Viable Side Business?
Hello fellow indie hackers.
I've been running a website http://www.playspedia.com/ for several years which is a play making / strategy tool primarily for Ultimate Frisbee players. The site technically has a user base of around 200K (mostly dormant users).
Monthly it roughly has:
-500-800 active users (or logins) per month
-30-50K views
-4-5K sessions
So the numbers are not huge relative to the user base but oddly the monthly data stays pretty steady.
It's in need of major TLC and at cross roads as the code is very dated and need of a complete re-write. I'm trying to determine if I should invest my own time to build a new version or sunset it, I'm capable of doing everything on my own so it's a question of time for me. I can't maintain it for free anymore, so I've been surveying to see if people would pay for it as a subscription product, very limited data shows about 40 out of 60 respondents would pay a small monthly fee.
Curious if any fellow indie hackers have some recommendations here given the data I've provided. Should I continue or focus on other things, as I already have another startup going on... much more time consuming one though. Playspedia more or less runs itself.
Appreciate any feedback.
Thanks,
Andre
You could always go the "lazy" way of placing banner ads on it : )
More creatively, if you have a few thousand emails collected you could consider doing Joint Venture campaigns with similar brands around Ultimate. Maybe partner with some equipment providers to run some campaigns with.
I can tell you what I'd do if it were me.
You have enough traffic that you could build a decent brand around your own e-commerce site.
I'd spin up a tiny Shopify site and tie it up to Alibaba for dropshipping and start selling custom branded frisbees or tees.
If you have 200k+ emails collected, that should be way more than enough to provide the 1-3k/month revenue goal you have.
Some good suggestions here. Some affiliate links might work, as well. Get set up through Amazon to display affiliate ads.
Thanks for that feedback, that's a really interesting idea.
As for ads, I have some on there but really doesn't amount to much as the amount of traffic of 30-50k impressions per month isn't enough. Out of the large user base, the actual return is relatively low but seems to always be the same.
So I had a similar situation years ago with a traditional golf site I had made. It was a basic stat tracking application during a time when that wasn't a totally saturated market.
Long story short it was a side, side, side project for me that I just never got into monetizing very well. I also had a spam problem which, from your front page, you have as well.
When I came to the point you are at now it was very clear to me that I just wasn't interested in rebuilding from scratch. It sits dormant to this day with a handful of active users but that's it. I keep it up because the costs are basically zero.
My advice is to try to monetize is the best you can with minimal effort and if nothing clicks try and sell it off. I had several chances to sell my site early on and I wish I had taken the opportunity back then.
Thanks for that reply bjplink. Yes, spam problem big time, especially on the user account creation side not so much posting content.
Appreciate the advice and your story, this sounds very similar to where I'm at. I have a plan to make it a bit of a win win situation here, or at least not a total lost. I'll put some minimal effort on gaging interest in loyal users about a new version which will be SAAS, but the work that goes into any new work will be re-usable for another project.
Have you thought of splitting your site by sport? Also providing time limited free access for any new original submissions? I'm surprised that this isn't more popular for high school and middle school sports, especially among coaches. Have you tried directly marketing to them?
Thanks for the feedback...I have thought about targeting other sports, especially given ultimate is a very niche sport. But the upside with Ultimate is that the site markets itself through word of mouth and a few posts on reedit, because there is very little competition. Only up until the last 2 years has there been some competition.
Coaches would definitely be the target demographic, or captains but I have not done any direct marketing. That being said, I have 60 responses to a recent survey on a paid model, and intercom indicates 1000 active users... so there are users to work with.
I'll keep you guys posted here on what I do!
Well, what would you consider a viable amount of money to continue?
You could attempt to move it to a subscription model and, if it doesn't meet your goal, return the money and determine whether to shut it down/sell it/whatever else. Of course, taking money from people would also make it inherently more stressful to run, IMO.
Viable, I would say for me it's earning 1-3K USD revenue per month. I agree about taking money and making it more stressful, that's my dilemma, I almost need to get pre-order type commitment in a kickstarter way to make the decision.
Kickstarter doesn't seem like the right model for a SASS product, especially in this case where the product/site exists and basically needs some funding to justify some major hours that need to go into it.
I'm actually thinking opening up a patreon funding page with goals tied to specific milestones would be more useful.
Could you flip it and start making some parts of the site paid before doing a complete rewrite? Maybe give those parts a tune-up or add some new functionality, so there is some extra value in it for the users as well. If people love them enough to pay for it, then great, there’s your money for a code overhaul. If users start dropping off, then sunset it. Just my two cents :)
That's what I should have done 2-3 years ago before the code was really outdated. But it is something I should consider. Another option I'm considering is to heavily advertise a v2 landing page with a freemium model in place, and then to place the actual site on sunset notice. Then I'll see what signups are like, continue to get feedback and make that call...
Thanks for the feedback.
Nice, that sounds like a good idea as well!