Ask HN: How long did it take to release your side project in 2016?

I haven't launched, so I hope this is okay. I'm 7/mo into developing a side project called https://keygen.sh, and am finally wrapping things up to launch a beta in early January. I have a few hundred people on my mailing list, so that's a plus.

Challenges I've faced:

- Getting carried away with automation: emails after certain events, marketing to users who don't convert, billing features; all of these are things I should have done post-launch.

- Writing tests. I've literally delayed the launch of the product a whole month because I didn't feel my test coverage was good enough. I should have launched the beta and then started writing tests.

- Too many features. "Hey, x) would be a cool feature!", "Oh man, y) would be super useful to my users." – Yeah, I've written and then removed so many features that I'm a little ashamed.

- Wanting to adhere strictly to the JSON API spec. I shouldn't have spent so much time making sure that it followed the spec, because in the end, it doesn't.

After reevaluating things, all I need to do is finish writing documentation so that I can roll out the beta.

9 months: January to September. It took 2 weeks after launch to get the first paying customer.

The product is a SaaS progressive web app for budgeting. It's $12/year for the premium version.

The main challenges were adding the last few features, making it production ready, and polish. The 80-20 rule really applied here (it took 20% of time to get 80% of the way), and that's only for the MVP! I still work on the app almost every day. :)

I'd say the hardest part now that I have many customers is not breaking anything for those existing customers.

https://financier.io

https://app.financier.io/humans.txt

For my first side project which has resulted in paying customers the whole process took quite a while. From the idea to first sale the whole process was roughly 30 months (May 2014 -> Nov 2016). There were a few false starts and most of the work was done over the last few months, but I'm glad it's made it to a real release.

What is it? It's a crowd funded user interface rewrite for an open source musical synthesizer: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-fusion.html

Challenges:

- Bug testing and regression testing a large/complex user interface was difficult as it tends to be a largely manual process

- Maintaining a multi platform codebase added a lot of extra complexity and it certainly made distribution more difficult

- Identifying what the users precisely needed was difficult as time could be spent on a number of different facets of the project

- Polishing up pieces of the application after it was functionally complete took much much longer than originally predicted

- Marketing/Estimating-the-market: Initial surveys indicated a large number of users would be willing to pay to support a replacement UI and a few hundred were on a dedicated mailing list for it. Conversion rates were much lower than expected with both the general audience and those subscribed to the sub-project specific mailing list.

I had the idea for the feature that would eventually turn into Unwaffle [1] back in July. It was initially just going to be an internal tool to track trial user actions for S3stat so that I could detect trends to predict who would convert on their own and who would need intervention.

But it quickly became apparent how useful it would be as a product, so I built it that way from day one, with its own domain and API for collecting data. The idea was to build the pieces I needed to do my thing, and if it didn't work amazingly well, to shoot it in the head and move on.

So:

  - Idea in July
  - Prototype in August
  - Decided to move forward in September
  - Public site live in September
  - Fully functional by around October
  - Some minor promotion in November
  - Just went live with real customers in December

Naturally, feedback is always welcome.

[1] https://unwaffle.com

We're still working on getting our 501c3, so that was unexpected. I knew there would be a lot of legal work and IRS work, but the sheer volume of it still staggers me.

The rest of the work on our site (werebooks.org) is coming along pretty well, I think. There has been a lot of work done to get the load times down (especially for mobiles in other countries), lots of tuning. We have a long way to go yet, but it's nothing like the prototype we tossed up early 2016.

Our biggest effort in 2017 is going to be adding content. Lots and lots of content.

So, to answer question 1 - from idea to 1,000 full book reads a week (we don't charge, so no paying customers) took about 8 months. I don't know that I'd consider it "done" any time soon, so many I'm speaking out of turn.

Challenges and unexpected potholes have been almost entirely of a legal nature.

I started in 2015 and launched an early access in November of 2016. The product wasn't hard to make, per se, but I was stuck in analysis paralysis. Plus I went through a bout or two of depression which took away my time as well as I was writing a book which took even more time.

My biggest challenge was not picking something and just going with it. I picked what I knew (WinForms with C#) and went with it. I ended up throwing away the UI 4 or 5 times because I just couldn't get it right. It didn't look "good enough" it just looked horrible. After I launched I just thought my UI looked horrible so I started to re-do it (yet again) but this time in WPF. My UI looks so much better, I have added more functionality to the UI and it took much less time.

