Buchdeals

Learning 1:

If you somehow see an opportunity (your side project makes more then $1000 /month), go for it and don’t try to split yourself into different projects. We could have achieved the $30,000 much earlier and saved two to three years if we had stopped making excuses.

Learning 2:

Even if you have a small project, it doesn’t mean it will stay small if you work on it. At $2-3k we kind of said okay, that’s a small project, it’s not worth the time for two people. Only after it grew organically and confirmed our initial assumptions were we confident and bullish. => Be bullish from the get-go.

After discovering Bookbub in the US we decided to launch a website version of our service and to send out a newsletter daily with the best ebooks deals.

What we learned:

1. If you have and app, ask for the email. This way we could build up our app user base and simultaneously our newsletter reach.

2. Bring value first -> Ask for money after if you are just starting out. For example, we have highlighted ebooks for free in our newsletter. After the promotion, we reached our to authors and told them about the last spot we had and that we have put them in our email. They were very happy and started using our service after.

Spent around 2 months learning Phonegap and Rails and built a simple backend with 2 simple apps.

Initially, we have used Heroku to host our backend and Teamtreehouse to learn Rails and it was the best experience ever.

Look at how similar apps are doing what you have done to learn from their experience.