Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue
It's been a long slow hog and I almost gave up a few times (more than a few) but when covid hit this year it gave me some time to really focus on my product. There were stupid user journey things that I knew needed fixed. There were some features I knew needed added. And I knew the pricing was wrong.
I spent some hardcore time working on these things back in March / April and since then my MRR has continued to grow.
My product is SongBox (https://songbox.rocks) - it's an alternative to things like bandcamp and soundcloud for creators who need to share audio files privately.
I'm at a stage now where I've bottomed out all the work I've wanted to do and I'm looking for a fresh round of feedback. Would love you guys to check it out and see what you can think of.
Thanks!
318 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 555 ms ] threadFeedback:
- Could you remove the email requirement for getting started? Maybe figure out a way for people to associate an email account after they do the "Getting Started"?
- Could you put a back button on the tutorial?
- In addition to the poll at the end of the tutorial, I hope you are capturing implicit feedback data to determine how effective it is. Things like average time between clicks and whether users click the buttons you suggest immediately after are indicators of effectiveness.
- For the registration form, maybe get rid of either the label "Display Name" or the placeholder text "Your Artist Name..."? It was confusing having them be different.
As for actual content, unfortunately I can't help you. I don't have any personal music to upload so someone else will have to give you feedback. I hope my suggestions on registration were helpful. Congratulations again on your early success and good luck expanding in 2021.
- Yeah I don't actually use the email address for anything other than sending updates about the product and standard marketing stuff. So I'm open experimenting with this to see how it affects conversion.
- Yeah... this is a good idea. Consider it done.
- Yeah I use a service to make the tutorials and they have a great dashboard.
- Hundred percent... I didn't realise I had named them differently.
Thanks so much.
From the Why I Built page:
> Years later, and I've taken a job in software at a large media company. I'll name no names but this company had music brands that were (and are) known globally.
How have you navigated intellectual property to SongBox with your current employer, who it sounds like works in the same industry and who might have claim on some part of what you've created?
"In the course of your employment" or similar words used to be a more reasonable standard that was widely considered fair to both sides for salaried employees. In other words, things you do on company time, using company resources and/or in the company's line of business go to the company, but they have no claim beyond that. I haven't spoken to a lawyer about this recently, so if the issue might affect you, please check whether this is still correct and don't just rely on my comment here.
And what if you actually hire people to work on it for the time after you join the other company?
Where does it end?
What if your parents never met?
Please don't read this as facetious, I'm not meaning to be.
What I am asking is what happens with work/projects/apps that someone has done on the side before joining a company, and especially in the case that this creates a revenue stream.
In my current role I mentioned that I work on things on the side and they were like... oh that's not allowed, and I said... oh well I can't work here then.
They changed the rule lol
Good for you! There seems to be a certain mindset in some company bosses, and it's usually middle management types who have made it to a moderately senior level and never not been "company men" (or women etc. obviously) in my experience. It's like they think becoming an employee at their firm means giving over your life to them, and that by graciously allowing you to work for them they're doing you some big favour that justifies that stance. This is supported by the corporate lawyers routinely trying to insert heavily one-sided terms into employment contracts. But that simply isn't what an employment relationship is, certainly not in the West in 2020, and enough good people saying "no" and being willing to walk away is the only way the "we own you" people will learn.
When I interview for a position I am interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me. Everyone should think like this.
I recently came upon lots of free time and I'm more and more inclined to do one side project, I don't think it will free me to need a 9to5 job in the meantime, but at least I can be productive without being bossed around and just do whatever I want with it.
Might as well try to launch something public instead of acummulating unused private repos on github, I mean they're free now (thx microsoft overlords) but still failures on forgotten drawers...
Sorry for my random rant, thanks for sharing your experience!
Some suggestions:
- maybe factor number of listens into your pricing rather than tracks to nudge people into higher pricing around the time they are broadening their outreach.
- think about automating distribution to soundcloud, youtube, spotify, etc. as a next step. Could be interesting for e.g. podcast creators to not have to micromanage each of those. Probably some or all of those have APIs for this.
