[HN Gopher] I spent five years building a webapp and got my firs...
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I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
Author : sillysaurusx
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-02-01 08:47 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (codingcafe.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (codingcafe.jp)
| msephton wrote:
| Previously:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599679
| jstxm wrote:
| Cool to read. Thanks.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Light text on light background for max pain. Still I will read it
| though. Frankly, I commend anyone who is willing to work long-
| term on massive projects by themselves like this. I find it
| inspiring since all my projects are like this tbh.
|
| Seems like frameworks were a major problem for the project. I get
| it. Sometimes if you're too early you end up having to build not
| only your project but a small ecosystem of things to support it.
|
| Here's the software they ended up making which looks frigging
| cool: https://signal.vercel.app/
| makerdiety wrote:
| Is that Signal Vercel MIDI thing something people can use to
| make music for free?
| reactordev wrote:
| Yes
| dsego wrote:
| Luckily there is reader mode, the contrast is so low to make it
| almost illegible.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Dark Reader works beautifully on it tho, because it's pretty
| simple
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| yeah, GitHub Sponsors is non-existent, impossible to get any
| revenues from it
| david_allison wrote:
| And yet it still hurts significantly less that Patreon
| nrilead9 wrote:
| One time I set out to write an accounting ledger application and
| towards the end realized I built an ORM framework.
|
| Neither the application nor the ORM lived on. I now start from an
| existing ORM framework for any new project.
|
| Good learning!
| ipnon wrote:
| I wouldn't be who I am today without wasting years in the bike
| shed. Kudos!
| Frederation wrote:
| Thats cool.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I remember the moment when in my last startup, the first invoice
| was paid - $5. A magic moment. I still remember the name of the
| customer. The last invoice before exit was $50.000. I remember
| that customer too.
| cmenge wrote:
| Interesting, did you pivot / change the target market? $5
| sounds more like a consumer product but $50k likely isn't
| (unless you literally progressed from skateboards to cars like
| every Agile cartoon wants to make us believe)...
|
| Among other things, I'm working on an elephant hunter type
| product. Took us five months, but the first invoices were $7k,
| $3k and now $45k but that doesn't prove much yet.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| No we started with too low of a price, and we added
| enterprise pricing later on. So it was a combination, but we
| didn't pivot.
| android521 wrote:
| Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would
| need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to
| launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known
| about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made
| the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and
| mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature,
| this thing would be ready for launch and take off. But in
| reality...
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| > mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature,
|
| Even non-technical founders make this error. Everyone wants to
| believe that "just one more feature" is the difference between
| make and break.
|
| In my experience reducing features is better to begin with.
| reactordev wrote:
| >In my experience reducing features is better to begin with.
|
| This is right approach. Lean. If you don't have PMF, reduce
| your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again.
| Eventually you'll find a market to serve. Just don't fall
| into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market
| exploration.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding
| new features?
| Phreaker00 wrote:
| As a freelance back-end developer with various co-
| founding experience this question speaks to me. I think
| it's all a matter of perspective.
|
| Looking at it from a development perspective the two can
| mean the same thing: we pivot and so we need to add new
| features.
|
| However, in my experience the key is to look at pivoting
| from a non-development perspective. As mentioned in
| parent comments you pivot to find a product market fit.
| That entails finding your audience and the problem you're
| solving for them. Those questions do not require a
| product, but a human understanding. Questions like 'is it
| actually a problem they need solving, or a slight
| convenience?' and 'how are they solving their problem
| without my product?'.
|
| By pivoting quickly in that space you don't get bogged
| down by technical issues or challenges that don't even
| matter, and the real solution might be a week's worth of
| time.
| Nemi wrote:
| Pivoting means you are solving a new core problem. Adding
| features keeps the core problem intact.
| m8s wrote:
| It's a good lesson. We found PMF with a shared google sheet and
| a bit of data processing behind the scenes. The level of polish
| I'd come to expect as an engineer at an enterprise company was
| astronomically higher than what was actually needed for our
| customers to give us their dollars.
