Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

Do you have a forum for the users? The amount of help your users can provide to each other is massive.

4-5 K is more than enough to hire someone to help with support part-time, via something like oDesk. As a bonus, you could probably hire someone who speaks English as their native language.

Could you find a friend that would be willing to split time with you? Not an employee but a partner. Sure, you will lose half the profit (make sure you put it in writing that the situation is temporary), but it is better than being completely overwhelmed.

4-5k a month is more than enough to make a hire. Think of it this way:

What is your time worth to you?

Would you rather work your ass off and make 5k, or have a sane workload, make 2k for a while, which then rises as you have adequate internal infrastructure to support growing sales and users?

It sounds like you have a good thing going, and I'd strongly recommend at looking to get another pair of hands involved - or close it down.

Recruit someone, on a contracting basis, for $15 / hour, to do support responses. Pay that person 70 or 80 hours per month. Adjust the hourly as desirable to get the kind of person you need.

Have that person also build a very comprehensive FAQ, if one does not exist. They can also process any time consuming sales routines for you (refunds, billing questions, whatever). If they're any good at basic sales, you can give them a commission for selling which might get their income up to near full-time after a while.

Begin slightly restricting what kind of support tickets you'll handle (specifically begin to make it abundantly clear to users that if their question is in the FAQ, all you're going to get is pointed to the FAQ; ratchet that up to whatever degree is necessary).

Hey, I can help on the communication part and managing the forum. Rest assured, I won't charge anything. Let me know your email, I will get in touch.

4K is enough to hire someone. So you're a student and you're working on this side project. There are many others like you who don't want to work full time but have some time left while studying. Maybe you should get another student or basically any person who fits your needs and wants to work 15-20h a week? You you don't have to pay them as much and you get more time for the core programming and studying.

By the way: What tool are you working on?

Not sure how the pricing of your service works, but try increasing the price. If you do it carefully you might reduce the number of customers (and therefore bug reports) and not change your take home.

What I would do is make an investment in future time by spending time now: write the code to automate as much as possible. For example, why are you actually managing sales?

Prioritize until things calm down. Are you accepting feature requests? Stop doing that until you nail down a stable release.

Don't have a heart attack. Stress can seriously kill you. If it becomes too much start considering exit strategies (yes, that means selling it). 4-5K a month isn't much, but it's impressive as I'm guessing you aren't even marketing it - you could make a nice bit of cash by making it someone else's problem.

Your happiness and health comes first.

I agree with some of the other commenters that a hire sounds like the way to go. Unless something is lost in translation, such as the currency, 4-5K is plenty. If not a developer, then someone in sales, which can potentially be a commission based system.

Also, think about switching to ramen for a few months. Thats the part of startup life that you tend to not see in the movies and magazines. Pre-seed tends to involve ramen. Lots and lots of ramen.

Take a year out of studying, work on business. If it goes well, great, if not, go back to studies.

Ask yourself, why are you studying? what's it for? A good job?. Why do you want a good job/career? for money? Well here you have an opportunity to skip the qualification step and get straight to the end goal.

I say go for it. You'll learn more about yourself and your worth in one year of business then you ever will studying.

What tool is this???

And your English is fine!

Small add here, but if you do decide to recruit some help, I might consider starting with your users. By "developer tool", I presume you mean a tool for developers. That means that you have a talented user base. Might not be a bad idea to post a message to your forum, or post a notification to your app, or email your users. I wouldn't phrase it as "I'm overwhelmed", but saying something like "This is a powerful tool supported by a single CS student, and I'd love to bring in some help to advance development and/or respond to user needs. Does anyone want to contribute to the project?"

Keep in mind that if this is your first time managing others, it will require some up-front investment of time. Managing people is difficult, but not impossible to become very good at. My advice for you at the outset is to be really clear and consistent about your goals, and to be open and honest with your community about the experiment you're undergoing. They'll give you a lot of credit for doing this as a student, and I think you'll find they have more patience than you think.

If stress becomes a problem, consider speaking with a professional about that (e.g., through your University), or practicing meditation and mindfulness. Good luck!

Have you ever considered providing someone a stake at your product / service? That way, people whom you would get will have in their mind that the success of your product / service will ultimately be good for their bottom line. Be transparent that you would not be able to provide a decent salary. But be sure that once the business model is thriving and growing, reward those people who've helped you and stuck with you during the the trying times.

Good luck.

Have you talked to your school about what you are doing? They may be able to 1) give you credit for what you are doing and /or 2) assign other students to help you for class credit.

Also count your blessings, there are a lot of people your age who would love to have your problem.

Gauge your level of passion in the product. If you really care about it and find it rewarding, by all means leave school and hire a 2nd. If not, possibly hire a second anyway and leave the day-to-day to them while you focus on school or turn the project over to one of your users--sell it.

Going to disagree with a lot of people, but drop out of school for a semester. I did that and I don't regret it in the least. School was a large waste of time and it took me a long time to see that. YMMV.

You have two effective options unless you can make school & the project management more efficient.

1) Put the project on hold until you're done with school

2) Put school on hold until you're done with the project or can afford to hire people to deal with it while you're in school.

Unfortunately, there's only so much time in a day and you need to sleep some. Priorities suck.

I think you have a problem most people your age would love to have. That being said, I get it. It's easy to get burnt out - especially when you're trying to continue your education at the same time. If I were in your position, I would definitely look to my fellow classmates or any friends I had that would be a good fit. I'd probably bring on one more person (maybe two, depending on what they could help me with) and split everything evenly between the two of us. If the tool you've created is that popular, everyone working on it will be in a great position down the road. You'll either be able to turn it into a full-time business, or leverage the crap out of it when you go out looking for a full-time position elsewhere (companies will love hearing about it). Either way, you've been hit with a blessing - I wouldn't give up on it just because it got too popular for you to handle. That's a great thing. Congrats!

1. Put the studies on suspend for a while

2. Try to get a developer who can support you, should not be to hard

3. Try to scale your business

Where are you based?

have you considered hiring an intern?

What a great problem to have.

I can't tell you much about managing the coding part, but I've got experience getting solid support systems up and running for developer-type products. Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to bounce ideas back and forth on what you're doing and what might help make the load more manageable. I may be able to help with some of it too for cheap/free time permitting. Good luck either way!

Humblebrag, sorry.

focus on getting your bachelors, continue that for sure.

If 4-5k per month is in dollars I would look in to hiring a part time person to help out with bug reports/support tickets to free up some of your time. Finding someone good might be tough, but look first in your circle of friends. I expect a fellow student would be looking for some extra spending money. Test out a few of your friends for the position.

Other than that it sounds like you've built a great tool that's making good revenue.

http://startupsfortherestofus.com has some great information that can help you I would start listening to those especially the ones relating to the problems you're going through right now.

Last thought is maybe relaxing some, setup an autoresponder to bug reports and tickets that you have received their bug/request and allow yourself some time on the non-critical ones.

Good luck, sounds like you're on the right track.

im interested in assisting with a project like this, currently studying as a CS major as well, I just also need an excuse to quit my job and focus on studying/working on projects that interest me more. PM me if you are interested!