Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?

Automate as much as possible. Payments ? Slap a stripe checkout form (unless you happen to be in a country where Stripe is still not supported) or Paypal for others.

Onboarding: Make it as easy and smooth as possible for clients to get started after signinup. Show them exactly where and how to start.

Documentation & FAQ: Create tons of it. If a client has a question, thy should be able to resolve it through your documentation for the most part. Don't let little simple questions to come to you EVERY time.

Setup a Support Ticket system and only answer via emails/support ticket for questions that cannot be resolved via your documentation. If a client is not aware of documentation, point them to it before answering the same question again and again.

Get a decent smartphone and answer the tickets/email through that. You could even do it sitting at your desk or during lunch break

If you absolutely need to schedule phone calls, schedule them during lunch break and find a relatively quiet place where you can talk. If not quiet enough, tell the client that you are travelling and they may hear background noise. As long as it is not a screeching train, clients won't mind specially if you already told them.

Hustle. Do whatever it takes to get the first few clients except illegal activity of course. You may have to cross a few lines at work (lying about lunch plans etc) but I personally think those are reasonable to do.

Myself and a colleague are in this same position... we've just launched a store selling physical products, with a 2nd product store (with a completely different product set) launching in a few weeks. And then we're also working on an app that should be ready in about 3 or so months (at current projections).

Our approach has been approaching people or businesses in similar fields or related industries, and pitching the products to them and getting them them to sign up as affiliates. It reduces our income quite a bit and we make very little off it, but instead of us trying to reach the people they know and are in contact with all on our own, we effectively use them and benefit from them doing our marketing. They are keen to do it, since they have a good incentive to do so. Se make it worth their while. The long term goal is building up a brand, and then profiting off of that. In the meantime, everybody wins if they generate sales, but we dont have expensives if there isnt.

And yes, we met with potential affiliates during our lunch breaks, or after hours, etc. A couple were also generated through friends, family, and social group contacts.

We ran our side-project, https://emailoctopus.com ↗, for around 3 years before going full time. As a low-cost platform, our sales are quite low touch, so we'd be able to set up our marketing projects (Facebook ads, email campaigns) in the evenings and just let them run on a schedule.

Support was a little bit more tricky, however. The only solution we found here, other than outsourcing to an Upworker, was to try to minimise support. Make your help docs as useful as possible and spend time on improving error messages.

I would also advise you to switch to working on the project full-time as soon as you can afford to. Our growth went through the roof (we'd spent around 3 years getting to £1k MRR and tripled that in the first full-time month). Some reasons why? We could spend time with our customers and focus on improving our metrics, the stuff that you just can't automate away. We also began treating it more as a business and valued our own time spent on the project more, which resulted in increasing our prices and getting across our value proposition better.

- Keep your product really simple. The more complex it is, the more you need to teach and sell. If your product does one thing well and can communicate its value clearly on a homepage, it requires a lot less work from you.

- Tactically: you don't need to respond to emails M-F 9-5. Yes, that's when many B2B customers are working, but they don't know what timezone you are in, and it's not uncommon to have a delay in answering emails. Just be sure to answer emails before work and after work.

- Create lots of FAQs (using https://helpsite.io ↗ – shameless plug) so you aren't answering the same questions over and over. - (Actually you'll still have to answer many of those questions, but at least you'll have a quick link you can send them)

- Focus more on inbound marketing (creating blog posts, SEO, AdWords, etc.) rather than outbound sales, which requires a much higher amount of active work that you can't do with a full-time job.

Realistically speaking, you should do research and just talk to people with problems and try to figure out how to convince them. Then start setting realistic goals, how much do you think you can handle per day and then per week.

You have a busy schedule and so does your client, first thing is to not automate if you're starting out because you have to design out the system you're going to use gradually. I've tried straight-out automation but just like code most times you have to tear it down a couple times.

I recommend trying to figure how to get people to reject their current software or their current ways if not using software and use yours and find a common theme you can talk about to other prospective customers because I think that will be the main bulk of your sales and marketing efforts as we live in more software-saturated times.