Thanks!
Now I email everyone who takes a paid plan.
But yeah to answer your questions I just email everyone like a human being. Not like some marketer gasbag. I build relationships, make sure I'm on point when someone has an issue, and then just ask them for a testimonial.
All the testimonials on there just are are legit paying customers.
Customers really appreciate it. I guess its not for everyone, and it's not infinitely scaleable but it is highly valuable in the early stages.
If you feel that a real human person is behind all that, and not a faceless company, you're also much more likely to share feedback. (Nobody would share improvement ideas for Windows with Microsoft, since you can be sure that those go straigth to /dev/null (or, more appropriately, the recycle bin).)
I get so much response when I email people. Every email is hand typed and I just say whatever comes to mind at the time.
Its super helpful for getting feedback and getting to know my customers.
Regardless, as one who has never even had the courage to hang his own shingle, I am impressed.
Months and months of A/B testing copy, images, price points.
I'm happy with it and I appreciate your words.
Thank you.
A/B testing works great at google scale.
I would rather do it than not.
I had the same initial reaction and I believe it's because we, or at least I, have become accustomed to lower quality / unfinished / very MVP type applications on the newer TLDs.
Congratulations on your growth and success gigamick!
I've done a bunch of experimentation of price points over the years and the setup now converts by far the best. Started seeing conversions shoot up instantly upon deploying the latest pricing.
Prior to this setup it was $10, $25 and $50. No-one took out pro.
When I changed to $10, $20 and $30 it all changed. Now the majority of my paying customers are on the $20 and $30 plans.
Cheers
>Filter: /api/v1/track/*
>Filter List: EasyPrivacy
>https://songbox.rocks/api/v1/track/6d2c872d-fb1b-11e8-87d2-4...
Probably some generic analytics blocking filter.
thanks for pointing out. I will remedy.
It might be a bit egoistical, but this makes me feel better about my project going at a snail's pace (after 6 months I have something barely resembling an MVP).
Growing slowly has aided me hugely in being able to refine and optimise as I went. If I had the money to throw at marketing 2 years ago, to get loads of eyeballs on the site, it would have failed. Because the product wasn't ready then. It's been 2 years of listening to feedback and making incremental changes that has allowed me to really start growing revenue this year.
Getting first users was really tough. I "launched" on product hunt and that was a bomb. I posted around some forums and that got some attention, but it was a post on reddit that was seen by the owner of a niche forum for audio engineers that helped.
He allowed to me to post in their commercial thread and that got me going with a bunch of audio engineers who saw real value in the product.
That burst of interest and Q&A gave me a TON of feedback to improve things and add features.
Then things just VERY slowly started to snowball. and I do mean VERY SLOWLY.
I also get a lot of traffic from organic google searches as I rank number 1 in google for some very relevant search terms. Even outranking soundcloud. Have no idea how that happened.
As far as I'm concerned it was 2 years of refining the product. Only in the past 6 months have I seen consistent month on month growth, and it's still very early days.
It's not been completely a waste of time on my case at least though, I learned new tech stuff and it's a great addition on my CV.
I think the product management background is what has helped me as I focus on the user and the product... focus on value.
Rightly or wrongly I don't get hung up on code, infrastructure etc. The only thing matters (in my opinion) is that if a user sits down to use it, does it provide them a benefit.
That is what I have been (and am) laser focussed on.
I truly believe that "slow and steady wins the race".
You have to find ways of getting your message out. No matter how good your product is, if your users can't find it, you won't sell anything.
This is probably why it's important to make sure you're not doing it for the "easy money" and also why it can take months or years to make a nice little passive income; the word takes a while to get out.
I have to question these "I spent years making $40 a month working 8 hours after hours to built <project> but now <project> makes $60k a month" stories, since at some point you really have to ask yourself how much your time is worth. Thousands of hours for $1M pre-tax, not to mention how much life you gave up for that is kind of idiotic IMO.