So far I have two big challenges, getting a paid customer as well as accurately tracking my metrics. I have, I think, 30+ downloads of the trial since I launched early access but I'm using events in Google Analytics to track and numbers I see don't always make sense. On top of that, my analytics don't seem to make much sense either as I'm getting majority of the traffic from direct but I'm not sure why that would be.

At the end of the day, I'm looking forward to 2017 as I will have a new updated release of my product, my book will be finished and I can devote more time to getting customers.

We're actually launching our new SaaS for bloggers in January 2017 called the Blog Enhancement Suite, but we've spent most of 2016 working on it.

It basically allows you to plug in a community to your blog using a widget that will use the core of our community voting platform Snapzu (that launched in 2013). There are other widgets out there that bloggers can use, such as Twitter Timeline, Pinterest, Instagram, etc, but all of them are redundant, showing duplicate stuff that's already on the blog, and don't really add anything for engagement and revenue like we plan on doing.

Biggest Challenges:

1. Getting the word out (mostly for feedback at this point), so that we can continue improving our landing page so that people understand it better and see the value proposition.

2. A/B testing to figure out what works and what doesn't. This is tough because of the small sample sizes (because of challenge #1 just above) and because it requires a lot of re-writing copy/text.

Unexpected encounters:

Explainer video (still in production) is taking way longer than we thought it would, approx 3 months now.

Happy to answer any questions. Links if you want to see our service in action:

http://www.snapzu.com (platform)

http://www.blogenhancement.com (SaaS for bloggers)

One of my perpetual problems with releasing software is that I hate writing for humans. Marketing blurbs, blogs, emails to the right people. It all sounds so easy when native speakers write or talk about it, but I'm so shy about this stuff that I'm never looking forward to finishing a project.

Is there a low-cost service that will proof-read everything you do (not for grammar accuracy, but also tone)? The easiest fix might be to live in the UK for a bit.

3 months to build a new video chat platform. The first release was very naked, live video chats worked, but there was no text chat on the side. Since then, we've fixed a lot of connection bugs, added Twitter login, and had to scale to a new server with 15 times capacity.

It's called Harf, would love to hear anyones opinion: http://harf.io

I spent a few months working on a biz lead generator for web dev freelancers which still hasn't been released. Then I spent a couple months on a news summarizer called Kiwi which never got finished enough to be useful to anyone.

Eventually I got sick of spending weeks and months on things that were too big and serious to actually release and spent one week to get www.whispe.rs out into the public eye. It started as a paid Twilio wrapper for anonymous texting but has now morphed into a free web tool for anonymously texting goofy messages to friends and family for free.(For anyone who has ever wanted to anonymously text "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of Elderberries!" to an unwitting friend) I don't think it will ever make money or anything but it was fun building it, getting harsh feedback, and then rebuilding it. It has also already made a few people smile so I consider it a worthwhile use of my time :)

At some point I will start finishing bigger and bigger projects but for right now I'm happy with Whispe.rs.

About a week.

I launched DesignerJobs (https://www.designerjobs.co) about three weeks ago: posted on HN a friday afternoon and got like 5 upvotes. I thought that was going to be it but someone picked it up on ProductHunt the next day and it ended up ranking #4 on there all weekend. I got plenty of traffic from there, realized I wasn't collecting emails (oops) or had links to social media (duh) and rushed to deploy the features. Got my first customer on Monday! From there, I contacted a lot of companies with open positions for designers and eventually added more sales, one after another. So far things are going pretty well, I've added features, companies and I'm trying to maintain growth.

The biggest challenge for me was/is marketing. I'm finding it's actually pretty easy to code and design anything, but marketing/reaching out/selling whatever you have is what truly separates having a website from having a business.

I started playing with computer vision toolkits like OpenCV in the late summer, took a couple months to play with different tutorials, then it took another couple months to launch a simple iOS game with face and mouth detecting. As an MVP, I avoided any features that might turn into a time sink and didn't even include in-app purchases.

Working with the libraries was unexpectedly easy since I looked at a lot of sample code and tutorials.

