Ask HN: How long did it take you to go from side project idea to launch?

[_xnmw]

I've been working on a SaaS product side project for about 4 months now. Progress feels painfully slow, but I wonder what typical one-man consumer SaaS projects look like. Years of development? 6 months average? Specific examples would be helpful so that I can compare the scope/size of the idea to mine.

[thinbeige]

The problem is not the actual dev time of a serious side project like a SaaS. Even if it just takes you three months to get to some sellable product with payment integration, etc.--the much bigger problem is that you need multiple shots to get it right (find the right market niche, the right product, the right angle, the right Marketing, the right growth channels, etc.). Then, after more than just three months and many attempts + pivots you just don't have the energy/time/money to keep up. Of course you can clone some proven model but then you face lots of competition which doesn't make success more probable.

People who are succesful did 99 mediocre side projects before they hit the jackpot. But it still took them tons of time and energy. Very often a overlooked by-product which was developed over night and benefitted from all prior experiences will be the cash cow while the main project which took 12 months still hasn't won any users.

Most stop at some point because it's just tough, especially the mental part.

[justboxing]

> People who are succesful did 99 mediocre side projects before they hit the jackpot

This. Nobody tells you this part. I've read the blogs of several successful side-projectors and independently came to this conclusion a couple of years ago. Even Tom Preston-Werner had a bunch of side-projects that went nowhere (he wrote about it a while back) before GitHub. So also Dennis Crowley (FourSquare) wrote about his side-projects, incl. Dodgeball (college project?), which was a pre-cursor to FourSquare.

EDIT: Found an AMA that Tom did here on HN in 2010. Some interesting questions about doing side-projects while being employed full-time.

=> Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804443

[acconrad]

> People who are succesful did 99 mediocre side projects before they hit the jackpot.

This x100000. This is fundamentally it; just like how we love to talk about 10,000 hours and targeted practice, so too can we extend this concept to startups. You just have to throw (and attempt) a bunch of ideas at the wall until one of them sticks, and learn along the way.

I used to get so bent out of shape that my side project wasn't a massive success or that I'm not a young prototypical YC founder straight out of college on the fast track to entrepreneurship. When I took a step back, realized that most founders (even outside of the tech bubble) are older than 35, and have tried (and failed) at a lot of different startups...you then embrace that it's just all about executing and learning from as many projects as possible. It takes out a lot of the stress and anxiety about succeeding, and instead using your side projects as practice to get you to that great idea in your future.

[hugs]

For me, there's about 4 months between idea and first public launch. But another 4 years between that first launch to deciding to build a company around it. The time between 4 months and 4 years involves building a community, helping users, and improving the core product...

My personal examples:

Launched Selenium as an open source project in 2004. Founded Sauce Labs Inc ("Selenium in the cloud") in 2008. (Sauce makes roughly ~$25MM a year now. https://www.inc.com/profile/sauce-labs)

Launched Tapster (then called "Bitbeambot") as an open source project in 2011. Founded Tapster Robotics, Inc. in 2015. (Not disclosing revenue at the moment, but still going strong!)

To echo some other comments, I also have many other side-projects (some posted to GitHub, but even more unpublished) that never went anywhere. Success is a combination of luck, timing, ABC (Always Be Creating), stubbornness/persistence, and getting feedback from as many people as possible.

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

I run a service called Tesults for test results reporting. It's fairly new, I went from idea to first release in two months, releasing last October. I wanted it to be fast because I've spent 8-9 years launching a bunch of stuff and each one took far too long for an initial release. With Tesults I discovered users expected far more features than that first pithy release and so work has never really stopped and I think that's part of the 'improving the core product' you are referring to.

I find it fascinating how little love this part of software dev can get with respect to both developer time allocation and department budgeting (hence making free to use important for most users) so Sauce Labs revenue is all the more impressive. Tapster is very cool - working on something with a cool factor like that makes it easier to get attention as I'm discovering now with a new project I'm working on (unrelated to testing).

[coderholic]

I launched the first version of https://ipinfo.io a few hours after having the idea - but it was just a super simple webpage at the time. I added the API within a few weeks I think, and that's when it started to take off. It was probably around a year before I added paid plans though, and another year before it started bringing in decent revenue, and then another year before I started working full time on it. See https://getputpost.co/from-side-project-to-250-million-daily... for some of the story.

