Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9100724

by s_extra_s • 11 years ago

63 62 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am 19, student and javascript developer, I am currently the only one working on a small developer tool that has become quite popular but I am getting overwhelmed and having hard time managing everything. All the bug reports, support tickets, continuing my bachelors, managing sales and all has become a chore, I am currently not sure about solid business strategy and I am only earning around 4-5K per month so I can not hire anyone to work with me. Any advice would be helpful.

Sorry for my terrible english.

Joona2• 11 years ago

Do you have a forum for the users? The amount of help your users can provide to each other is massive.

s_extra_s4• 11 years ago

Yes, I have a forum but can't reply often because I am busy working on coding part.

Joona2• 11 years ago

Do you direct users there for troubleshooting etc?

davidw• 11 years ago

4-5 K is more than enough to hire someone to help with support part-time, via something like oDesk. As a bonus, you could probably hire someone who speaks English as their native language.

Raphmedia• 11 years ago

Could you find a friend that would be willing to split time with you? Not an employee but a partner. Sure, you will lose half the profit (make sure you put it in writing that the situation is temporary), but it is better than being completely overwhelmed.

madaxe_again5• 11 years ago

4-5k a month is more than enough to make a hire. Think of it this way:

What is your time worth to you?

Would you rather work your ass off and make 5k, or have a sane workload, make 2k for a while, which then rises as you have adequate internal infrastructure to support growing sales and users?

It sounds like you have a good thing going, and I'd strongly recommend at looking to get another pair of hands involved - or close it down.

VBprogrammer• 11 years ago

As he apologised for his English (which as an aside is perfectly acceptable) I'd assume that figure isn't in dollars or pound sterling. Possibly euros but that again would seem to be enough to get someone else involved in the project.

31reasons• 11 years ago

As we know there not just 3 currencies in the world. It could be Yen, Rupee or Ugandan shilling or any one of the 180 currencies.

hackerboos• 11 years ago

Safe to assume he converted into USD. I would have if I didn't use the £ symbol.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

This is right. There is a big step in business when you go from doing everything yourself to getting other people involved.

madaxe_again5• 11 years ago

I would like to apologise for my bad advice. Do nothing. Continue struggling. I cannot tell you anything unless you clarify what currency you are earning in.

My sincere apologies for wasting your time.

s_extra_s4• 11 years ago

It is USD, I thought it was fair to assume so I didn't reply.

adventured• 11 years ago

Recruit someone, on a contracting basis, for $15 / hour, to do support responses. Pay that person 70 or 80 hours per month. Adjust the hourly as desirable to get the kind of person you need.

Have that person also build a very comprehensive FAQ, if one does not exist. They can also process any time consuming sales routines for you (refunds, billing questions, whatever). If they're any good at basic sales, you can give them a commission for selling which might get their income up to near full-time after a while.

Begin slightly restricting what kind of support tickets you'll handle (specifically begin to make it abundantly clear to users that if their question is in the FAQ, all you're going to get is pointed to the FAQ; ratchet that up to whatever degree is necessary).

victorantos• 11 years ago

I usually charge £400-£450 per day but I could work for you at a lower rate for a short time, £15-£20/hour for 2-3 weeks while I am waiting for my next contract to start.

Timucin• 11 years ago

So market is slow for everyone ha? =)

mukesh2687• 11 years ago

Hey, I can help on the communication part and managing the forum. Rest assured, I won't charge anything. Let me know your email, I will get in touch.

jurihandl• 11 years ago

4K is enough to hire someone. So you're a student and you're working on this side project. There are many others like you who don't want to work full time but have some time left while studying. Maybe you should get another student or basically any person who fits your needs and wants to work 15-20h a week? You you don't have to pay them as much and you get more time for the core programming and studying.

By the way: What tool are you working on?

GotAnyMegadeth• 11 years ago

Not sure how the pricing of your service works, but try increasing the price. If you do it carefully you might reduce the number of customers (and therefore bug reports) and not change your take home.

zamalek• 11 years ago

What I would do is make an investment in future time by spending time now: write the code to automate as much as possible. For example, why are you actually managing sales?

Prioritize until things calm down. Are you accepting feature requests? Stop doing that until you nail down a stable release.

Don't have a heart attack. Stress can seriously kill you. If it becomes too much start considering exit strategies (yes, that means selling it). 4-5K a month isn't much, but it's impressive as I'm guessing you aren't even marketing it - you could make a nice bit of cash by making it someone else's problem.

Your happiness and health comes first.

BrianEatWorld• 11 years ago

I agree with some of the other commenters that a hire sounds like the way to go. Unless something is lost in translation, such as the currency, 4-5K is plenty. If not a developer, then someone in sales, which can potentially be a commission based system.

Also, think about switching to ramen for a few months. Thats the part of startup life that you tend to not see in the movies and magazines. Pre-seed tends to involve ramen. Lots and lots of ramen.

bdcravens• 11 years ago

think about switching to ramen

Though it's temporary, and somewhat romanticized (I still eat ramen), that's a terrible suggestion health-wise :-) I think dry beans + crock pot + rice is a better, low cost diet.

brador• 11 years ago

Take a year out of studying, work on business. If it goes well, great, if not, go back to studies.

Ask yourself, why are you studying? what's it for? A good job?. Why do you want a good job/career? for money? Well here you have an opportunity to skip the qualification step and get straight to the end goal.

I say go for it. You'll learn more about yourself and your worth in one year of business then you ever will studying.

g8gggu89• 11 years ago

What tool is this???

