Show/Ask HN: My side project for over a year; should I take it on full time? | Hacker News Reader

Show/Ask HN: My side project for over a year; should I take it on full time?

market.android.com

32 pointsmakeramen37 comments

Here's my opinion, build another app, or better yet build 3 other apps and diversify your income. 1 mobile app is not enough to require full time dedication, but having 3 or 4 apps to cycle between will keep you busy and should provide good money.

I upvoted, and you're not the first to suggest this either. But I must argue that to have 3 or 4 well-ranked apps with a solid income is easier said than done, especially for a single developer.

I wish I had the insight to know exactly what 3 or 4 other apps to write so I can have a steady income. But chances are by the time I finish writing 3 good apps a year from now, I'll be lucky if one of them has as much traction as this one.

The other choice would be to take this app that already has traction (from only my part time work) and pour more time an energy into it to see how big it could really get.

Thoughts?

Use the traction you've already got in the productivity category with this app to tackle other problems in that area. Be the next 37signals of the Android marketplace.

I am facing the exact same decision set in many respects.

1. I have one good app in dev process in a market segment that is hot, Custom HomeScreens

2. I know that I need some more apps, was thinking some quick 2d games via using andengine.

3. I do have some fulltime inquiries that might work as base income to fund the full 12 month weekend-evening dev cycle.

Pull Tim Bray's recent blog posts on making money in the android market. There also was some recent HN articles on android dev's making $120,000 yearly with a paired free and paid approach.

BTW, what dev processes are you using thus far? I am switching to combination TDD and BDD approach using robolectric and robotium/android-mock to take some of the pain out.

Dev process? I do what I think my app needs. It's rather 37signals-esque. I was the original user, and that's just how it's grown, other people happened to like it. I only take on other peoples suggested features when they align with what I want out of the app, or when the screaming and yelling from my users gets unbearable.

I have no tolerance for bugs, bullshit, or shitty customer support. Emails are answered within a day but usually hours, sometimes bugfixes even come out in less than an hour.

I don't unit test, I just write good code ;) Seriously, none of the bugs I've encountered were really unit-testable, so I don't really bother.

this blog post? http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/26/Mobile-Mon...

that is one of them and he has some more in fact..

Depends on the app, but for us one mobile app is more than enough to keep one of our folks busy full time. It takes a heck of a lot of work and dedication to make a solid app.

I really wish we had a few more folks hacking on Android! cough we're hiring cough :P

As someone who's been doing the nights-and-weekends thing for a long time, my advice is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do you really, really hate your job? Is it coming to a point where you have to choose one or the other?

Quitting your job and jumping onto your app full time might accelerate development, but it probably won't accelerate revenue, at least not a lot. Keep growing it on the side and take the leap when it's not a huge step down from your current income and when sales are steady enough that you feel comfortable.

Very slick app, but discovery on Android can be tough.

Shoot me an email, aschobel (at) catch.com and I can put you in touch with our Google Developer advocates, you definitely want to get featured.

What are you thinking of using for online sync/backup? RTM? Google lets you backup blobs using BackupManager, might be worth looking into.

Good luck!

I've always wondered how they chose their featured apps. Any more insight?

You need to contact them and they have a team decide if they will feature you.

They look at how closely you follow the Android HIG, level of polish in the app, have you been recently featured, etc.

We also send them beta version of our apps and they give us great feedback.

Thank you! I was wondering how that works even though I have contributed some bug fixes to the android sdk before...

Is there a google page with the addy to send the betas ?

Once again thanks for the info

shrug I haven't seen any online page to send betas and such.

Meet a few of the dev advocates at IO, SXSW, and a bunch of the Android events around SF.

I just found another way.. several of my Angel VC contacts are friendly with Google Android Dev Advocates..

Wow thanks! I'll send you an email right now.

Catch.com will bring you some tough competition since they raised a few million in capital and their app is free.

I've tried out a ton of todo list apps on Android theirs was the best.

Syncing with their site is key. I can type out a grocery list at home on my laptop onto their site. Then at the store pull out the phone and its there.

That would be a great feature to offer.

I agree, web app + sync is the big push I would need a lot of time to commit to.

And I've definitely seen catch/3banana before. I feel like they are more competitors to Evernote than to me. Simplenote's recent addition of a list feature has me more troubled, even though they don't have an android client yet.

You're right, simplenote doesn't have a native android client but I am a simplenote user and use mNote on my galaxy s; no complaints, syncs flawlessly (haven't used 'lists' though). Just posting in case you haven't seen the app.

Good luck, I'm going to give your app a go.

Kinda, we are trying to make it easier to capture what matters (things, people, places) and be able to pivot on that data. Productivity is a nice onramp for that.

Folks have been asking for ToDo functionality for a while now, I want to keep the productivity features to an absolute minimum.

Throws an SSL error/warning:

    This is probably not the site that you are looking for!

    You attempted to reach market.android.com, but instead you actually
    reached a server identifying itself as *.google.com.  This may be
    caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more
    serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to
    visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of market.android.com.
    You should not proceed.

Seems to be back to normal, using Chrome 9.0.597.107

Depends on how much $ you're making from it and what sort of growth you think you can achieve.

I checked out the app and it looks very nice. I will be buying soon.

I'm making anywhere from $500-$1500 a month, it really varies based on sales. The biggest leap I want to make is to offer a web version with sync, but that would be a rather large effort.

Ideally I'd like to see it become a Web+Device synced version of Things that actually exists.

If you're young, yes, go for it. But diversify, launch 2-3 apps a year minimum.

How much more do you feel like you'd make by having web-sync ?

It sounds like a large project compared to just steadily polishing the app itself and starting a second app on the side, or even as your new main project.

An added benefit in starting work on a second app is diversification, different target audience, different appspace. You say building a good app is hard, but so is building a good web offering.

That's not too bad really... If you think you can live on it and whatever savings you have, are young, don't have many commitments, and can dedicate the time, then I say go for the risk.

Why $2.99? Have you tried other price points?

It was originally at .99, then raised to 1.99, and eventually 2.99 without seeing significant decrease in sales numbers. But at 2.99 I did start getting comments saying it was expensive, so I decided that was a good price to stay at.

Dropbox sync would be enough for me.

gtasks sync could cover the web side until you can build your own web app. :)

Gtasks doesn't have a public API that I know of. I know there are some undocumented ways to get at it, but I'm not sure I want to deal with it. One of the main problems with syncing with other services is just the way todos are organized are different from mine.

off-hand sounds like if you do a limited-feature free version you could bring up that amount at least double it or maybe even 5x it..

Like this? https://market.android.com/details?id=com.makeramen.todolist...

Diversify. The mobile app market is very volatile, and you don't want to put your eggs in one basket. As many others suggest here you probably want to make a few other apps which have traction just in case your big one fails.

There's a lot going against you as time goes on. Other people roll out apps, technology changes which could suddenly cut your income -- so yea, highly recommend you diversify.

WHY DID NO ONE MENTION RTM? It's by far the best list out there

In my experience, when I am thinking about doing something (no matter how big or small), it generally turns out better when I do it instead of when I don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com