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Ask HN: No time to maintain our project, what do to?

23 points by dimillian ↗ HN
We are 3, and “MySeeen” is our first project and startup. We have built it from nothing since 2 years, but with a goal: Making an app you just have to open to get a movie you will have fun watching.

It could be achieved easily by making a social app allowing you to get movies information (length, casting, posters, …), to share about the movies you have seen or want to see and rate them to finally correctly advice a movie for anyone.

MySeeen is available on iOS and Windows Phone. (Info here: http://www.myseeenapp.com)

Unfortunately, after 1 great year in the company, as full time job, without knowing how to earn money and how to enhance our baby, we needed money and slowly stopped maintaining our project. Now we haven’t touched the code for 1 year because we all have started a new life and don’t have the time to maintain it.

We have a good amount of users, and it still growing daily by a good number of people. We don’t want to turn our back to our users, so we have decided to maintain (up and running) the back-end as long as we can, but we need to shut down the company because we still have fees to pay (bank, government, etc…). We post here to get people’s advices, potential users, current or former start-up fans, coders, CEO’s, what would you do if you were us?

20 comments

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mobiplayer
Sit together, give it a last effort and sell it. I'm sure somebody would love to buy it :)
_Max13
This is also something we were thinking about. But... How and where to find someone interested?
johnward
I tried this with one of my projects. I ended up getting offers for a few hundred dollars on flippa. I decided to keep it but now it's always in the back of my mind. I think I might just have to shut it down so I can move on.
mobiplayer
Never tried it myself, but you may want to attend local enterpreneurship meetups, networking events and similar. If you have a passion for your product and it is working (you said it's growing in users, which is nice) I'm pretty sure you can sell it face to face.
StavrosK
Open-source it and let the community maintain it?
cogburnd02
I agree, in part: if putting advertisements on your app doesn't help (raise enough money) and selling doesn't work/attempting to sell proves unfruitful, open-sourcing is certainly better than just shutting down. Might as well let people have it, if they're unwilling to pay for it, and the work of actually developing the app is already done. Simply shutting down without open-sourcing means that that work was wasted, whereas open-sourcing it might mean that it remains useful to the user community.
bonn1
Put it on https://flippa.com/

You can get some decent money if you have significant reach—how many MAUs/DAUs do you have?

_Max13
Thanks, this sound a good idea.

- DAU: 110 (Base on the last 31 days)

- MAU: 537 (based on the last 12 months)

We're pretty sure that it's because of the lack of evolution. We used to have better numbers...

antaviana
No offense, but being a consumer-oriented project, with these counts after 2 years, IMHO you need to shut it down. Anything else would be most likely more costly in effort trying to sell it than any cash it will bring.
jakobegger
I recently removed an app from the store; it had only a few thousand users, and made no significant revenue. It felt good to not have to worry about it anymore.

So my suggestion is: Shut it down. Write a short goodbye email to your customers explaining why you are shutting down, then remove it from the App Stores and turn off your servers.

A side project will always take some space in your mind and distract you. If you see no future for a project, there's no point to keep it alive. You built a nice thing, but it seems it is not comercially feasible. Stop, and concentrate on the next thing.

dimillian
Our service/app is generating 0, we could generate some revenus through ads but this is not our goal. We also have a ton of ideas for a V2, which can make some revenues, but as we said, w don't have time for it.

Removing it is kinda heart breaking, because we still got feedbacks and tweet from people who use it daily.

0tello
Either find time and give the v2 a try or shut it down. it is that simple. Just make a decision. Nobody can make this decision for you. I would try to sell it only if there is something to sell, otherwise it will be waste of time. Do you have significant userbase, some interesting data, and etc? If yes, poke your competitors first.
yitchelle
Could you not just abandon it and leave it on the app store? Obviously, leave caveat on the app description that this app is abandon and no support will be provided. In this manner, at least if someone wants to use it, they can.
ftwinnovations
I want to back this up. Just shut it down, and move on. You learned a lot, and maybe next time you will make something that can actually make money and work full time on. Probably not. You'll most likely make something else that fails. That's ok. After that, maybe you'll make something else that can actually make money. Probably not. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, you may or may not succeed. But each time will be more successful, less confusing, and more enjoyable. I know because I've been there, and now I'm very successful. It's worth it.
sideproject
Hello. I maintain a site called "SideProjectors". Would love to help you out if you want to give it a try.

https://www.sideprojectors.com

neotek
Great site, but the "sell my project" and "find a cofounder" buttons at the top of the page give me a full PHP (well, Whoops-formatted) error listing with stack trace and offending lines of source code. You probably shouldn't have error reporting turned on in production!
s_kilk
Same for me. If you login/register first using the buttons on the left then it works fine.
shrikrishna
Put it on Assembly (https://assembly.com). A great place where your project will continue to be developed by other interested contributors, and you will keep getting a share of the revenue generated
atmosx
Open source the code, will add value to your resume, so indirectly you're still going to profit from this.