Ask HN: Not sure what to do with my side project.
I've built a Twitter photo sharing service which has survived through Twitter's API changes and even when they started to allow photo uploads directly. The service is still used with 5000-7000 photos uploaded daily with 4mm pageviews per month. There's just under 4m photos stored on S3 and just under a million tokened users. There's a Safari, Chrome and Firefox browser plugin, iOS app and Android app in the wild. It runs 100% on auto-pilot.
I've been paying for hosting out of pocket as most users are outside of the US, banner revenue barely covers the costs to host it.
Any suggestions on what I should do? Thoughts are:
- Rebrand and relaunch it
- Sell it
- Shut it down
Any ideas on what I should do?
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You are stuck in the monetization part of your side project. Its not that your side project has stalled, it is that you have auto-piloted it without adding alternative monetization strategies.
As relix mentioned, you also need to cut costs too.
If I owned this project, I would probably pick it up again and try to add some new niche to it and find some other revenue sources.
"just under a million tokened users" I don't know if this is means almost a million users or not, but that is a massive audience already.
Move from S3 which is ridiculously expensive for an image host, to something more suitable such as imgur:
Looks like you could go with the $25/m plan: https://www.mashape.com/imgur/imgur-9#!pricing
is it costing you money? is it growing? if not what could you do to make it grow. maybe allow people to add accounts and post comments. if there are heavy commercial users look at charging them. Are the banner ads retargeted adwords? that might help conversion.