What products/services are worth paying for?
Hey IH,
Just curious as to what products or services you’ve paid for in order to grow, build and operate your side project or startup. Which ones were worth the expense? Any that weren’t?
Hey IH,
Just curious as to what products or services you’ve paid for in order to grow, build and operate your side project or startup. Which ones were worth the expense? Any that weren’t?
I’ll take a stab at this.
Here’s a list:
And to add to the list, here’s what I didn’t find useful, at least for me. Most of these come from having paid for it and didn’t find any ROI:
Agreed. I would add Amplitude/Mixpanel/Hotjar/etc. to the list.
Here are some of the things that I've paid for running a content site/blog as a side project and also general maker stuff:
For side projects, there are very few tools that are actually needed.
There are operational things like "hosting" you'll likely need, but past that, most tools should just optimize what you are already doing. Meaning few will actually be the reason for growth, they'll just amplify what you were already on track for.
This is even more true the less specialized the tool is.
I think you'll have more luck if you specify what it is you're trying to build for your side project and what big problems you're trying to solve with external tools.
I agree. I love tools and in the early days spent way too much time jumping from tool to tool, hoping for a magic bullet. Spoiler: it was a waste of time and money.
Now, I use specialized tools in order to boost what's already working or to solve a specific problem. Overall, though, my toolset is pretty small.
As Josh said, try being more specific about your needs (if you can) to get feedback that's relevant to you. For example, I used a popular email messaging platform for quite some time. It's a great product but just didn't work for my needs (B2C, freemium, low price point, etc). For a different business, I think it would be the right choice.
I’m looking for the most effective tool or service that will help increase sales. Also, if there’s anything that people find worth paying for I can think about building something in that space.😁
My side project was/is a test creation tool and bubble sheet grader as a service for schools. I tried Facebook ads for about two months and those drove some traffic to my site, but didn’t increase sales.
Besides ads, the only other thing I paid for was hosting.
A phone. Most people overlook (or don't want to deal with) sales calls. If you're selling to schools, a simple phone call might be the best place to start.
Email marketing tools. Mailchimp is free for up to 2,000 subscribers I think, but no matter what business you're in you should be collecting emails somewhere.
I usually get away with paying for nothing (mwahaha) until a project can pay for its needs itself, honestly. That said, I typically do projects for clients who intend to take over paying for some infrastructure once the products start making money, which is helpful.
Here are some tips to get an app going for free:
Web Hosting:
You can do it yourself! Setting up a linux web server is not that hard. When my projects are small enough, I set them up on my linux desktop computer for dev and testing purposes.
Next, when its time to show off the product, I like to switch to a more scalable hosting platform. For example, I will often use a Google Cloud Compute Engine, which has a 12 month free trial (hopefully enough time to monetize that product) and is also basically a containerized linux server itself, so the transition is really easy. Check out the free trial: https://console.cloud.google.com/freetrial .
Database Hosting:
You can set this up yourself too! Similar approach to the previous. Set up a local db for dev and testing, then move to something more scalable but still free. Heroku has an unbound free tier for PSQL db hosting which I think is great: https://www.heroku.com/pricing .
Test Automaion:
Version control, etc. is very helpful for testing and dev ops. I use GitLab, GitHub or BitBucket for most of my projects, which are all free. If you go with one of the platforms I mentioned, you can pretty easily configure something called a pipeline. This allows you to define a series of stages a build must go through before reaching the final "production" repository... this is useful for having test builds available on the web without affecting the live product .
For mobile app testing, use your own cell phone and maybe the free tier of Blisk, a browser for developers that visually simulates tons of phones and devices: https://blisk.io/ .
Uptime and Traffic Monitoring:
You can get this for free too, using good ol' Google Analytics: https://www.google.com/analytics/ .
Design Software:
Tons of free design software that is reasonably good. I use Inkscape for a ton of graphical work. It's available for Mac, Linux and Windows: https://inkscape.org/en/ .
Customer Support:
I know its painful but you can do this yourself too.... if you have a phone number.
Dev Tools:
Visual Studio Community Edition, Eclipse, etc. are fantastic, mature development environments.
The List Goes On. I did have to pay Apple to be a developer but that is because they are Apple.