| n0vella wrote:
| Wise words man
| jll29 wrote:
| +1
|
| Thanks for posting this insight, because a typical engineer, if
| they are worth their money, does not like the idea to launch
| something "unfinished" or "half-baked" or even "not yet
| perfect", but the business logic behind the MVP (minimal viable
| product) is clearly correct.
| flir wrote:
| Have to disagree (although this may be a "no true Scotsman"
| disagreement).
|
| I think a typical engineer is more likely to want to evolve
| towards mature software in small steps. In my experience the
| "complete it, then release it with a big splash" approach is
| more likely to come from marketing. "We moved the CTA up the
| page a bit" isn't the stuff of press releases.
| osigurdson wrote:
| It is definitely hard to break the "but... I'm a
| professional" mindset. It is good to remember that your code
| isn't you. If you get PMF, just re-write everything from
| scratch.
| somenameforme wrote:
| As an argument on the other side - so long as you're making
| enough to live comfortably enough, then there's no real
| need to abide the business logic though, even if you think
| it absolutely does maximize income in the longrun. If you
| spend years working on something and it turns out somehow
| nobody else likes it, well at least you have something that
| you're presumably satisfied with, and you often learn an
| immense amount in process.
|
| Careers that aren't quite so commercialized regularly carry
| out this process. The obvious example being writers where
| you may spend months/years writing a book only to find out
| that nobody wants to publish it. Or perhaps you ultimately
| just don't like it. I know Andy Weir (of "The Martian"
| fame) wrote about 75,000 words on his next novel before
| deciding he just didn't like it, and scrapped the entire
| thing.
| swoorup wrote:
| Surprisingly the cost to develop is fairly accurate, using scc's
| COCOMO
|
| Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $1,023,233
|
| Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 13.87 months
|
| Estimated People Required (organic) 6.55
| writtenAnswer wrote:
| I want to be as cool as this guy.
| jsemrau wrote:
| I built a deep search for financial research in 2023 and learned
| that 2025 would have been the year to launch it.
| cmenge wrote:
| Sounds interesting, what stops you from (re-)launching it?
| jsemrau wrote:
| Well, I am pondering this now, tbh.
| arionhardison wrote:
| Same here but I learned so much I think it was worth it, im
| literally 4y+ in. I made a platform for my own personal website:
|
| https://arionhardison.com
|
| then Ai education: https://pub.education
|
| then Ai healthcare: https://codify.healthcare
|
| I used to think my goal was to do this and that and change the
| world etc... I am starting to think that I just like building
| things and maybe thats OK.
| Narciss wrote:
| Just visited your personal website, looks like it has a bunch
| of overflow errors - worth looking into.
|
| I appreciate the grind though
| dsego wrote:
| Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for
| some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped
| JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when
| they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Did you also tell them about "server side rendering"
| capabilities of PHP?
| dsego wrote:
| I remember this uncanny feeling when I started reading about
| a new thing in JS frameworks called "file based routing",
| coming from PHP it was, wait, didn't we just come from this
| to proper routing, and now this is a feature again.
| floydnoel wrote:
| whenever i tell other developers that i think file-based
| routing is stupid all i get are blank stares. i guess we'll
| just have to let the young bucks figure it out again on
| their own
| indulona wrote:
| i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet
| change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off.
| as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is
| long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by
| the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the
| most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i
| will ever make, for this reason. it will be 2.5 years of work in
| march, when i will be releasing it. the only reason i am going
| for it and i stuck with working on it full-time this whole time
| is because it is a type of business where customers will come on
| their own and will want to use it because it provides them with a
| new sales channel so competition is actually good for them. it
| flips the usual business model on its head. otherwise i would
| have quit a long time ago. my hopes up to get it going this year
| and make 1M in sales next year and hope to be able to focus on
| growing it for many years to come.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Interesting. Link?
| indulona wrote:
| not yet. it is nothing world-changing, just sales platform
| for digital content creators. something like patreon,
| teachable, audible...mashed together.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| There was a fantastic article giving advice to any would-be
| patreon disruptors posted on HN a while back. Might be
| worth your time.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808115
| kubb wrote:
| How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time?
| Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year.
| If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary.
|
| Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out
| seems out of the question.
| input_sh wrote:
| Nobody starts by dropping quarter of a mil, you start by
| dropping $1k and being very frugal, releasing something
| minimal, seeing how it behaves, and once you have some actual
| data to work with, you pivot again and again and again.
|
| It's always a huge money sinkohole until it isn't.
| svantana wrote:
| It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it
| was a side project. That's why it took so long.
|
| Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance
| work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the
| remaining time.
| AutistiCoder wrote:
| How do you get freelance work?
| svantana wrote:
| Networking, in the broadest sense of the word. Gone to tech
| meetups, gotten to know a lot of people in my particular
| niche (sound and image processing).
| ExxKA wrote:
| It may be possible for you later in life. Most bootstrappers
| have worked up some wealth via traditional methods like
| savings, home equity, inheritance, and freelance/consulting
| work.
|
| VC money and accelerators are primarily for people who dont
| have the wealth to bootstrap, but who are young and willing to
| take investors on early.
| fbuilesv wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Nice to meet you. I'm an engineer who runs a small mobile app
| development company.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| I assume you work in your freetime, besides your actual job.
| bandrami wrote:
| I think having a day job was a big part of why that took five
| years?
| eksapsy wrote:
| Reading the article carefully, one realizes
|
| - this is very likely a side project. Conclusion made by the
| fact that the author was writing, re-writing and re-writing
| again the project because of a new 'cool framework' that came
| out. They were taking their time to do that and doing it
| repeatedly for years. Proving that releasing the project was
| not their first concern, nor making money out of it judging
| from the fact this was not designed to make money but merely
| having a github sponsor button. Author's main concern seems to
| having been to just have with it and learning was likely a
| bigger factor.
|
| - it didn't need funding to startup, as it seems like the only
| costs were the operating costs which were likely just a server
| on vercel
|
| Also, to answer your question more thoroughly
|
| - usually people that make projects like these have a main job,
| which funds in one way or another their side-projects.
|
| - A million $ is a very unusually big capital. Side projects
| are very unlikely to need such big amount of funding just to
| start-up. People just throw a small capital if needed at all,
| and if the project self-funds itself, maybe they'll throw the
| money back.
| AutistiCoder wrote:
| You could just not do a Web app.
|
| There are plenty of apps you can build that don't require any
| upfront costs.
|
| I'm working on an app that runs entirely on a consumer PC.
| bl0b wrote:
| There's still the big cost of time spent working on it
| without making money from having a job.
| kubb wrote:
| Hey, my question was about the costs of living, not the costs
| of web hosting :)
| piskov wrote:
| 2.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any
| accessibility specs.
|
| Please don't do this
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I'd noticed it as 2.58 in Firefox's dev tools, so when you say
| 2.54, I'm curious. #ab9ea2 on #ffffff.
| https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ says 2.57,
| https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white says 2.57 and on
| hover expands that to 2.5785676343306743. I presume Firefox is
| rounding, while the other two are truncating. Truncating
| actually feels more useful for how people are too likely to use
| such things--taking values as low as they can while still
| complying.
|
| The new, superior method is https://www.myndex.com/APCA/. It
| yields an Lc of 50.4, which is (as you'd expect) _wildly_
| unsuitable for body text.
| webprofusion wrote:
| Technically they didn't put a price tag on the app, the $1 was
| github sponsor money, so the project was never really designed to
| make money.
|
| The app itself (Midi editor with piano roll UI) looks great but
| is instantly made much less relevant if you just install Reaper
| (and actual DAW, free to try, available at the time all this was
| developed).
|
| Cool thing, but the moral of the story is: release that toy thing
| you spent a few weeks on, it's as ready as it ever will be and
| maybe it'll grow with it's user base.
| nchmy wrote:
| That ain't the moral of the story... It's not even the literal
| story that they shared
| albertobarrago wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, great result
| p3rls wrote:
| I spent eight years and I'm around -$150,000 for my main webapp
| so you're ahead of the curve!