My metric generally is, "if someone on etsy selling magic rocks is making more than my tech project after three months, time to move on". I'm not being shitty, this is just a standard I hold myself to when it comes to valuing my personal time. Also, don't worry, I'm not one of these people who thinks my time isn't worth cooking or cleaning (like many YT gurus and even Financial Samurai now claim).
Some people have said that this was far more effective than advertising. And it’s free.
But most importantly, you need a following, an audience to sell your product to.
- Music Tuners
- Rulers/ measurement tools
- Tools using gyroscope (record speed indicator)
Take a simple idea and continue developing it until the user experience is really enjoyable. Not guaranteed to succeed, but a compelling way to spend your time.
Glad I saw this post + thread today, y'all just gave me another boost of energy.
Say:
Strategy 1: If the market is trending higher. Then, buy on the dips. Hold. Sell for 20% gains. Then rinse and repeat.
Strategy 2: Or, if the market ($SPY) has risen for x percent for the day, say 3%, then you short the stock. Wait for it to correct, and sell for 20% gains. But if it continues rising higher than 10%, then buy back the stock to close out your position.
I put a lot of time into my side projects but that is mostly the whole saturday and sunday, but even then I obviously don't feel so well rested on monday.
It's fucking crazy with some people, but that's what it takes to get ahead of the competition.
Edit: Please note that I'm not advocating that anybody should do this, but just be aware that a lot of people are setting that level for themselves and in some cases for their subordinates.
That said, Bill Gates definitely said he and some of his crew were working 16 hour days delivering their first DOS release.
Point is, you might work some intense stretches, and doing that shows your passion and might land give you an edge when you need it. But you don't need to go insane. If you work 8 hours day job, don't spend hours in commute, you can be perfectly healthy spending 2 hours of your night time each day working a side gig.
Now, Musk said he is “down to 80 or 90” hours of work per week and “it’s pretty manageable.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/elon-musk-on-working-120-hou...
That's the quickest I could find. But yeah, I suppose 20-23h constantly long-term would not be doable. Point is though that many people can and do work even long-term the equavalent of 2 "full-time jobs".
Never mind working such hours does not guarantee success. Hell, it only about guarantees poor relations and health with any chance of success a very distant second.
So at best you're successful with shit relationships or fail with the same prospects? Dunno 'bout you, but I don't play no game I can't win!
I think it's fine for entrepreneurs like them to work however much they want, but it's not cool to put that on employees, especially if they don't have any ownership in the company.
I don't buy the theory about poor relationships and long hours. I could see it going either way, especially if one was single and would otherwise spend their time at home watching tv or whatever.
You can't keep relationships if the time spent on a relationship tends to 0.
6 hours per day, 4 days per week. 24 hours per week total.
Or 8 hours per day, and 3 days per week. Then you have a 4 day weekend.
Anything more, is regarded as overtime.
Then those that do want to get ahead, can work the remaining 16 hours on a separate job.
Software automation, mechanization, and robotics, have reduced the need for manual drudgery. And farms are highly mechanized to mass produce raw foodstuffs.
The corporations should be competing against themselves, to work for us, the citizens, that makes their profits possible. Instead of just competing to take a bigger piece of the pie, and to hoard it all for themselves.
It’s time that we as a society, begin to think differently.
I think that the part-time jobs culture today is like the remote jobs culture 15 years ago.
This would also help boost local or nearby tourism. It’ll give people an extra day to travel.
Doing that much work on a side gig is totally possible if you want to do it and have the right disposition.
I remember going to conferences,especially the really small ones, the professors and students would spend all day listening to extremely draining lectures; this one particular conference started at 8.30 am, went till 1 pm, you get a few hours break, and then it goes till 9 pm.
I'd go back to my room in the noon time to take a nap, and in the evening maybe go to the bar for a small bit to get a drink and go back to the room to get ready for the next day, but the majority of professors would spend most of the midday break meeting each other, and also continue socializing in the bar fairly late into night, and they'll still come back the next day as if this is a regular day.
I had a talk with my professor on how they're doing it and his response was just "you just have to train yourself to do it and get used to it." Probably one of the main reasons why I chose not to continue down that path!
