Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and eventually, maybe one of those projects will take off and start generating a decent amount of profit.

A few years ago when I was a consultant, in my free time I worked on my World of Warcraft guild's website and after a year and a half, I realized it was better than the vast majority of other guild sites out there (imo), and thought, maybe I could charge for this if i made it a service. So I spent 6 months rewriting my own guild's site to make it "general purpose" allowing other guilds to create websites.

The thought was, "maybe I can score a few extra bucks on the side." I launched in May of '06 and was profitable immediately, and by January '07, business was so good that I dropped consulting altogether to focus on the guild hosting site.

So keep plugging away. I probably had 5 or 6 projects (Frozen Custard Stand CMS system anyone?) that I worked on "on the side" before this one actually turned into a profitable venture.

Wow. May I ask, how profitable was the WoW meta-guild site?

I don't remember how profitable 2006 was (since the income was combined with consulting at the end for taxes), but for 2007 and 2008, it was something like $90k revenue each year. 2008 was on a course for a bigger year (March did $14k) and then it seemed all WoW interest dropped considerably after July (if you look at the alexa ratings for the main guild hosting services, they all took the same dive). It's nothing massive or anything, but it's a reasonable living for providing gaming service to folks who are pretty much just like me :)

Hell. Yes. Way to go.

One more: could you estimate how many total hours of work you've invested into the WoW meta-guild site?

That one, I honestly couldn't estimate. Some weeks I do no coding and just answer support emails, phone calls, and forum posts. Other weeks, I'll code seemingly nonstop over 80-90 hours/week and won't do anything else (I won't even feel like gaming during those hard core weeks, all I care about, and all I dream about is coding).

Is much time lost due to burnout? E.g. periods when you don't feel like working on code, support emails, phone calls, or forum posts -- just on leveling your character. Have you developed any techniques to deal with those periods?

Oh sure, usually after a long stint of coding (several weeks), I'll take a break from coding. But regardless of what kind of week it is, I'm answering phone calls and emails and doing general support (had to do support even on my Honeymoon with satellite internet on our cruise).

I deal with them just by knowing that they have to get done. It's hard to say. A lot of what keeps me going is pride, I guess. When I don't feel like working on the guild hosting site, I just work on random other projects to keep me going.

(I'm getting tired, so my apologies if I'm rambling nonsense)

No, that was great. Thank you for your time.

July 2008 is right about the time Age of Conan launched. I wonder if that's really what caused the drop?

Which immediately makes me wonder how easy it would be to scale chops' site to service other MMOs. If you could get it to the point where you can release a fully-featured guild website on the launch day of each new MMO you might just be on to something :)

I should have specified that it is actually multiplatform. The site currently natively supports about 15 MMO games, and has an interface for customizing and specifying your own game parameters (level cap, tradeskills, classes, races, etc).

WoW is just the biggest player by far. Currently I host approximately 88% WoW guilds. The other "bigger players" are EQ, EQ2, Warhammer, AOC, FFXI, and LOTRO, with Warhammer being the biggest non-WoW game at 2%.

WoW just has so many more players.

Hah...no. Age of Conan didn't take much of a dent at all in WoW's numbers. It had a lot of hype, but the hard core pretty much gravitated back to WoW since AoC's endgame was pretty much non-existent, at least from what I heard (I only made it to level 11).

Wow, congratulations.

How did you get your initial growth? i.e. where did you find your first 100 guilds and how did you convince them to sign up?

Thanks.

I offered the first 15 sites free on a first-come, first-serve basis, which was while I was in beta yet. In a few cases, a few people had come to my own guild's site asking where it was hosted, and I redirected them to the hosting site. Otherwise, I've pretty much always just done Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN ads.

There wasn't a whole lot of convincing. I offered a 30-day money back guarantee and people just started signing up and paying even before I was advertising - those first few I have no idea how they found the site (I even had someone sign up and pay even though my Auth.net account was still in test mode so I just let them have the site free). Aside from that initial 15 guilds, I've never offered a free version. Every guild I've hosted has paid for it (with the exception of friends of mine that were starting their own guilds, of course).

I had (have) a "Featured Guilds" section which showed off what other guilds had done with the system, an online demo for people to tinker with the system before signing up, and offered more features than any other guild hosting site (or any open source package offered as far as I can tell). The only major guild hosting site out there that did this was stagnating from lack of competition.

That's what was so surprising about it...I wasn't expecting the degree of growth I had gotten at all.

It made a lot of promise to make easy what was otherwise a tedious thing.

Looking back, it just seems like it was "right place at the right time", and everything just...sort of...happened.

But like I said, the platform was in development for a year and a half before it launched, since it was my own guild's site, and I was completely serious that I wanted my own guild's site to be one of the best out there feature-wise.

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