I've worked on tons of side projects before this (most unsuccessful, some with some success - busmapper.co.uk, donothingfor2minutes.com). My advice would definitely be to launch early and improve things over time.

[mattbeckman]

Thanks for this! I use an ipinfo bash function on my Mac probably every day.

  ipinfo() {
    curl ipinfo.io/$1
    echo
  }

[highace]

I'm sure there were already IP APIs available before you launched, what do you think helped you fight through the crowd to become as big as you are now?

[HugoDaniel]

I quit my job in May 2016 (15 months ago) to work on an idea (a painting web app). Unfortunately I was also trying to earn money with any sort of side-kick jobs (teaching) and the idea never got the attention it deserved. It got a few turns and twists after an initial demo to some designer friends in December 2016.

I have since then managed to get some funding and have been working on it more seriously for the past 4 months (since may 2017). In two weeks I will have another closed alpha-demo that is then going to be used to produce a video for the landing page, and opened to the public if there is no big bashing from my zen target audience friends.

It does seem like a huge desert to cross. Motivation comes and goes. In the meantime I managed to kill my desire to feature creep it to death and learned a lot about the fine art of listening/ignoring the target audience requests. I know for sure that my approach for my next project is going to be completely different than my current one. But in the meantime the rent is due :)

The landing page: https://www.pixnit.com

My blog with some thoughts on the bootstrapping experience: http://www.hugodaniel.pt

[civilian]

Cool! It looks like you're doing most of your canvas-drawing with canvas draw commands? You might consider looking into WebGL rendering with regl: http://regl.party/ I've found it to be really powerful.

[pier25]

Interesting project.

Illustrator has a similar feature called shape builder. You can create new objects from intersections and such.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izi0mtItHh4

[ploggingdev]

Not a SaaS, but I'm working on a blogging platform for developers : https://www.ploghub.com/ . To use an analogy : Medium for developers without the dickbar. It took me around one month to build the initial version. The front page uses a dumbed down version of the HN algorithm. Code here (need to add test cases) : https://github.com/ploggingdev/ploghub

For my next project, I plan to build an alternative to Disqus which respects users' privacy. I removed Disqus from my blog a while due to the 2 MB junk it loads and sends tracking data to 10+ sites. I used to receive a few comments, so I thought I would build myself an alternative to Disqus and maybe turn it into a SaaS if there's demand for such a product. Any interest for a $10/month privacy respecting Disqus alternative + an open source code base?

I expect it to take me 2 to 3 weeks to build it. As you build more projects, you end up with a lot of reusable components, so it gets easier to build out the MVP. The real challenge for developers is to get users. This is something I don't have much experience with, so let's see how it goes.

[mattbeckman]

Depends on what you're building, of course, but seriously consider if what you're building is an MVP or not.

My most successful side-project has been the one where I didn't start out by using design patterns or TDD or fancy fun new languages as we do at my full-time job.

Instead, I spewed code vomit on the virtual floor of a tiny VPS, wrote most of it via SSH, and felt shame when users started using it because holy hell if they only knew what was underneath all that.

But ... that MVP generates income. Not quit-my-job income. But it's steady, and doesn't require a lot of changes. I plan on rebuilding it soon, as I need a better code base to handle upcoming plans. However, that embarrassingly messy hodgepodge has been running for a year, making money.

Good luck!

[vanrysss]

What's the product?

[danthelion]

Around 1 month total time since the idea, 2-3 days net dev time.

http://reddittopbooks.com

I wanted to learn Django and wanted to start with something fairly easy. I don't really have any idea how and where to promote it, didn't get much attention in my `Show HN` thread and most subreddits remove it because of the affiliate links to amazon.

Other than that it was a fun experience and at least I can say that Django is a great framework to work with!

[toptalkedbooks]

We have built a better website (more data and good algorithm), maybe you should consider join us, haha

[nikivi]

It took about a month to built the initial prototype for the Search Engine we are building.

https://learn-anything.xyz

We had the interactive mind maps as JSON already however we needed to display them on the web in a nice interface so we made a react component to render the JSON to the screen.

https://github.com/learn-anything/react-mindmap

Overall it took about a month to do the whole thing and get a working prototype, the search engine improved a lot since then though.

[AlexAMEEE]

Hey great work thanks! I used it a few times with good results.

Would it make sense for your app to also link topics to distance learning universities ?

I mean you could contact them first then talk about a commission fee, if someone joins their course they should pay you

The same thing could be done with coursera and edX.

