Ask HN: How to monetize this side project?
the website is: https://www.extempengine.com
The app is called Extemp Engine, and it's a specially designed news search engine for students participating in one kind of speech competition in the USA.
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# history
The simple description: it loads a large archive of news articles locally, offline, and makes them easy to search through.
it's a niche app i built for high school students.
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# problem
My biggest problem is that I'm not sure how to monetize it without alienating the small following that it already has.
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# prospects
I have an list of 114 email addresses of people who have incidentally (un prompted) clicked the 'sign up' link on the website, and I have a google plus group of 10-20 alpha testers. My website gets about 30 users per day, mostly (90%+) new, and most (75%) from search.
I still have connections to my local school district, so i could promote it via those channels too.
If there's key data i forgot to mention, just ask and i'll post it.
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# why monetize?
I want to monetize it because i'm hitting hard limits on my mongodb databases (I'm using mongolab). And it's causing API failures. The chrome client itself is also failing to scale with large numbers of articles. (377,000~ articles consume approximately 50GB of my mongo database). It's getting hard for me to justify spending time to fix these issues for an app that isn't generating revenue.
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>> Given the situation, how should i monetize this app?
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Thank you for reading
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extended version without [TRUNCATED] can be found here:
http://hayksaakian.com/article/54b19cbcc9e0270200137ffa/how-to-monetize-extemp-engine