Along with all the others here, I also immediately unsubscribe and get rid of products that feel like they're a bit too close for comfort. My side project is now making a lot of money, and people value tremendously not getting newsletters, or messages from John, the customer superhero. There is value in email, tremendous value, but I strongly believe that it's timing, wording and situation that will get you the most mileage here. I send one single email after about a week of no user pulse, all it says is: we still have your data, looks like you may haven't had a chance to try this yet, here's a coupon that expires today and it'll get you some extra credits (or whatever your product offers). If not interested, simply remove your account by clicking here.<p>No point in storing dead accounts. I don't care about a falsely inflated user base. People love that.<p>Also, I end the email by saying, "click reply to talk to our CEO directly and ask any questions you may have."<p>The last one gets a lot of conversions, and helps tremendously in figuring out what their concerns are.<p>This system is doing the magic for me.
> First and foremost, always, always, always, split test EVERYTHING.<p>That's a lot of work and as a developer I couldn't care less, since it's just a side project. Just ask people about your core message and if it doesn't resonate, change things.<p>> On-boarding<p>This is the hardest thing to get right. Too much instruction will be counter productive, too little will be unpredictable. Black magic.<p>> 1 Hour later<p>I'd instantly unsubsribe. Leave me the <i></i><i></i> alone please with your followup mails. I can instantly tell if your personal touch email is sent 60 min later that it's a bot. Product hunt follow up mails on my submissions are bots. I find it lame.<p>It also probably converts more :)<p>> Price Anchoring<p>Do, test, ask. This is the most crucial part of any business. I'd personally push a lot of focus here.<p>> QA the SHIT out of your product<p>Well said, any product start should have this as #1 priority.<p>> While I know this is probably only a side project, there is no reason you couldn't turn this into a viable small startup with an additional 1-2 developers<p>What you listed above already takes a fulltime job of 1-2 people.
Speaking as someone who turned their 5 year side project into a full time startup, I whole heartedly disagree with point 1 - split testing is likely to be a waste of your time.<p>Unless you have a tonne of traffic, and let's face it, side projects tend not to, A/B testing simply doesn't work. I've tried it a few times with BugMuncher, but the results take 3 - 4months, and are usually inconclusive. I've spoken to other people in similar situations and they've found the same thing. For reference, BugMuncher is lucky to see 3,000 uniques a month :)<p>I believe A/B testing is a good idea when you have the traffic for it, and I'd love to be able to make use of it, but unless your side project is getting 10s of thousands of unique views each month, there's much better things to spend your limited time on.
In response to the email spam thing (5 emails after the first week of a signup. Wow):<p>I have some projects that fit the use case very well, but I personally hate receiving them. I know that I am not the target audience of my app and that familiarity with a product and just having the name show up over and over makes the product easier to recognize. Of course, the data shows it converts better.<p>It just seems like one of those dark patterns.<p>Is it really about choosing ethics or money? Is there a third option?
Author here. I'm happy to answer any questions or comments. A little about this post:<p>I was recently commenting on an excellent Show HN for a product called Duet and it was the most karma I have ever received on HN (17 votes in 4 hours), and another respondent said I should write it up as a blog post. So here it is.
>always, always, always, split test EVERYTHING<p>Side projects tend to not have the traffic for this. If in doubt, use a calculator to calculate how long it would take to statistically detect a given uplift.<p>Instead, user-test everything. User-tests give feedback that's rich, nuanced, instant, qualitative and granular. And each one needn't take more than five minutes.
<i>Immediately: email<p>1 Hour: email<p>Day 2: email<p>Day 6: email<p>Day 10: email</i><p>Maybe it works but that kind of crap is super annoying and for me is going to turn me off your product. IF I ask you a question, quick and helpful followup is often the key between my staying with your product or moving on. Annoying unsolicited spam is not.
<i>Annual Licensing - Don't give updates away unless it is a bug fix.</i><p>I strongly disagree with this point. Patching in bug/security fixes to different versions of a product is several orders of magnitude more work than just having everyone on the latest, most secure and most patched version. For a <i>side project</i> to be successful you want to spend as as little energy on admin as possible and much energy on the project as you can.<p>Have one version. Differentiate between tiers by using feature flags so everyone is on the same codebase. Make development <i>easy</i> and design things so there's as little admin work as you possibly can.
