execution! Been playing with a similar idea for internally at large companies, where you get intro'd to a new person in a different team every week, and get a flavour of what they're about (it's not a tested use case, but something to scratch my own itch).

Signed up, great second stage marketing for the audience with the follow-up post!

I applaud the effort, however, I was expecting that you would have a business model, not 1-off revenue from a sponsor. You could argue sponsorship is a business model, but it is certainly not a scaleable one at the level of impressions or unique views your business has.

/rant

Nonetheless, great work and congrats on getting the idea off the ground. It's still impressive to get so much attention and I can empathize with the problem you are solving.

Thanks! I do expect to continue offering sponsorships so that it can at least cover its costs. At the moment I'm just happy people are using the product and seem to like it.

If continues growing, who knows? Maybe it could become a real business. Evolving and iterating is the name of the game, right?

> If continues growing, who knows? Maybe it could become a real business. Evolving and iterating is the name of the game, right?

Absolutely!

I had tentatively been planning on a freemium model, and I could not have been more wrong. Users were unanimously and strongly against it, so I had to find another way

This took me by surprise. Why is HN against freemiums? I'm debating whether to introduce a freemium plan into my project [0] and would appreciate some insight on this.

[0] https://www.cachoid.com

The general consensus is that customers cost money -- not just in terms of infrastructure, but also support. Customers who do not want to pay, will never pay, but will still cost you money. It's better to aim your product at people who want to pay. Customers who want to pay will not baulk at paying (by definition). Freemium is a loss-leader marketing scheme. There may be other effective marketing schemes that don't continuously cost you money.

> That's right: I wrote something in jQuery in the year 2018.

JQuery - it's simple and it works without any fancy tooling or non-standard HTML/templates which makes it pretty great for projects where you want a quick turnaround.

This is cool. You should consider expanding this to other communities besides HN if it works here. I’m a marketer and this would likely be received well in marketing communities I’m a part of.

You should charge for this upfront, to make it more exclusive. Realistically a busy person will follow up on maybe 1 a week at max, so I want them to be high quality intros

Maybe have tiers of pricing and the option to only be introduced to people at the same (or lower) tier.

or karma level (at least >1 ?)

Matches are bidirectional by definition, so the lower tier user in any match will have gotten a higher tier match without paying the fee. It also raises some ethical concerns with segregating users by social class.

Yes matches are bi-directional, but the match is at the higher tiered user's discretion. That is, by paying more, you have the option to more finely filter matches.

Regarding ethical concerns, I'm not imagining tiers in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, but something like a one-off $1, $10, $20 payment wouldn't be segregating by social class in any significant way while still providing nominal filtering ability.

> That's right: I wrote something in jQuery in the year 2018.

ahaha what? Indeed it's a pity it wasn't just html and css, but we will survive...

Is it just me, but when the site has fully loaded I can't use my arrow keys and the page up/page down keys to scroll the site?

I...never noticed that before. That's super annoying. Must be something with the template, thank you for pointing it out!

Great success in just 5 days.

Wish I could do this and ditch the blithering idiots at my work.

great, nice idea

Here's an archive link since the original is not secure and fails to load without JS.

https://archive.fo/CpUwi

I'm always baffled by straightforward sites that can be seen to load their stylesheets and content only to finally blank out at the last moment when finally complete because JS isn't enabled. This isn't necessarily a knock on the OP since I know many sites use templates.

I know what you mean and I hate it.

Tvtropes does that a lot, it's incredibly annoying and I switched to allthetropes instead since they manage to load just fine.

hasura.io is also a great discovery

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