[ai_ia]

Hi, really nice project. I had stumbled across it few days back. Good job !

[wainstead]

I recommend "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup," if you have not heard of it. He has some simple formulas for measuring how much you're trying to do and how long it will take, given that you have a full time job.

[nkg]

Thanks for the recommendation, I have just started it.

[goodnews3879]

There seems to be a prevailing idea among startup people that if you can't get an MVP up and running in ~3 months or less, it isn't worth doing. I have heard this exact statement made on a few of the well known podcasts.

The reality is that not every concept is going to get the low hanging fruit, and for many people real life gets in the way. Plus, for some people the journey of learning is just as important as launching the product.

It might be worth considering that you shouldn't stress out if it takes longer than the conventional advice might dictate.

[highace]

Two weekends for the MVP of https://newsapi.org. About 3 months so far for v2 - I'm building it out into a more featureful service that I'm hoping I can build a business around.

[dguo]

Thanks for building it!

It only took me a day or two to get https://www.dailylore.com up and running because of it.

[vanrysss]

What's the delay between article publication and it appearing on your api?

[guohuang]

1 week (mostly nights and weekend) - http://toptalkedbooks.com

Building a website is not the most painful part, promotion and getting traffic are the hardest, you have to be very determined. keep up the good work, don't give up.

anyone has any good advice on marketing?

[jadeydi]

Lots of good books

[rwieruch]

3 Months. It highly depends on the project though.

For me, it was an e-book [0] that I wanted to write to teach others about React. The idea was to learn React while building an application that is more complex than a Todo Application.

So I took the first 3 months to write the initial draft - only 90 pages. I released it on Leanpub as an unfinished book, because it was painfully hard to keep going. Yet the community seemed to like it. It confirmed me being on the right track and my motivation went up again.

Since then I iterated 4 times to improve and enrich the learning experience and "released" it multiple times. I keep it updated to the recent library versions, best practices and new techniques with the help of the open source community. Now it has over 170 pages and over 11.000 downloads.

What helped in my case: Release early and improve/iterate based on the feedback.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/

[toptalkedbooks]

Good job

[Zaheer]

6 months. I sat on the domain and an index.html file for months even though the idea was super simple. Partnering with a friend and holding each other accountable was the best thing to launch.

Compare career levels across companies - http://www.levels.fyi

[AndrewKemendo]

Concept was May 2011, I wrote up the spec in Aug 2011 and we launched in May 2015. So about 4 years.

[pier25]

So what was it?

[cityzen]

Biggest lesson I learned from building a SaaS side project that actually had revenue is this...

You cannot develop your way out of a marketing problem.

There will ALWAYS be technical problems to solve but it's all irrelevant if no one is using your product. Long development time also tends to create a familiarity with your product that users likely will not have, possibly ever.

I am a huge fan of Steve Blank's How to build a startup (which is free on udacity) https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245

[20years]

I have built multiple SaaS products. I spend about a month building the first version. I get that out in front of users and continue to build upon it if I see traction and based on feedback. If traction isn't there or it becomes obvious user won't pay, I generally move onto something else.

After the initial prototype, it generally takes another 3 to 4 months to build out a full fledged app that I can offer to the masses. It doesn't stop after that though. There is always more to develop and improve including a lot of re-factoring.

I currently have 4 SaaS products on the market and another one in the works.

[alinalex]

All your SaaS products are generating revenues? How did you come up with the ideas/pain points for your products?

[herbst]

I launched 2 SaaS. one that failed to sell took me only a long weekend. One that does well currently (https://forwardmx.io) took about 1 month of work scattered over 4 months. Plus at least a few weeks I invested in updates so far.

As one man show I try to scope small and grow slow within my capacity.

Also i have tons of prior experience in software development. Not want to make it sound like I just did that and whoosh

[_xnmw]

4 months for ForwardMX sounds really impressive. And that's a great landing page, did you design that yourself as well? What about payment integration?

[tmaly]

I spent around 6 months for version 1 of my food project https://bestfoodnearme.com and another 3 months for an entire re-write of version 2. It is still a work in progress with small iterations. I would say launch with the bare features, not even password reset. Get feedback and keep iterating.

Make sure you have some form of analytics from the start so you can see what pages people are going to

[ifend]

2 weeks -- http://www.backereta.com

Nobody uses it but it was a good learning experience.

[btzll]

Looks very useful, maybe you can promote it on reddit.