The challenges are to come when I have to dig deeper into combining different image processing techniques to boost my particular tracking needs. Additionally, I'll have to learn about 3D graphics from scratch if I want to make the game more immersive and dynamic. Lastly if I want to add stuff like an in-game economy, that will take time away from experimenting on the computer vision stuff.

Check it out and send me feedback! https://appsto.re/us/hhcxfb.i

I had an idea of a static JavaScript practice website with little to no maintenance required. It took me about a month of part-time work from idea to having the website up. I took a month or so to add more content to it.

It was never meant to make any money, so maybe your definition of side project is more specific than mine. I got about tens of clicks on the affiliate links and made a grand total of $0.00.

The website is at https://javascript.onl/ and I wrote a high-level blog post about how I did it at http://www.pesfandiar.com/blog/2016/05/12/javascript-online-...

I haven't launched completely, but it's been around 5 months since I started it. I'm building a visual-programming environment to build chatbots with pure drand and drop. Still lots of stuff to do, but I launched a successful beta.

You can see it in action: https://talkbot.io

Website took 2 days to build, the idea, webapp and server took around 5 months.

I haven't charged a penny to my clients, because it's still in beta, but I'm on my way on making it no-beta soon and start monetizing.

Unexpected: Got featured in some blogs and it rained clients and e-mails, too demanding for one-person project. I wasn't ready, nor my product, marketing was going to happen later.

P.S. I'm the only coder and designer, should've been faster with more people on the "team".

I've been taking a circuitous route with a side project: first just building an open source command-line tool that scratches my own itch, and then evaluating traction from there. If companies find the tool useful, I've been keeping in mind ways to build out a SaaS/enterprise version. Or if it doesn't get much traction, worst-case at least I have something that's useful to me!

The tool is called Skeema [1] and it allows you to manage relational database schemas as code -- a bridge between git (or hg, svn, etc) and SQL DDL. You can use it to export CREATE TABLE statements from a DB to a repo, and then auto-generate and run DDL based on changes to that repo. Currently it just targets MySQL (due to personal familiarity, and the historic complexity with schema changes there), but if it's successful I could envision porting it to other DBs.

The open source CLI is still in alpha, but getting very close to a first release candidate. I've spent 9 months of working 5 to 25 hours/week on it so far.

Some unexpected challenges:

* Even for entirely text-based command-line tools, building a nice polished interface takes a lot of time! My goal has been to make Skeema's CLI paradigms immediately intuitive to users of Git and MySQL, in terms of option-handling, subcommands, and config file format. Even little things like exit code values, and STDOUT vs STDERR for different types of output, matter a lot for building CLIs that are friendly to pipelines.

* None of the existing Golang CLI/config packages were the right fit. After a couple attempts at hacking/forking popular ones resulted in overly-awkward code, I scrapped all that and wrote my own. I should have done that from the start, but it felt like yak-shaving.

* I eschewed unit testing at first, going with the common side-project wisdom of only prioritizing functionality. But as the codebase grew, I really wished I had spent more time writing tests from the start. I suspect it would have been a net time-saver vs the manual ad hoc testing I was doing initially.

[1] http://github.com/skeema

Less than a day.

I had been thinking about it for weeks/months and knew exactly how it would work. Having mentally worked out all the problems simplified the creation so much. While putting things off is usually bad, sometimes continuously thinking about it solves problems before they come up. The only challenges I had were with learning new tools and not execution.

Wrote a hn post (on an alt acc) and sent a few emails and it had a couple nice traffic spikes and news/blog articles. I haven't touched it since though. I won't link it because I don't want my name attached to it.

I've been working on https://instantexporter.com/ I'm surprised by how much longer it actually took me to build the v1, compared to what I initially thought it will take (5+ months vs 1 month!). Also, I thought that I wouldn't fall for the common psychological pitfalls as I know about them well, but here we are.

We started working on customer development in May part-time (full-time starting July). It wasn't until mid-September that we actually knew what we wanted to create, and that's when we bought our domain. From there it took til early November to get our first paying customer.

Nymeria (https://www.nymeria.io) from inception to launch was one month. If you do any cold emailing for your own projects you may find it as useful as I have!

1 month per project, but nobody uses either - they were just for fun.