My side project gets 170k+ users / month. But I'm stuck at my day job. Any advice?
Hey everyone
Last March I started a gaming tracking platform. It's been growing like crazy and last 30 days pulled in 170,000 unique visitors.
The plan to monetise is to build in paid subscriptions for each user. My problem is I need to pay bills. And I'm currently stuck at my day job working 6 days / week.
Managing this much traffic is time consuming. And building the paid subscription stuff whilst juggling my job is a bit of a nightmare...
What I'm hoping is that I could get some kind of investment. Around $15—30k. This would be enough to leave my job and monetise properly...
But I'm not well connected and don't really know where to start. Any advice?
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I would caution against leaving your job without having any actual proof that you CAN monetize the product. I remember chatting with you about the platform before on Twitter. I think you should not step away from your sole income source until you have a proven monetization path.
That means building out the paid subscription feature while you are still moonlighting. I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but consider this: any investor who is willing to put money into this business needs to know that you can recuperate that investment. They need to see that there is a revenue model that looks promising. Right now, there is no such thing, at least not visible on the page.
In any case, I would reach out to the folks at Earnest Capital (where I am an LP, just to be clear) and see if your business fits. Having a few sales already would obviously improve your chances, but you won't know what bootstrapper-friendly investors expect until you ask.
Hey Arvid, thank you for the information. I currently have Google Ads, however a portion of my traffic use a Google ad blocker. Hence further the reason I would love to move to paid subscriptions - as my audience are willing to subscribe.
I will certainly check out Earnest Capital!
Appreciate the reply.
I agree 100% with this advice.
Make sure you've proven people will pay with actual money. People will always be nice and say, "Oh, yea... I'd totally pay for that!" Asking them to do it is a different story.
Once people start paying, you definitely want to build up to a 6-12mo in savings so you have enough time to course correct if things start to stagnate or go south.
Good advice. I am struggling with the same and in my mind it always boils down to the main points:
Should I leave to build more momentum
Should I be rational and stay in your job until you can sustain yourself
I've set myself some inflection points to reassess where I stand and until then it's just a side hustle.
Maybe you can try the same @heychazza :)
Congrats on building such a popular site! Don't panic, you will figure out how to make money from this.
You don't need to build any new features to make some money from your traffic. Continue to work on adding subscriptions, but you can start making money right now with ads and sponsorships.
Here's some ideas:
You will be tempted but DO NOT build any payment features. Just ask people to email you. Include a mailto link if you want. When they email you, ask them to Paypal you the money to book a slot.
Check out buysellads dot com to sell some ad space. There are other ad exchanges like it. This is just one I happen to know. See what kind of money you can make. And try it out.
Add some affiliate links (for Amazon or other sites) to some gaming related products.
You don't need to "have connections" to sell ads. Just start contacting companies that are connected to your space and ask if they're interested in sponsoring.
I'd try and spend a few days just focusing on selling sponsorships. As soon as you start making a bit of money, the pressure will be off and you will feel better. All the best!
Wow, thank you a ton hrishio for posting this - I appreciate all your time spent to reply! I will check these options out, as this would allow me to make a sustainable income, right?
And would allow me to utilise my existing website, while the new revamp is being developed.
Thanks a ton for your time!
You're welcome. Let me be clear - I don't know if this will allow you to make a sustainable income.
There are no guarantees in business. You will have to try things out and see what works.
If anything, it would be a temporary solution until the new site were to release.
Congrats Charlie. Have loved seeing the growth each month. Haven't got any advice or money to give I'm afraid.
For anyone reading who might know someone — Charlie is a sound person and incredibly hard worker. 0 to 170k / mo working a full time job is crazy. Worth backing.
Thank you a ton Harry! Really appreciate the kind words, and I would love to expand this further.
If you can gather some interesting data you could send to your users weekly or monthly an automated newsletter could probably have good results. If you get a decent number of subscribers getting sponsors shouldn’t be really hard specially on the gaming scene. I’m building a product to help newsletters find sponsors so if you decide to create one let me know and I could add you to the list. Have a good day and keep going!
That sounds awesome, thank you Jordan I will consider this!
I'm no VC, I just visited the website and I couldn't understand what it was about. Maybe a quick description of what it is and what service it provides would help , if you're trying to pitch this for funding. I visited on mobile, not sure if the desktop experience is different.
Thank you, I’d happily explain more to a VC, and a full description and preview of the future for the site.
While it might feel wrong to leave a job, it might be now or never an opportunity to make something for yourself. With such traffic, I would personally try.
Try announcing a part-time availability at your job. If not, leave. You can ALWAYS find a new dev job.
Thank you, this is the exact reason I want to jump on this sooner than later. If I don’t do it now, someone else will.
I could only do that if I had the income to cover, I have a mortgage soon, and currently pay rent which is costly..
Congrats! Not sure what the things on your website are (gaming assets?) but looks slick. I guess you can build a paid version with history and alerting?
If you want funding there are indie hacker focused VCs (that are not like VCs) that might be interested like Earnest Capital: https://twitter.com/earnestcapital
Thanks a ton Seattle! I’ve just reached out to Earnest, appreciate the reply!
Currently got a brand new site underway, with much more (fancier) gaming assets. I can’t wait to finalise the new website once I can complete it haha.