| Narciss wrote:
| What's the web app, if you don't mind sharing the link
| KronisLV wrote:
| I feel like many would point at all of the technology migrations
| and view it as a cautionary tale: that if you don't stick with
| whatever stack you picked, then shipping will be a lengthy ordeal
| due to migrating between various sub-optimal choices all the
| time. For example, what if someone just picked jQuery for the
| front end and stuck with that and tried and rewrites or changes
| after the launch of the MVP?
|
| On the other hand, this no doubt will let you learn a lot of
| useful things along the way and possibly make you a better
| developer, or at least give you an idea of which technologies are
| nice or easy to use, or suited for certain problems.
|
| It's nice to have that sort of separation between the categories
| of what you aim to do - to study or to try and ship something,
| because without you see a lot of cases (especially in indie game
| development, for some reason) where people feel disappointed due
| to not shipping anything in the end. There's nothing wrong with
| unfinished projects that let you learn, or shipping sub-optimal
| code to get it out of the door and start generating value.
|
| Good job, though!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| TFA talks a bit about shiny object/library syndrome. I think
| there's another good reason to avoid new things: LLMs are better
| with old stuff.
|
| I can sit down and essentially english-type an app together in
| javascript or an old version of bevy, but if I ask for new APIs
| it all falls apart until I have built up sufficient examples in
| my own code. I've tried giving documentation, etc. It's just
| easier to version pin something from 2022 and chug along using a
| less featureful but more productive assisted-coding paradigm.
| flippyhead wrote:
| This resonates with me. I've recently come out of retirement, and
| really gotten back into programming and product building. I've
| done this a few times before, but even with experience, I STILL
| find it hard sometimes to not just dive right in and start
| building. Mostly, it's because I enjoy it so much.
|
| Now though, things are different. After a throw away project to
| get back into things, I realized I could very nearly just build
| first and find product market fit second if only because building
| is sooo much quicker now.
|
| I decided that over the course of a year I was going to try
| building 3-6 separate projects, and assume at least one will be
| successful. My most recent project I realized very late that it's
| probably going to be very hard to ever make much money; so for
| now, I'm giving it away for free, just to see how people use it
| (https://seikai.tv).
|
| I've not just started a new project and for sure this one is
| going to be a unicorn!
| xyzzy9563 wrote:
| I spent 2 years making a web app and it's making about $4k per
| month now.
| vcryan wrote:
| This is a great post about learning JavaScript
| beryilma wrote:
| > Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript.
|
| > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the
| UI framework from React to Riot.js.
|
| > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via
| npm.
|
| > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6.
|
| > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the
| introduction of Flow, a type checking system.
|
| > So I rewrote everything in TypeScript, including my own
| libraries.
|
| > Anyway, I'll be replacing my own components like Button and
| Toolbar with Material-UI ones.
|
| > It's time to rewrite everything to styled-components.
|
| > It's time to rewrite everything to useXXX.
|
| No wonder why these software projects (personal as well as
| professional ones) are 6 years late. It may be a good learning
| experience, but a terribly inefficient way of developing
| software.
| madduci wrote:
| Exactly. Using a boring stack like jQuery would have been
| already good enough to let them concentrate on solving business
| problems rather than stack ones
| EGreg wrote:
| It's interesting
|
| 12 years ago I released v1.0 of the full stack open source
| platform for anyone to use to quickly put together pretty
| much anything on the Web in a standard way, and focus on
| actually growing it, but I have faced opposition from day 1,
| on weird bases
|
| First, I was told that the name of my library "conflicts with
| the excellent Q.js library for promises" and that no one was
| going to take a look. Well, promises are built into browsers
| now. But I renamed it to Qbix Platform back then.
|
| See for yourself LOL:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 (2013)
|
| Then people told me that it doesn't use the latest React /
| Angular / Web Components / Typescript whatever, and looks
| old. On the PHP side they told me that it looks like ancient
| code because it's compatible with PHP 5.2 and told me I must
| break compatibility.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 (2023)
|
| Then I was told that PHP is a stupid language to build a
| platform in and I should use Go or Rust if anyone would take
| it seriously.