I've been there, done that, seen it all (server, web, mobile, firmware, games). It's routine now, but not something I can lose myself into like I used to be able to. I get bored far faster.
(I kid, but more seriously, it did indeed help dampen some of my own passion for quite awhile. And then a bit of resurgence...)
When I first began programming it was like my mind was a nuclear reactor. I LOVED it. New ideas were popping into my head all the time, and solutions to problems were quick.
I'll never forget when I was in the first few months, and learned about POLYMORPHISM. At the time, it utterly blew my mind, and I found so many sweet use cases for it and felt like a GOD of programming.
Fast forward 10 years and yea, it gives me a chuckle to remember those days. I miss how excited my mind was, and how eager to code I was. Now, I'm critical of code, less open to learning new things, and new ideas are few and far between.
It sucks but as far as I can tell, that's just life. We aren't programmed to constantly lose ourselves in any one thing. If we did, our ancestors may not have survived. Our primitive brain found great utility in "moving on" to the next thing, the next opportunity, etc.
I know exactly what happened. Changing languages and domains every few years can wear you out. If you were lucky enough to pick one language that madw it 20 years you can spend your time deep diving different domains. Bonus if the language becomes unpopular with developers but still need with business. Bonus points for picking a fun language you like.
A real pain is leetcode.
I would certainly agree that your best shot at maintaining your passion would be to stick with 1 or 2 languages and get really good at them. Constantly context switching does wear on a person.
With that said, there are some caveats...
1) Businesses need to find that language useful and important. In other words, there must be opportunities to make money using that language.
2) The language must support great depth of work. For instance, learning Objective-C or Swift could become dry over the years as you master the iOS SDK. There's a lot there to cover, for sure, but I imagine after 10 years you might arrive at the same endpoint: Somewhat deflated, certainly less passionate.
3) The language must resonate with you. Everybody has a language or a programming style they enjoy. Personally, I love classic, imperative, low level stuff. C, C++, even Java. Not really a big fan - despite years of professional work - of declarative UI, or functional programming.
I'm curious since you have 20 years - what language / domain have you been focussed on? How did it work for you?
I started with C/C++ so php was natural fit.
A good question would be if starting out today what language would I pick?
I'm tempted to pick php but I would probably go for react. The market is huge career-wise, the language is fun to develop in and the community is strong.
Some solutions in PHP are quite elegant that are quite not in virtually any other language. Like WordPress’s priority queue (aka, hooks).
My dad has been a developer for 40+ years and he stills get excited about random, incredibly complicated projects (that don't even pay that well) or new technologies.
Maybe you just need to find something else you enjoy coding.
Is that really the reality? As far as I can tell, the reality is quite the opposite -- that sustainable levels of work across all knowledge work industries drop off a cliff past 8 hours a day, and for deep work 4 hours a day. Working on a side project after work possible for short sprints at a time, but somewhat impossible if you have an engaging day job where you are making good forward progress on your career.
On the other hand, if your day job is well paid but rather dull (quite common in tech), working on a side project is a nice way to retain creative and intellectual fulfillment, agency, and ownership in some capacity in one's life -- it can be an artistic outlet and worthwhile in itself. Beyond that, it can be nice transition to a startup. But I think this idea that some people "can just do more per day" makes the fallacy of thinking progress happens a day at a time. When it comes to side projects or new companies in incubation, that's not always the case. Explaining it away with an argument that is biologically untenable seems questionable to me.
Sure, you may not do your finest work, but you can get a lot done. If you're happy trading off your health for a shot at success, it's something that's on the table.
It gets harder when you start having a family or if you have other obligations.
You make a great point that just doing tasks is not necessarily going to make or break a company, there are tons of other factors.
Exactly. Doing tasks is literally table stakes -- it's the equivalent of showing up. For any company that banks on its differentiation, making big moves that cement the company require more thought, more depth, more risk. These kinds of simplistic platitudes amount to hierarchical animisms; they have little to do with the very specific things that make up a real high performance organizational culture.
In general in software Engineering (I can say with some confidence since I made the transition between) people get the idea that they're actually very smart when they are just _okay_. The easy six figure salaries which IMO are often the most undeserved (compared to other careers except entertainment) is probably to blame.
