Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianleeclark | Hacker News Reader

I have a project which may never generate revenue, despite the fact I spent 2 months after hours working on it. I did a dumb thing and dove directly into the project without first finding a fit or customer base for it.

More or less, it's a scheduling application that allows a user to set when they're open and allow anyone to book that time for however much the original scheduler valued that slot of their schedule. It's a good base application, but without customers, it's wasted potential and engineering time. Guess I'll add a link: https://kronikl.io

There is an added benefit that I built up a lot of custom Vue components and flask modules which can be added to later projects (braintree painments, address inputs, settings pages, &c.), so I'm not considering it a complete loss.

I've decided to pivot most of my time to a more marketing based approach for the time being and, once customers role in, tailor the solution to their needs.

View on HN

Due to a bizarre series of accidents one of my hobbies is taking picture of escorts, for their websites. (Getting paid as a photographer is hard, and they're a consistent and reliable group of people who are willing & able to do so.)

If you're not averse to the niche scheduling appointments for such people could be an interesting thing to work on. That could cover both men/women working "at home", and those who are going on tours to various cities (something that is pretty common).

Depending on where you're based this might be an immediate non-starter, but I've talked to a lot of people who hate the established publishing platforms, and scheduling is a recurring source of pain I hear about.

Feedback: bad name, but VERY bad homepage. Nobody wants to ready paragraphs to understand what a product does. SHOW US the product.

The basic pitch you described here sounds good, but compare your homepage with others in a related space: https://youcanbook.me/ or calendly.com/ or https://clarity.fm/

This.

The first thing I did is go to the page to see if what it does. I know what it claims to do, but the actual mechanics matter.

And then I want to know how much it costs.

Without those two, I might as well use a competitor that lets me see what it does and for how much.

It looks good, it's a great idea. I really think you have a bad name for it. It seems hard to spell, and the name seems more related to diary entries than billing time.

I think there's a lot of professional services that could use it, say photographers, psychologists, etc.

That said, I could see a service where experts (think node.js and others) could put a badge on their blog site and answer questions for an hour while getting paid for it. That would be something I might use if I can get an hour of an experts time (even if it cost me $50-$100) to get some information from an expert. So instead of me taking 8 hours to learn information, I can learn that info in 1 hour. It seems like a bargain.

This sounds like clarity.fm

Two months after hours doesn't seem like a waste of time if you actually finished it. I've spent FAR longer on projects that have never seen the light of day :)

Try 2 years ( not every month/ evening)

Pick a niche market: hairdressers, dentists,...

Setup a customised website/landing page directly targeted at these people from your home town and try to get their attention and feedback. Be polite but determined: send an email, call over the phone and meetup.

Selling a generic product nobody knows is hard, so try to become #1 in your vicinity for a certain niche, and make sure all your marketing material is focused on that niche. Once you're the reference in that niche expand vertically or horizontally. Repeat ad infinitum. Combine your outbound marketing with proper inbound marketing, and after a while you'll gain traction and leads will start dripping in slowly but consistent.

Don't offer free trails, but tell them they can get your product at a reduced rate forever. Free customers are hard to convert to paying customers, so charge them something (even if it's peanuts). You can always upsell later.

Gradually increase your prices for your new customers as you expand your market. Keep old customers at their old price; it will take them feel special and reduce churn. At the perfect price point people will complain it's too expensive, but buy anyway.

After you've done this (I'd assume it will take anywhere from 6 months to a year) you will probably already have a long term vision in how to proceed.

my inlaws would never be able to type in or remember "kronikl.io". They would go to "cranikal.com" and their browser would be infected by malware and their computer would die and I would get a call in the middle of the night.

This is all part of my master plan to have y'all trapped in a vicious cycle of using my product

I gotta tell ya, every X months I think it would be a good idea if there was a turnkey scheduling app for customers to subscribe to a person, with recurring payments, etc., as a way for people not to be beholden to maid-service type sites that take a cut. Of course, hosting and maintenance might balance out the cut that a service site would take, but I do wonder if there's value in the self-hosted independence angle.

I wanted to do something similar a while back, but stopped because I was still too new to coding.

I think it's an excellent idea, you just need to narrow down your market and update the design accordingly. Doctors, hairdressers, physios... lots of people are looking for something like this.

Make an embeddable plugin version for WordPress and physically go shop it around to potential customers. Show them and get feedback.

You have a solid start of an idea. You just need to flesh out the rest of the canvas: https://www.creatlr.com/template/UOLHsfqGrLzugzVVttoi1e/busi...

I'd have no idea what your product does from looking at the website.

I'd suggest putting the app right on the homepage, so that people can set it up immediately, like this popular group scheduling app: http://doodle.com/

You have a huge market for this. Doctors, accountants, barbers, hairstylers, every occupation that needs an appointment could use this. This replaces the person whom answers the phone so the business can keep rolling.

Consensus seems to be an awful name :)

you named it after something a developer would use (kool name, missing letters, ending in .io) instead of something a plumber or coach would use (catchy ending in .com)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com