Cool - hope you get some interest. Another one is Tiny Seed: https://twitter.com/tinyseedfund
Best of luck!
Good going. You've got more visitors that most of us😂
15-30k is nothing, it'll be gone in a second.
Yeah, monetize, then leave your job, not the other way round I'd say.
Or, if you need help doing some building, you could just give me a shout
Haha, thanks jaakit. Really appreciate it, the reason for the investment would be more to allow me to be able to finalise the revamp with subscriptions.
I’ve built the site currently with $0 spent on advertisement, this is solely organic via Google SEO and YouTube videos that creators have made.
Appreciate the reply!
Hey Charlie. Amazing work. Congrats on the results they are well deserved.
Have you thought about selling some ad space? I’m sure new games would like to be on your website. That could make you some money and you could save the 30k in a few months probably.
Maybe create an automated newsletter for your users and sell ads there.
This could make you some money while you save to make the jump. Later you could remove those ads.
Hope some of these ideas are helpful.
Hey Jordan, thank you a ton for the kind words! I’ve considered it, just not sure where to start with that space - I don’t have the connections yet.
Really love the ideas, will note these down now!
Thanks a ton
Hi Charlie, if it's capital you seek I'd be happy to take a look closer and learn more about what you're doing here.
Can you build something that is no code that can first help you monetize before you quit your day job?
Can you take some vacation or time off to try focusing on your project?
Hey Albert, as said in a previous message - the only time off left I have is for my actual holiday but that’s not until July.
Aside from that, I wouldn’t be able to book any unpaid days or anything of that sort.
Have you got any savings you can rely on for at least a month or two?
Sadly I do not, however quitting with 2 months would still be risky as I have a mortgage to pay soon sadly..
Do you know you can go sick and take few days of sick leaves ?
Do you know you can use stripe and build a bare minimum yet good enough subscription in few days ?
Hi Sach, I wouldn’t want to take sick days just because it could result in me losing my job.. too risky as this is the income I depend on currently.
As regards to the subscription part, I do have a revamp in progress which is why I would want the investment to get this finalised and released.
I still have no idea what the site is about, but if you have so much traffic, I guess it's a niche, and niches are the best to monetize ;)
Making a newsletter+sponsor, buysellads, adsense (with this traffic, you can go with ezoic).
Great job!
Thank you Tim, I will consider this!
Hi Charlie ... congratulations on your hard work !! ... for your situation, you could try taking a few weeks unpaid time off .... sometimes even 1-2 weeks is enough to get you started and then rest can be developed on the usual side schedule. I wish you good luck in your endeavors !!
Thank you a ton! Sadly my company doesn’t allow more than 1-2 days a month.. really frustratingly..
Hi Charlie, Can you contact me? I would like to see if this fits an angel investment.
Hi Tobbin, feel free to email me (it’s on my profile).
I am going through exactly the same thing right now. Do you have expensive server costs?
The costs aren’t too bad, around $230 a month. This is because it has future proofing, so I don’t need to keep upgrading haha.
We currently have 90 million rows of data
Wow that's a lot of rows.
I'm using a DocumentDB (Mongo) cluster and it only has collections with around 300k documents but double your costs for the DB alone. There is a lot of aggregating data but I must be doing something wrong.
I’ve never really used Mongo, looks interesting though!
Ouch, I have to add a ton of indexing haha, alongside giving MariaDBA (MySQL optimised fork) a ton of tweaks etc.
Feels like there's a patch of a few months between where you are now and when you'd be able to show enough evidence to easily get some kind of investment (and also prove to yourself there's a monetization path). Might be worth working with a contractor or two in this time to try out different approaches whilst you're busy with your day job. Could be developers, could be marketers (obviously, you'll need to vet carefully - recommendations FTW). Then you can spend your day off planning experiments and/or features for them to try during the work week.
And/or staycation from the day job if you've got some vacation days?
Hey Chris, appreciate the reply! I’ve used up my holiday days, and only have days left for my actual holiday later this year.
I do monetise via ads currently, and know my audience are willing to pay - both from asking users, to the game that the users pay upgrades for.
Sounds promising! Maybe bring an ads expert in to tweak your system then so you can ramp up revenue enough to quit the day job.
One word of caution: users telling you they are willing to pay is pretty much worthless - only trust when you see them actually paying
Thank you Chris, will note this!
Hello Charlie,
I would not recommend leaving your job now, you should try to accomplish one of these two things before that:
1 - Have 12 months' worth of savings covering basic living expenses
2 - Enough MRR covering your monthly expenses
Implementing a subscription is not very hard nowadays, you can use a system like Paddle (paddle.com) that automates everything for you, you should be able to implement a first draft in a couple of days.
What is blocking you from implementing the subscription part now? Remember that in the beginning, it will be a lot of trial and error, you can change the price and plans until you find something that works.
Good luck!
Hi gramos,
I am currently working on a new revamp of the website with many new features, which would also have paid subscriptions. However due to lack of time with my full time job, it has made developing this much slower and in turn - harder.
One approach you should consider is to implement as few new features as possible. Maybe even not building any new features at all. You can try to just limit the current website, maybe limiting it by page views per month like some news websites do nowadays.