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Comment by swalberg | Hacker News Reader

http://SmallPayroll.ca was a one-man-in-his-spare-time project until recently. What I did was:

1. SEM - Google AdWords mostly. I spent a fair time on this, partially because my day job at the time was in the SEM field

2. Organic - I got a great domain that contained my primary keywords, got a landing page built, and it ended up driving a lot of organic traffic. I also set up a blog on the main site. The blog was good for traffic, but not that great for conversions.

3. Referrals - my app is mostly used by people that hire domestic help, so I tried talking to the agencies that help people find that help. Hard to measure that one.

4. Provide awesome customer service - I have been told by several of my customers that they have sent their friends.

5. Free trial - The app gives a 30 day free trial. Many customers have thanked me for that.

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Nice work launching this on the side, I know how exhilarating it can feel when people pay you for what you made.

One comment – The orange and brown color combination on your landing page looks visually tiring to me, which was probably why someone else said that your site looks depressing.

Take color psychology into account, here's a link I googled that touches on that:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/design/color-psychology-websit...

And all the best!

- Alvin Lai

Have you written about your experiences with transitioning from "spare time project" to what it is now? I saw that there is a blog for smallpayroll.ca, but do you have a personal blog that covers the start of your business and beyond?

I'm very interested in transitioning spare-time projects into something real. Thanks for any info, and congratulations on smallpayroll.ca!

There are some other people involved now, and they've asked that I hold off on anything like that for a little bit. http://ertw.com/blog/ is where it'll be.

Your app is so depressing.

Your comment made me click on the app. :)

I thought it was attractive, and fills a need. Nothing depressing that I can see.

Why is it depressing?

I get depressed regarding income taxes, especially for low-income people (i.e., the nannies). Did you know that on a proportional basis, in nearly every country with "progressive" income taxes, the working poor pay the most tithes to the government than they ever have? If you compare the institution of income taxes in "democracies" in the early 20th century to now, the poor have shouldered most of the burden, proportional to income. Kind of flips the whole bleeding heart mechanism for "redistribution of wealth" thing on its head, IMO.

Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a political discussion but that was the reason behind my comment.

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