This sounds like the kind of overly simplified individualistic narrative I used to believe when I was 14. My heroes to me then looked so indestructible. I wanted more than anything to be like them -- a captain of the industry, prolific and indestructible. The problem with this narrative is that it didn't hold up to real world scrutiny as I entered the workforce and interacted with high-performers and became one of them.
> people get the idea that they're actually very smart when they are just _okay_
I think that this is a very intellectually lazy idea. I've found that the people who most believe this idea are those who are objectively "just _okay_" themselves because they don't understand/have ever experienced how effective organizations and people deploy and harness role evolution. You remember that old chestnut about how some people with 10 years of experience just have "1 year of experience, 10 times?" The two often go hand in hand in my experience.
After all, the most effective way to be lazy about your own professional growth is to believe that it's impossible to improve. And for that to be believable for yourself...you have to make sure other people believe it's the case for them, too. The problem with this kind of fiction is that eventually the fourth wall cracks as people see parts of their network leave for greener pastures where this growth is promised and then actually followed through on. I know because I've sold candidates on this exact thing during interviews.
All I'll say is that it's not a particularly hard sell to say "people that think of the world in such individualistic terms are condemning themselves to mediocrity -- we're building something way better than that, come join us." Think about why that is. Our ability to execute talent arbitrage was based on our competitors having the same mental model as yours. It was an arbitrage that worked very well.
> but the majority of professors would spend most of the midday break meeting each other
Spending 60-80 hours in meetings is not "work". Attending lectures is not "work". Work requires either mental or physical effort to which all humans have limits. People in academia like to think they work hard by quoting useless hours like this. But that's like people billing their bosses for the 2 hours they spend in traffic. From my time in academia, my impression is that most grad students have 1 to 2 hours of productive work per day. They will tell you that they spend 10 hours at the office however.
1) If you missed my quotes around "work" it is because some people describe certain tasks as work equivalent to other tasks. The effort of digesting vs. producing material is about 2 orders of magnitudes for me. I took 60 hours of lectures (time spent in class) during one of my semesters of undergrad. 12 hours of lecture everyday. That is completely sustainable because all you have to do is listen. Reading papers is the same, it's a low effort activity. Something you can do for 12 hours a day. Yes, "advanced academic lecture" is more draining than Harry Potter but less draining than driving a vehicle.
2) Working hard (or long hours in the case of academia) vs. working intelligently are orthogonal. I can't really address the entirety of graduate school because history is going to be much different than engineering. Applied much different than theory. I'll repeat my claim, if you actually take the useful bits of a grad student's day, it often compresses to 1-2 hours. Yes, reading is important. Yes, there are often other teaching commitments that are usually treated like second class citizens. I'm not debating the time spent in an office. Merely, that the "60-80" hour myth really needs to stop.
I also don’t believe for a second that a mere mortal can pay attention to lectures or read papers for 12 hours. Personally after 5 hours of lectures I can’t pay attention anymore, and it’s a similar for paper reading. Most people I know are like that, and frankly I don’t believe you can actually attend 60 hours of lectures a week in university given the scheduling constraints.
Look at Fall 2015 where I had 10 courses worth 32 units not counting the project course where the credits are awarded the following semester. call it 35 units. Roughly, a 3 credit course consists of 3 hours of lecture and a 1.5 hour tutorial. The courses I took that have more than 3 credits typically have a lab component that adds an extra hour.
You are correct that I didn't "attend" every single hour of those. But it just further proves my point that just because you're sitting in a room designated in your time table, it doesn't mean that you are inherently working. Instead of going to those classes, I used my time effectively and studied (not necessarily in the classroom) for a normal 8 hour day. When I say useful work, I don't necessarily mean that something is produced. Like you say, sometimes you need to find dead ends before finding the correct path. That's useful. Yes, you can work for 12 hours in one day. It's just not sustainable. A 80 hour work week implies one of two things:
1) You aren't working as much as you think. Go to the gym. Hang out with friends. Enjoy life.
