Ask HN: Launching a side-project
1. When to launch: too soon or too late?
Rather launch 'embarrassingly early' than later to benefit from early feedback. It has been used at my day job and does make some tasks faster and easier. I made basic changes so that it can run multi-tenant.
2. Pricing
Going to use an open-source core. The back-end and front-end will both be AGPL open-source from the start. Client access libraries to the API will be MIT licenced. The 'core' is that which is needed to run the app standalone in one's own environment, similar to what is run at my day job. Other non-core changes are infra-related e.g. supporting more scalable dbs.
Having the core open source also makes any service provider (including myself) use value-add-based pricing. I'm planning on $5, $29, $150 per month for Hobby, Startup, and Business tiers which have different limits and all with a free trial. Using a PayPal checkout button which seems to support the free trial bit.
3. Marketing
Being a side-project I'm not spending on marketing, just on operating the platform. The main places I hope to get traffic from are HN and Product Hunt. Also thought I'd give out some free accounts (can I call it Beta if I'm charging others?).
Other ideas are to write dev blog posts and possibly tech talks on software development with the related product plug. I don't have any significant online presence (Twitter etc).
Materials I have so far:
a. the webapp (static served from Netlify+CloudFlare)
b. single landing page
(unspalsh bg, screenshot, features, pricing and checkout)
c. API documentation
d. try it playground/sandbox
(like cURL requests in web forms)
e. favicon (i.e. low quality logo)
f. an .io domain name