Hello

[faesrol]

Hey, I'm Janne. I'm from Finland.

I've never written an introduction post before so I don't know if this is TMI or not but whatever, here goes.

-- PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND --

I got into software development when I was 14 (in 2005) because I wanted to make changes to a game, and I kind of never stopped. In 2013, as a third-year university student, I applied for a summer job that was referred to me by a friend who wasn't confident enough to apply for it himself (he thought the job requirements were too high). I applied and got the job.

The summer job was extended until the end of December 2013. But as it was unclear whether the contract would be renewed into 2014, I applied for other jobs. I was invited to interview at Nokia for two different positions: one in "cloud" side of things (specifically the Push Notifications team), and the other, in hardware (embedded systems / chip design).

My first interview was with the cloud guys. At the end of the interview, they had me write some Java code. The thing is, I'd never even seen Java before. I told them this and gave it a try anyway. After the inteview, they said they'd get back to me within a week.

They called me a few hours later that same day, offering me the job. I was convinced to accept it before even going to the interview with the hardware team the next day.

It was kind of unfortunate when, a few months later, Microsoft came in and bought Nokia's phone buiness and proceeded to shut down the site we all worked at.

However, before I parted ways with Microsoft, I was referred to a remote job with a US-based startup company, for which I interviewed, and again got the job. I worked with them for around 9 months until I was contacted by people from my old team at Nokia/Microsoft. They had set up a company and asked if I might be interested in joining.

I parted ways with the US-based company and went to work with some of the people from my old team. I've had this job for almost 10 years now. It's still a small company, so I've worn many hats.

But last year a guy left the company and, being the only other person in the company with relevant expertise, I inherited all of his past projects. I haven't been enjoying work very much since then.

-- END OF PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND --

So I started thinking about whether I could start making money from something of my own. Hopefully enough to quit the day job.

It hasn't quite happened yet, which is why I'm here. I have this one side project, a desktop app aimed mostly at PC gamers, that within the last 12 months has made a whopping 74 sales (conversion rate 0.9%). These days, the website gets around 1000-1500 unique visitors a month.



I'm pretty sure there is a market for the app but I think my problem is that few people know about its existence. The vast majority of traffic to the site comes from Google and Reddit, where I try to post about it in relevant threads (of which there might be a couple a week).

I've been doing the same thing on Twitter for the past month as well but since I have no followers, I don't exactly have a lot of reach over there. (I've never had any social media accounts before.)

Since adding a feedback form to the site (other methods of contact have always been available but I wanted to make it as easy as possible to submit feedback), I have actually gotten some useful feedback. I'm working on adding some of the features people have requested. A few such people turned out to be content creators and/or streamers, so I figured it might not hurt to listen to their feedback in particular -- they might just mention the app to their viewers or other creators.

A few weeks ago I also made a proper landing page for the website but as it was my first time making one, I'm not sure it's actually any better than the condensed "Github README" type of page I had before. The low traffic to the site makes it difficult to draw any conclusions.

Also, I never bothered to make the app itself look very fancy -- I wonder if that's been a mistake. Once you set it up, you generally don't look at it, so I thought it probably doesn't matter. Then again, maybe it doesn't give a great first impression?

I have a few other side projects that I think have potential as well but I thought I'd focus on this one for now, as I'm not convinced it's a dud just yet.

As far as marketing goes, I had one other idea: to make some free related tools like this that point the user towards my paid app, but again, having no contacts/network, I have found it very difficult to let people know about them.

I would definitely appreciate any pointers.

Thanks for reading,
Janne

 

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