Ask HN: My side project is ramen-profitable. What do I do now?
For context: The project is a PC-hardware recommender (https://www.pc-kombo.de ↗). It looks at benchmarks and tries to find the best combination for the budget, for the parts where there are no benchmarks (hdds, case, …) it relies on reviews and finally coded heuristics (=my judgement). It's a side-project, I have a job (salaried PhD-student, finishing this year).
The jump from 0 to some monthly income was a really big thing and took a long time. Then everything moved fast for a moment, but now it did not evolve much in a while, and I'm not sure what to do. I see some options, but they also seem blocked.
For example, I'd love to extend the version for the US by adding newegg as a vendor. But the Usage Terms of its referral program are batshit crazy. The consequence by signing it were for me to have to pay them $20k dollars whenever they want, they'd just have to claim a problem with following their terms. I'd have no defense, nor the money.
I could also expand to other EU-countries. But I think the monthly work required to keep the database up to date would go over the time budget I have for this project. Maybe if I built that in a very robust way – but my tries to do that for Germany all only improved the situation, there is naturally always still manual work to do… Maybe that should be done anyway, I'm leaning towards it.
Maybe I could just make it more known in Germany somehow? Or maybe the site just needs to be improved gradually and would then grow by itself? Maybe (probably) there are other options I miss?
I'd love to hear some advice.
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Great site and even better idea but looking at your public traffic data I am wondering what you mean by 'ramen-profitable', https://www.similarweb.com/website/pc-kombo.de ↗
However, let's not look into how much you make now but instead how much growth potential this idea has:
+ One opportunity is to further internationalize the product with more languages and vendors to other countries. Then you should be able to 5x to 10x your revs (but quite some work is involved)
I rather see some limitations in the chosen business model (if we talk about making this thing really huge):
- Strong dependency to Google and hard to buy traffic since the CAC will be always higher than the affiliate revs
- Most affiliate merchants fool you on the affiliate commission (except Amazon and ebay), so prepare for tough negotiations without any possibility to prove generated sales
- Low LTV and customer loyalty if any because people configure a PC once every one or two years and in that time they might forget about your site and not using it the next time
- In general the market is limited, 10-20yrs ago everybody did configure a desktop/tower, now with all the notebooks, ultrabooks and iPad the demand is way smaller
- Content generation and maintenance should be small but it's still there (costs for one content manager should be considered)
- And do not forget: this browsing and choosing of the best components is an important piece when building a PC yourself, it's fun, don't know if people would give this away
=> I would keep it as a pet project which brings some revenue but look for new business models where you can adapt what you learned in this process and improve on mentioned points
Here's what I'd do:
- I'd stay in the German market, because adding additional providers and keeping up with their terms, API etc. sounds pretty annoying.
- Make it more accessible through small design improvements
- Try to find new audiences who'd benefit from this tool. Say right now, it's gamers. But what about bitcoin miners maybe? Or small businesses that need a calculator like that? The next step is to find where those audiences are and tap into these traffic sources.
- Show your tool to "influencers" (meaning: people with a small audience of 100 or more). Maybe gamers on Twitch, in hardware forums, games magazine forums, in Steam guides (or write a Steam guide)
- Maybe write more blog posts. Could even be semi-automatically. Say: Picks of the month under 100€ / under 500€ etc. Try to distribute your blog posts (see points above)
- Keep a sane mindset. Enjoy the fruits of your labor, but only do the stuff that you enjoy doing. No point in wasting time with integration some US service, if you hate that idea.
- Use it to position yourself in a specific way. Maybe it's good for your resume (creator of the popular tool pc-kombo.de + proof of popularity -> shows you know how to execute and "finish" side projects and think about customer outcomes).
Hello brother from another mother. I did a similar thing for my bachelor thesis ( source available at https://github.com/za-creature/puls ↗ ). Mind going into the details of how you designed yours?
Mine is extracting equations from benchmarks of the form ax = b where a and b are components, picking a random "unit" component and fixing it to 1, and then solving the overdetermined system in a least-squares sense. I designed it that way to take all equations into account (e.g. multiple benchmarks can and should include the same components with a potential different "factor") and to handle like a graph (as long as there's a benchmark-path between any two components, they are directly comparable)
Edit: to ensure the graph is always connected, an additional low-weight "metadata" benchmark is generated from the technical specs (e.g. amount of ram, cpu speed) and the total score of a computer is calculated as the weighted sum of all components, using target-specific weight factors (e.g. a gaming pc will want a fast cpu / gpu whereas a multimedia pc will want more capacity)
Here's my advise:
* Don't worry too much about crazy contracts / terms of service. If you run a business you will end up signing all kinds of ridiculous contracts. If you are worried about the consequences, get a normal job instead.
* Don't expand to other markets before you've managed to crack one market. Right now you can experiment easily with the site, if you expand to many countries making changes will get a lot harder.
* Who are your customers? Who is using your website? This is the most important question, and further development of your website should start from here. Are you targeting hard core gamers who want to get the highest frame rate for a budget? Or are you targeting parents who want to find out how much they have to spend on a PC that runs Minecraft for their kids?
* What are you doing to promote your website? How do people find out about your website? I see you have this bbcode widget, so I assume you are hoping that forum users use your site to share configurations. Are you doing anything so people can share configurations on Facebook / WhatsApp / whatever people use to communicate today?
First off, this is a neat project. I don't buy hardware often, but I think your idea creates value here (and could be applied to other industries too).
I think sharing some of your metrics with us should influence the advice. There is a lot of advice in this thread, but I don't know that it's good advice.
- How long are your users staying on the site for a typical session?
- How many (monthly) actively users do you have? Do users return or really just come once?
- Where do your users come from? (traffic source)
- What are the typical price ranges your users search for?
- What kind of parts bring in the most revenue?
- etc.
Essentially I think you should put together the answers to the most common questions an investor would ask for a seed stage pitch deck.