Beyond split testing, it's a good idea to collect usage metrics for everything your users do on the site. At a bare minimum, you can send event data to something like Google Analytics and sift through it by hand to look for patterns.<p>Ideally though, you should be associating that data back to userids and bucketing it by whether or not that particular user converted to paid or let his trial expire. That way you can collect statistics on what things make your users happy so that you can know what sort of features to add in the future, and so that you can gently steer wayward users toward doing things that you know will tend to bump their chances of converting.<p>I've been writing a bit about this lately. Here's a better thought out explanation of the above:<p><a href="http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/maximizing-saas-trial-conversions.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/maximizing-saas-trial-...</a>
So the irony isn't lost on me that I should have probably had my blog monetized! I am writing a book on how to properly hire for, build out and project manage your development team. Would have been nice to have that on the blog BEFORE I got 5000 visitors!
Wow,
If I get spammed an hour after trying something, and then again after a day or two that would be it. No chance I'd EVER use their product even if it was free.
> "Day 2 (if they haven't used the product): Have you had a chance to use {ProductName}? - Body of the email went over a few benefits left out of the second email..."<p>When I get this email, I unsubscribe/ignore/tell them I'm not interested. If it's too high-pressure, I'm out.
Regarding onboarding I think one thing you can do is be smarter about the trial period. I will often signup for things and not get around to properly trailing before the trial period runs out.<p>No doubt if I email you you will give extra trial period, this could be done automatically though with an accompanying follow up email to reengage. As you would be tracking usage metrics anyway there would be plenty of data to decide if I have properly trialed the full capability of the software or not.
> First and foremost, always, always, always, split test EVERYTHING.
Well most side projects I think have very little traffic / customers, due to most side projects being done by developers (not marketers) and these developers having little time to work on them. It's a bit of a waste of time to AB test a project when you don't have enough traffic / user activity to generate meaningful results.
Any suggestions for <a href="http://www.pincalendar.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.pincalendar.com</a> ? my side project written with django
> Include your own payment processor by default (I would use Stripe, personally)<p>In my opinion this decision (not only which payment provider to use, but whether to do it yourself at all!) depends highly on the kind of project. Fraud detection, international tax compliance, etc. can quickly become very expensive. Choose carefully.
Would love some feedback on monetizing my side project..<p><a href="https://simplerm.co" rel="nofollow">https://simplerm.co</a><p>Paywall isn't implemented yet so feel free to sign up and try it out.<p>A lot of feedback I've gotten so far has been on the pricing and finding it hard to get the right mix.
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> you could always know the date and time you pushed a new version of the page and track visits/conversions from then until you replaced it with the next test.<p>While this is true, it's worth acknowledging that this comes with some risk. If the current version is doing reasonably well, you could potentially miss out on a lot of conversions by replacing it with an untested version.
I'd also say get community involved early in your project. Use something like Baqqer to put it up, embed newsletters, open up a shop, get feedback/help and give it some distribution.
These "tricks" are so awful I can't comment. This guy just tells you to do everything you already wanted to, but don't have time to it (it's an article about side projects, so this is totally unexpected), and it doesn't tell you what to prioritize or anything like that.<p>Also, many of the "tricks" are bullshit, or, if they're not, at least they're not proved in any way.
So the core idea is: When doing a job for a customer, use that time to resell other people's stuff with an increased price and don't tell the customer about you taking a cut. Sounds shady!<p>Why not make money on the side by providing additional values? E.g. if you write a plugin that enables the customer to deliver his service, don't charge a fixed price but a yearly license fee, including updates to the software and the ability to write you an email if a question occurs.<p>In the end being honest is always paying off more in the long run. If you do shady stuff like that it will work in the short run, but will cost you customers who just find other developers.
One month of phone support... for a <i>side-project</i>? Ouch.<p>You can make that high-tier throwaway suggestion when the app is an invoicing app for freelancers who will never buy that tier, but it's bad general advice. For the general product, you better hope you <i>don't</i> get a few enterprise customers who don't see a difference between $100 and $500 when it comes to pricing, and who can drain your phone with demand...
For once a top voted HN article is up there to be 100% criticized and fix the bad advice. Quite different from the usual norm of supportive discussion.