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Ask HN: My side project is killing me, any suggestions?

4 points by Mattasher ↗ HN
I'm about 5 months of part-time work in to development of a massively multiplayer online game (growhive.io, think Risk meets slither.io). Growth was great for the first 3.5 months. Stalled for month while we made, and then reversed out of, a major back-end change (more about that in a moment). It's now back up again and growing at a great pace.

My main metric, total time spent playing, went from 20 minutes per day in the first weeks, to 1.5 days/day before the big change, and is now up to 3.5 days of play per real-time day. My second metric (H-index on users actions) is also way up.

So great, right?

It would be, except the back-end change I aborted would have swapped in Postgres for Firebase, which at the time was costing $400/month and is now on pace to blow well past $1000 this month. Meanwhile, keeping up with with the website, without even adding new features, is taking a couple hours per day. I have an assistant to help with user emails and some social media promotion, but no one to help on the business or planning side. I'd like to bring in people to help with that, but adding tasks I struggle with (networking and outreach) on top an already full plate of front end dev and back end containment is daunting at best.

I feel stuck in terms of my next move. Try again to transition to Postgres to save cash? Gamble my limited energies on trying to find a co-founder? Ignore the rising costs and grind through my (long) list of bug fixes and features? Sacrifice a lamb in the name of Chris Sacca?

7 comments

[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] thread
david927
Contact me. My email is in my profile.
Mattasher
Tks email sent. I've added my email address to my profile in case anyone else wants to contact me.
kristianp
"3.5 days of play per real time day"

Can you explain what that is in daily active users?

Interesting game, but there's no help or FAQ. How do you get more nectar? Is it per battle won? What is a black chip?

Mattasher
The H-index I mentioned gets close to that. Yesterday we had about 100 users who each took over 100 game actions (for example, placing a chip is a game action). Beyond that there's a long tail of people with much fewer game actions.

I've found that the intrigue of figuring things out drives some of the engagement, though many of the items on the page have explanations when you click on them (including Nectar), and we have more info at growhive.io/blog.

Mattasher
Quick update: I found a way to cut firebase usage back down to $400/mo even with the higher traffic.
LurkersWillLurk
How did you do that, if I may ask?
Mattasher
I have a few processes on the server that do regular queries on the firebase data. I was able to tweak these to be much less aggressive in terms of the amount of data they request.