Ask HN: How long did it take you to get your first sale for your side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @max0563 convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 4 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
I built my project for myself, and started using it about a week after I'd first run `git init`. Once I did that I spent several weeks making it prettier, writing documentation, and before that was complete I had my first user.
I think it took me about a month to get my second user, and another month before I broke ten. Nowadays I seem to get 3-5 users every week for a free trial, a third of which go on to pay. So the growth is somewhat random and irregular.
For my first one, it took me about 6 months, and lots of cold calling and networking.
However this was a B2B product, and worth £100k a year, so quite large sales.