|
| Every step of the way, I was citing massively adopted
| projects like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, the number of
| servers running PHP and my vision for everyone to "just run
| it" https://qbix.com/ecosystem
|
| But the signal to noise ratio was very high. Some people here
| on HN started telling me that they didnt want to read that
| page because they found mentioned a token. But the token is
| optional and there only for settling micropayments and
| hosting companies to make money from customers globally. It
| is solving the payments problem on the web and getting rid of
| the stupid paywalls. It is solving the problem of monetizing
| digital content like open source software, journalism etc.
| Which have corrupted journalism.
|
| In short, it's been a lonely experience. Many times people
| are married to the latest fads or taboos and unwilling to
| even read what you wrote (unless you remove all mention of a
| token and add the latest framework du jour).
|
| Here it is, if you want it, it's free and open source btw:
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Web devs specifically seem to be especially prone to
| inheriting biases from more senior devs that they've worked
| with, to the point that they spout things like "php is
| terrible and no one should use it" or "jquery is bloated
| and useless" without actually having used the technology
| they're rallying against. Or sometimes they'll maybe have
| messed around with a poorly written legacy application, or
| they'll go through a tutorial.
|
| I actually partially blame xkcd for people spontaneously
| getting these kind of trendy opinions. If I had a nickel
| for every time a junior dev quoted that 99 problems regex
| comic to my I'd have like... a few bucks.
|
| Things are outdated when they no longer have use do to
| their age, they aren't outdated just because there's
| something shinier.
| smaudet wrote:
| Exactly. The one thing I learned about web dev in 10+
| years is, all (or most of) the opinions are wrong.
|
| Where we were in the early 2000s wasn't bad, it was
| actually pretty slick compared to all the "shiny" we have
| today.
|
| There will always be problems, but the idea that to solve
| the problems we should use Yet Another Cool
| Library/Language is just incorrect. Sometimes its good to
| refactor/rewrite, but often the rewrite is just as bad
| (or worse) as the old thing. You should have a very
| compelling reason to do so (at least for large scale
| rewrites, removing tech debt is OK).
| ge96 wrote:
| What is the latest now in JS land? HTMX and combining
| client/server side code in one file right?
|
| I am guilty of trying to keep up with the buzz like learning
| Rust even if I don't need it (get by with JS/Python/C++)
| chkhd wrote:
| Exactly why I have zero regrets going native on macOS. Yes,
| Xcode isn't the best to put it mildly and SwiftUI is still
| maturing.. but I am so glad I don't have to deal with the
| modern web stack. Daily smiles instead of facepalms, most of
| the time!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No one "has to" rewrite just because they're building on the
| web. Coffeescript was a bad bet but other than that all of
| the technologies listed there would have been fine for many
| years to come without a rewrite.
| taylodl wrote:
| Some people see a new project as a new opportunity to get to
| use new tools and processes. They get wrapped up in that more
| so than in the delivery of the product. Others see a new
| project as an opportunity to hone existing skills in their
| current set of tools and processes. The latter group tend to
| deliver a much higher-quality project on time and budget.
| curiousigor wrote:
| Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this.
|
| A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if
| you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was
| not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool
| which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some
| might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with
| a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first
| $1 email that came through that felt very validating
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Seems like a solid app. I haven't evaluated online music software
| but this is a good first experience, for me. I appreciate that I
| can try it without signing in.
| fsckboy wrote:
| when I got my first apartment that had its own clothes washer and
| dryer, the first time I found a $1 bill in the dryer with my
| clothes, I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall!
| ge96 wrote:
| now just time travel to when $1 was $100
| lxe wrote:
| The app is actually really good too.
| gitlinuxgreat wrote:
| I use boring stacks in all my software development including
| jQuery, also 5 years programming and not a dime of revenue.
| American software development not easy. Even though I offer free
| account, how messed up is that.
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