Ask HN: Seriously Frustrated. Encouragement, Advice, Bitch Slap Needed.

It isn't easy to make a product that generates a few hundred dollars a month. The way Hacker News writes about these little products, you'd think they fall off trees. Nope. The step from nothing to $250/month is much much greater than the step from $250/month to $5,000/month.

You're frustrated because it isn't easy. I mean seriously, you really think there is a golden bullet to this? There isn't. Launch more stuff.

I agree. If you read HN on a daily basis it does often feel like building a product that generates money is easy. I guess that biggest question is what does traction feel and look like?

In my startup that succeed, traction happened like this:

We were about to shut down, I returned to my old job at the IRS - we were not making any money at all. Suddenly, a huge construction company came to town to build a dam. We rushed to try to sell to them and somehow they bought it. It was cool because the company would have profits at least for some time.

But after that, hundreds of companies that had business with them started calling us. In a matter of 3 months we grew more than 600%

It took 9 years to find that single client that created traction for us. I don't know if you can create traction by yourself. I think you need to find someone that can create traction, usually someone that is a client of many companies and somehow spread the word about you.

Agreed. HN and other news sites tend to write only about success or semi-success stories, and we are missing the huge number of non-success ones. Non-success is not a failure, it is a data point, but typically don't get through the news.

You should go over all of your side projects and catalog the point in the project and the reason that your interest fell off. Maybe you'll find a common theme such as, "built prototype, now need to add a ton of (tedious) features". Or "built MVP, now need to polish the design and write marketing copy". If you're able to find such a theme, it may suggest a path to success. For example, if you always get to a functional product but quit when it's time to promote, you may want to find yourself a bizdev partner.

Aside from that, the only other thing I'd say is that you should find yourself a partner. Things turn out much better when you've got someone to work with.

Thanks for sharing this. I found these comments very helpful. A few thoughts from what I learned at my first company, and from someone possibly a bit more revenue minded.

-First, I recommend doing some personal strength tests such as the Gallup Strengthsfinder test. If you have a better idea what you are strong at, this may help how you approach solving the question of how to monetize things.

-Sales will not just appear, you'll likely have to email/call/meet/blog/do everything it takes to get the initial buyers group. I had no idea how to "Sell" something but I picked up a sales book, read it, put on a suit by myself in my apartment while I made sales phone calls (the suit was a confidence booster). Once you get the first sale everything gets easier...at least for a while until you hit Phase 2 which is too many people buying but that is a different Q&A.

-Have you thought about asking people or companies what they need, what XYZ would be worth to them, and then building it for them? This decreases your risk since they have already told you what they would buy. Make them pre-pay.

One of my favorite stories is of the entrepreneur who goes to a company and asks, "What product do you guys really need right now?" They inform the entrepreneur and he responds, "That's interesting, I make that!" He hadn't even built the product out but did it under their specifications. Once that was complete he went back to them and said, "What other product do you really need right now?" They informed him and he said, "I make that too." Thus started his business.

This is me too.

I developed an app which was constrained by time (sport event to be precise). I had to work towards a time limit or else it was worthless. I also spent a decent sum money on getting design work done so I wasn't going to quit.

The app was big failure but I actually feel very pleased with myself for sticking to something and getting it out the door. Because of this experience I feel more confident about shipping the new product I'm working on.

In summary, reasons I believe I got something out the door:

- Having an actual deadline

- Working with others

- Investing your own money

Having a deadline means you have something to aim for. Otherwise it's just too easy to be working on something for ever. This twinned with seeing you become out of pocket for not sticking to your deadline is a motivator too.

By working with others I don't just mean working on a project with a buddy. I mean the people I hired to do designs or do research. These people often came back to me asking questions about what I wanted done so I wasn't able to stop thinking about the project for too long. Having people help out also made sure that I had stuff ready for them to work on too.

Good luck.

edit - when I had to research / collect media for the app I encountered some really painful problems - which is now the basis for my present project!

Not got anything to contribute aside from this post could quite easily be me ... exactly the same boat, exactly the same feeling ... chin up

Thanks. I'm sure there are quite a few that feel the same. Hopefully this will be up voted a bit and get some attention.

This is exactly where I'm at right now. I just built a little prototype and right before launching I don't think the idea is going to pan out. Send me an email and let's chat.

I've been lurking this site for years. It's these comments that brought me out from lurking after spending the past 11 months building something I hope will work out. If you folks are interested in a google hangout, irc chatroom, I don't care, something... please let me know, too!

Email: christopher.bui@folkrobots.com

Just to drop my 2 cents, answering your questions (I've started two startups, one failed, one succeeded).

1) It found me. Someone asked me how to solve a specific problem and I realized I could build a product; Edited: My personal strategy for dealing with competition: Ignore, don't go to their website, never, don't read about them, it will not help you.

2) If you can pick one, always choose services instead of products. Products usually comes with liabilities and the market is prone to saturation.

3) Try to build something more simple that people you already know would pay a little money to use. I never suggest books, specially 'self-help' but you need to read Rework by 37signals guys.

Best of luck.

Build stuff that is already out there - competition is fine in any marketplace if there are enough consumers for the product. Create a copy of software that is already performing well, tweak a bit of it to give it your own flavour - copying something that already exists will give you the chops to pull off something unique when the inspiration hits you. Kind of like learning to play music - learn some basics, copy the classics/standards in your style, improvise a bit on the classics and eventually, write your own tune.

If you can find it, look up jgc's talk at the last HN London meetup - he gave a talk on "ideas" it was good.

I am highly interested in the answer to this. I am tired of learning news things just to learn them. I want to be able to the use the stuff i learn to build something that is actually useful and interesting, and not just another app/website in some already crowded space. I have built a few apps that I use personally but they are not things i feel anyone would pay for. They mostly solve my particular requirements for an already solved problem. I would love to find an answer to this question.

Talk to people that do stuff and they will often tell you about problems they have. if it is something you think you could do something about. talk to more people who do the same thing and see if they have the same problem. Is the solution already out there? could you do it significantly better? They may also have an idea about a solution to give you a starting point. Is it a big enough problem? would it be worth your time building a rough MVP?

I feel you on this. I am a seasoned dev and have worked on lots of projects. But it is always someone elses vision and I kind of fill in the blanks and make it happen.

When you have to supply the vision, it gets A LOT harder! I think it is also distorting when you've worked on projects that have had success finacially but are not really great in the dev department.

A lot goes into a profitable project besides just good development.

I tend to work on stuff I want for myself after failing to convince less lazy, more capable people to do it for me. If I still want it enough to do it myself, then I do it. My impatience/random ideas and desires/tendency-to-criticize-everything must overcome my laziness to create a perfect storm to convince me I should actually fix some problem, that it's not just some random thing I'm being a perfectionist about, before I do anything.

I felt like this for a long while. The last few projects I've built have been kind of a turning point, in either popularity or revenue. I focused on keeping it small and sharing it with people.

No matter how much work you put in on a big project you never feel 'done' and that leads to feeling demoralized. Also small ideas need less maintaining.

This is coming from someone with very limited development skills!

Care to share some of the stuff you've built?

This is a how I feel too, so many ideas that have fizzled and very few actually being finished, which after so many times gets really discouraging. Maybe this is your problem to solve, for yourself and for the rest of us?

I'll lend a hand anyway I can if you set out to solve this -Mike

You should work on the simplest idea you can think of. Start small and improve as you go. Launch something and just focus on covering the hosting cost.

Making a constant $1/day is really hard. If money is the only motivation then you'll give up really easy.