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Ask HN: Not sure what to do with my side project.

7 points by centdev ↗ HN
I've built a Twitter photo sharing service which has survived through Twitter's API changes and even when they started to allow photo uploads directly. The service is still used with 5000-7000 photos uploaded daily with 4mm pageviews per month. There's just under 4m photos stored on S3 and just under a million tokened users. There's a Safari, Chrome and Firefox browser plugin, iOS app and Android app in the wild. It runs 100% on auto-pilot.

I've been paying for hosting out of pocket as most users are outside of the US, banner revenue barely covers the costs to host it.

Any suggestions on what I should do? Thoughts are:

- Rebrand and relaunch it

- Sell it

- Shut it down

Any ideas on what I should do?

16 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] thread
sharemywin
is it costing you money? is it growing? if not what could you do to make it grow. maybe allow people to add accounts and post comments. if there are heavy commercial users look at charging them. Are the banner ads retargeted adwords? that might help conversion.
centdev
About $150 a month in hosting
helpful
Are you net negative or net positive when you say "barely cover the costs to host it" or just about break even. What is the stack?
centdev
Net negative. PHP , MySQL, memcache, s3 for storage and cdn
phoney
How about trying to sell on flippa.com?
centdev
The problem with flippa is that most offers will be based on some factor of net rev.
relix
Move from S3 which is ridiculously expensive for an image host, to something more suitable such as imgur:

Looks like you could go with the $25/m plan: https://www.mashape.com/imgur/imgur-9#!pricing

centdev
I didn't even realize imgur had that as an option. Most of the costs of hosting goes to S3 storage and that would cut it significantly. Thanks for the tip.
phantom_oracle
You are stuck in the monetization part of your side project. Its not that your side project has stalled, it is that you have auto-piloted it without adding alternative monetization strategies.

As relix mentioned, you also need to cut costs too.

If I owned this project, I would probably pick it up again and try to add some new niche to it and find some other revenue sources.

"just under a million tokened users" I don't know if this is means almost a million users or not, but that is a massive audience already.

caw
I think OP means Twitter OAuth tokens?
centdev
Sorry, yes Twitter Tokens.
AznHisoka
How is this possible? I thought each app had a 100K limit.
phantom_oracle
He said he said it up before they imposed their API limits. So I suppose all pre-change signups remained and it is likely that the OP is unable to signup any new users through the twitter API.
centdev
The number of tokens the site had (forgot what it was) before the final API changes that limit tokens was rather high. It was well over 100k and based on Twitter's rules, any app that had over 100k tokens would be able to go to 2x that number. I believe the app had somewhere around 600k tokens at the time so there's still some room for growth. Though the plan would be move from solely Twitter-only to something covering more social networks or create its own network. Not sure yet.
centdev
After thinking about it last night I'm leaning towards picking it back up and putting some new energy into it.
phantom_oracle
Keep us updated. Although I am not personally intrigued by photo-taking apps, a lot of people are, so you should be able to turn it into a cash-machine somehow (if not, then you should consider doing what that other guy did with "ViralNova").