2) You are about to burnout. Stop. Go to the gym. Hang out with friends. Enjoy life.
If you want to keep perpetuating that you need to be in your building for 60-80 hours to be a good grad student, you are directly contributing to the mental health issues seen among grad students.
The biggest proponent of "you only need to work 9-5 and can still be a successful professor", Cal Newport, himself walked back those statements somewhat after he started going tenure track.
I'll give one corollary though, which is that there are some very successful professors who actually don't work that hard. I am friends with one; they're just simply not human. I remember reading from the same textbook with him and he finished the pages 3x faster than me. So the only way you get away with regular life in academia is to have a super human brain. The rest of us have to compensate by putting in the extra hours. It's not healthy, at least not for me, which is why I chose to leave. But many do it. And continue to do so. It's arguable if their lives are worse or they don't mind it, but it's not arguable that they are just morons who don't understand time management.
I would take this with a pinch of salt. Socializing by the pool after the talks isn't hard work. Also, most people only listen to some of the talks. It's not uncommon to see the room half empty the last days of the conference. There are also various social events and so on...
While it's true that some professors/researchers are hard-working and driven, it's not the case for all of them, and it varies throughout their career. Their job is also typically not very stressful.
Same thing for software engineers. Some people do meaningful work for a few hours a day, and slack the rest of the time and still have good performance reviews.
Among the professionals who work a lot, I can think of doctors. My family doctor works very long hours, and he's certainly not slacking.
Keep in mind that some academics truly love this stuff too. They’re enjoying socializing and keeping up on the field and it quickly changes the “work” dynamic when you’re not writing as much code anymore. I think you’re both correct though.
I would agree that doctors and lawyers have the most hard working hours. No room for error as the doctor, and just mounds of tedious paperwork as a lawyer.
Which is why I explicitly mentioned small conferences. The one I was talking about has 90 attendees total, only one session at a time in the same room, and in snowmass Colorado so if you're outside the conference hotel we can literally see you from up to half a mile away. Almost no one skips a single session in these conferences, especially the professors. For the most part they're paying attention as well, no one's on their laptops or dozing off.
Again, I spent a decade in academia, and if you're in fields such as biology and in some top institution, it's very rare that professors up to doing something meaningful have anything less than 60 hour weeks at any point in their career. This is more or less what me and my roommates actively discussed most of the time all through a decade, so I'm not just talking about anecdotal evidence. From what I understand, academia in other fields especially tech related can be less stressful than this. Being a oroefssor in a competitive field is really back breaking - You have to juggle a large number of roles and are constantly responsible for the lives of numerous people and lack many of the protections one would normally expect from any regular job in some ways.
Learning new things requires physical changes in your brain. Fewer new ideas = less cognitive effort = more energy remaining at the end of the day.
You need to take time off though at weekends etc if you are doing it longer term.
(Note this isn’t a recommendation)
Also note that I don’t care for tv or gaming so don’t have those time black holes.
I just love building things. I don't do social media, don't watch shitty tv. I just like to build.
If you are working 60 hours a week for a job paying 40 hours then it is horrible.
If you work 40 hours and spend 20 hours a week doing your own thing, it is hard work but doable.
Long term no one should work 60 hours a week.
Hacker News repeatedly rediscovers that there is no point in putting in more than the bare minimum at typical jobs over and over again. Some people pour the gained time into leetcode and succeed. Some pour it into stuff they're excited about. Some into their families. Some pour it into being at the right place at the right time. Hardly anyone has ever succeeded by pouring it into their jobs.
This might be the most relevant part of the discussion
I don’t know how to escape that model at a wider scale, exactly, but if I were worth millions of dollars, I think I’d have the economic luxury to invest some time to figure out how.
You're Jerome Powell?
I'm just kidding, but surely you see how from another perspective, that sounds farcical. Like I get it, you care about the work that you do. I'm not saying you won't be rich. I'm not saying people don't think you're doing a good job. I'm saying, in a positivist measure, like, "If you vanished tomorrow, would anything happen to a major bank?" The answer is, unless you're Jerome Powell or the guy who hires the clients' kids and covers it up (1) (2), no.
