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Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I'm Renato.

I really don't know what to do. Many people told me if I hire a team, or at least one developer, this would help me get going with the game. This does make sense.

However I've been extremely stressful for the last hours. I guess this really is a bad decision, but one that would free myself for university and other projects I have.

The problem is I can't stand to spend my whole day working only on Hacker Experience anymore. I already have other projects that I want to work full time with.

Happy to hear any advice from you. I have no experience at all with business, marketing or even start-ups. I'm just a programmer.

Thanks!

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Just wait a few days until things settle down before making any decisions. Seems the stress of the events is still fresh, don't make any final decisions just now.

That's a general lesson in life. Know yourself and know when you're being afraid, when you're being irrational. And postpone taking decisions that can wait a few days.

Hey Renato, I am the developer of an Android app that had more than 1000 downloads a day and a huge number of active users. I ran into the same issue that you are facing right now - I was just a programmer and didn't really have the time to support everyone.

One way I managed to cope with it was setting up an autoresponder that redirects over to a FAQ to help with most common issues / requests. If something wasn't covered via the FAQ people still came back to me and I jumped in to help.

As most of the others here replied: Don't jump the ship and sell immediately - try to power through the next few days and use this as an opportunity to learn.

Cheers

Hiring a developer will increase your stress. Bad idea. Find a partner that knows how to code.

Hey Renato, good job you did here, but I would honestly don't sell and I'll definitely don't buy.

See, I've been wandering on HE a couple of hours yesterday, and your project seems to have some serious execution flaws (bad ui, downtimes, social based income, etc). Nothing serious for a side project but these are definite blockers if you ask for a 50k something.

Not mentionning the stack: slackware (honestly?), php and python (why two langages?), no framework. The last one could be the main reason you are struggling to keep it afloat, and that at least throws a big red flag: "I'm gonna head troubles if I'm gonna buy".

And the business side doesn't seems to be worth it.

My 2 cents on selling/buying webapps : I would be keen on paying 10K on a website-based business with 10 long-time customers paying 100$ each month. That's not the kind of deal you seems to be after, but I think this is somehow the standard for serious buyers on the market. Why so low you may ask? Because if I understand your project to the point I could buy it, then that means I can replicate your little business. I'm only buying time, and I think it would take ~10 months to build that webapp and gather some ~10 customers (maybe yours, now I know your flaws...).

And that means buying a strong problem solving webapp, not a niche online game. If the webapp is very well executed then I would maybe push to 15K per 10 recurring customers, not more. And I don't care the market size: it's for the potential 100 recurring customers that I would be in, not for the seldom social viralisation peak with an only 1 or 2% conversion.

In a nutshell: don't loose your time trying too hard to sell it. If it sells then congrats, but you should spend your time fixing the UI to keep your players onboard, writing a great FAQ that handle the tickets, and boosting your infra so you that you're not needed around when it collapse.

Because after that you're done: let it live alone and enjoy your 1000$/month. Based on my experience there's little chance you'll reproduce that for the years coming.

But that's still a good feat for your age and experience, kuddos and congrats to you ;)

Why not Slackware? Besides, does that matter? I'm sure one could easily run the game on CentOS (or something else) if they chose.

Your point about maintainability might be more valid.

Slackware is a highly capable distro. It may not have the fancier things that other distros have (or at least not as simple), but it's just as capable, and it's highly more stable.

I was not trying to be mean on slackware users, nor implying that slackware isn't a capable distro. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

I implied that, when a distro is missing dependency management, it should be the last on your picking list. I'm an Arch guy myself, but my own servers run on wheezy (because 'life').

Everything has its uses I suppose.

Yes, this is all about maintainability. When you are on all fronts the last thing you want is to fight with your distro.

I don't know if it's a bad idea if you can get someone to buy it for a price you find acceptable. I think you might have trouble doing that though, which will make the the question moot.

If you did get someone to buy it for say $60k (or $10k?), and they ended up making millions, would you feel ripped off? If they end up not even making back what you paid, how would you feel?

You can also just sit on it for a while, and see what happens, see how your attitude develops. Yes, that might mean you end up losing the chance to sell it (note, it's not clear you have that chance now), but you say you didn't really do it for the money anyway. You could wait a month or two, remembering you don't need to respond to every email or support ticket, and see what happens. Does the success continue? Does it trail off? Are you still stressed about it and want to get rid of it, or do you have a renewed enjoyment?

There's nothing forcing you to rush, you are in complete control here. I suspect you are worried about doing the 'wrong' thing, and maybe being judged for it, and maybe then feeling like you missed out (on making money, or whatever). Don't worry about it. You didn't do it for the money. It's an experiment to see what happens.

If part of your stress is feeling an obligation to your users, maybe actually turn off the freemium pays (for now), so it's all free. If you're getting enough income from adsense to pay your costs, just let it coast a bit see what happens.

Give it rest, go out and take a walk. You don't need to worry about this too much. You've put a lot of effort into this, but nothing like this is worth ruining your health about it.

Being tired doesn't allow you to think straight.

As for handling support, an autoreply to a faq can save time. Zoho also has a free plan for their support system https://www.zoho.com/support/

Have you watched Silicon Valley? The plot is exactly like this.

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