(1) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-08-18/bny-me...
(2) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-11-18/jpmorg...
Fulltime jobs usually aren't fulltime in that they take all of your available thinking capacity, nor do they quench a person's curiosity or interest. More often, fulltime jobs (especially in tech) are ~40% work, 60% absolute garbage timewasting. Sitting through meetings that don't need to happen, to satisfy an insecurity or requirement that someone above has, without actually solving any real problems or creating any change.
Some people do exactly as much is required at their actual job (so a generous 40% of their available capacity) and then spend their nights, weekends and freetime pouring themselves into other things. Startups, personal projects, hobbies, families, etc.
Fulltime jobs are almost never rewarding or exciting. A startup may start exciting/fulfilling, but eventually corporate garbage sets in and you're on the same treadmill of meetings to talk about prospective work/how much work there is, fitting actual fulfillment of tasks in between.
Easy!
I am getting out of it though, I am starting to study CS at university next year. So hopefully that will be a bit less stressful because I am well prepared.
Sticking with something when you're bored of it, and it's not providing much return, aint easy.
I have realised that too many people quit early and yet it is clear that their ideas are good. I hope many are inspired by this story, I know I was... inspired to keep on fighting.
As I said here > https://twitter.com/getflookup/status/1332767868002455554 "If you quit, you did it early"
BTW, what app is this, if you don't mind sharing?
It's https://songbox.rocks.
Otherwise, I have been causally following yours ever since you announced it on Indie Hackers ... it looks like it is going places but I'm sure COVID hasn't helped things one bit.
Let's keep pushing into the new year and hope for better times!
Linus of Linus Tech Tips talks about this. His old employer wasn't interested in his YouTube channel because it was raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of $1, but it was 1000% growth over the previous year or something like that.
Growth is growth.
And congrats, your success story is awesome to read. I've got a similar long road ahead of me.
Just FYI the bottom of your Blog pages contains a button with a strange label CANVAS::BLOG.BUTTON.NEXT
Also the link to your Privacy Policy has (almost) the same foreground and background color.
https://i.imgur.com/HcU0wOy.png
PS I think your Pro tier is too cheap ;) anyone that wants to remove your branding (and perhaps whitelabel the product as their own?) is a big enough outfit to pay more than what you're asking.
Will re-look at pricing in the new year.
Thanks a lot for your input, it is appreciated!
Corporates and other businesses won't blink at paying bigger amounts than this, if you can tell them how much support they are going to get for their money.
Do you have some sort of upload API, so music creation software could potentially upload directly, without going through a GUI? (I realize this may be an exotic request, so I understand if this is not of interest for you to implement).
Do you see a use case for this?
While there are tons of image sharing sites with suitable APIs for this, it's surprisingly hard to find audio sharing sites (maybe due to piracy concerns?).
I like following along with indie developers. Do you blog anywhere or post about your progress?
For reference, here are some indie developers whose regular progress updates I enjoy:
* Cory Zue, creator of SaaS Pegasus and PlaceCardMe: https://www.coryzue.com/writing/
* Jen, creator of Lunch Money: https://lunchbag.ca/
* Allison Seboldt, creator of Fantasy Congress: https://allisonseboldt.com/
Maybe this thread has changed my mind on that.
Front end is just plain old HTML and CSS.
The site looks very good, and the idea is very appealing (though I am not a target customer). Will point Songbox out to my audio producing friends.
One question in regards to where the audio is being served; would it be possible to proxy it through Songbox from another origin point?
Hmmm... I'm unsure of wether you could host the audio somewhere else and serve it through songbox. It's an interesting proposition though and one I will look into.
Great story! Keep going.
I still have a side project that basically goes unmaintained for several years now but only returns about a hundred bucks a month. I think it still has potential but for several reasons I totally lost the passion for it.
What's you side business? You should consider selling it.
There is money to be made in this market but generally my experience with domains is that it's a pain.
lol if I get to £1000 MRR I will be jumping for joy. Over £1m mrr is insane!