And your English is fine!

jchung• 11 years ago

Small add here, but if you do decide to recruit some help, I might consider starting with your users. By "developer tool", I presume you mean a tool for developers. That means that you have a talented user base. Might not be a bad idea to post a message to your forum, or post a notification to your app, or email your users. I wouldn't phrase it as "I'm overwhelmed", but saying something like "This is a powerful tool supported by a single CS student, and I'd love to bring in some help to advance development and/or respond to user needs. Does anyone want to contribute to the project?"

Keep in mind that if this is your first time managing others, it will require some up-front investment of time. Managing people is difficult, but not impossible to become very good at. My advice for you at the outset is to be really clear and consistent about your goals, and to be open and honest with your community about the experiment you're undergoing. They'll give you a lot of credit for doing this as a student, and I think you'll find they have more patience than you think.

If stress becomes a problem, consider speaking with a professional about that (e.g., through your University), or practicing meditation and mindfulness. Good luck!

AngeloAnolin• 11 years ago

Have you ever considered providing someone a stake at your product / service? That way, people whom you would get will have in their mind that the success of your product / service will ultimately be good for their bottom line. Be transparent that you would not be able to provide a decent salary. But be sure that once the business model is thriving and growing, reward those people who've helped you and stuck with you during the the trying times.

Good luck.

jimt222• 11 years ago

Have you talked to your school about what you are doing? They may be able to 1) give you credit for what you are doing and /or 2) assign other students to help you for class credit.

Also count your blessings, there are a lot of people your age who would love to have your problem.

protomyth• 11 years ago

or, sadly, with some schools 3) decide they own the copyright on your work while you are a student

best wish and good luck

hotgoldminer• 11 years ago

Gauge your level of passion in the product. If you really care about it and find it rewarding, by all means leave school and hire a 2nd. If not, possibly hire a second anyway and leave the day-to-day to them while you focus on school or turn the project over to one of your users--sell it.

johndevor• 11 years ago

Going to disagree with a lot of people, but drop out of school for a semester. I did that and I don't regret it in the least. School was a large waste of time and it took me a long time to see that. YMMV.

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

Most hiring managers I have worked with completely ignore schoolwork. It often ends up being a poor predictor of actual working ability.

reboog711• 11 years ago

I can't imagine why any hiring person would look at schoolwork. But, the value of a college diploma is not to have schoolwork to show potential employers.

The value of a diploma is that it shows potential employers that that you can put your mind to something and see it through to completion.

Consultant32452• 11 years ago

Around here the only real exceptions to that rule are defense contractors. I believe there's something in their contracts with the government where they can charge more for people who have higher degrees, doesn't even matter what type of degree you have.

ilyaeck• 11 years ago

I would not drop out of school, unless I strongly felt I have nothing more to learn and the new business is going to grow into something big and I am happy to be working on it for the next 10 years. Education done right is an asset for life, and it may be very hard to come back after you drop out.

ant6n• 11 years ago

alternative: take fewer classes.

simplyluke• 11 years ago

You have two effective options unless you can make school & the project management more efficient.

1) Put the project on hold until you're done with school

2) Put school on hold until you're done with the project or can afford to hire people to deal with it while you're in school.

Unfortunately, there's only so much time in a day and you need to sleep some. Priorities suck.

traviswingo• 11 years ago

I think you have a problem most people your age would love to have. That being said, I get it. It's easy to get burnt out - especially when you're trying to continue your education at the same time. If I were in your position, I would definitely look to my fellow classmates or any friends I had that would be a good fit. I'd probably bring on one more person (maybe two, depending on what they could help me with) and split everything evenly between the two of us. If the tool you've created is that popular, everyone working on it will be in a great position down the road. You'll either be able to turn it into a full-time business, or leverage the crap out of it when you go out looking for a full-time position elsewhere (companies will love hearing about it). Either way, you've been hit with a blessing - I wouldn't give up on it just because it got too popular for you to handle. That's a great thing. Congrats!

bonn1• 11 years ago

1. Put the studies on suspend for a while

2. Try to get a developer who can support you, should not be to hard

3. Try to scale your business

Where are you based?

JCJoverTCP• 11 years ago

have you considered hiring an intern?

unknownzero• 11 years ago

What a great problem to have.

I can't tell you much about managing the coding part, but I've got experience getting solid support systems up and running for developer-type products. Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to bounce ideas back and forth on what you're doing and what might help make the load more manageable. I may be able to help with some of it too for cheap/free time permitting. Good luck either way!

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

Humblebrag, sorry.

saluki• 11 years ago

focus on getting your bachelors, continue that for sure.

If 4-5k per month is in dollars I would look in to hiring a part time person to help out with bug reports/support tickets to free up some of your time. Finding someone good might be tough, but look first in your circle of friends. I expect a fellow student would be looking for some extra spending money. Test out a few of your friends for the position.

Other than that it sounds like you've built a great tool that's making good revenue.

http://startupsfortherestofus.com has some great information that can help you I would start listening to those especially the ones relating to the problems you're going through right now.

Last thought is maybe relaxing some, setup an autoresponder to bug reports and tickets that you have received their bug/request and allow yourself some time on the non-critical ones.

Good luck, sounds like you're on the right track.

roflchoppa• 11 years ago

im interested in assisting with a project like this, currently studying as a CS major as well, I just also need an excuse to quit my job and focus on studying/working on projects that interest me more. PM me if you are interested!

jkot• 11 years ago

Hire remote assistent in India or Philipines, offer good pay. Quit school for semester.

readme• 11 years ago

Figure out your schedule. Tons of students have full time jobs. Prioritize your time.

late2part• 11 years ago

Bring in a partner. If you find the right partner and give them 25-50% of the business (or earn-in over time/vesting) then your pie can grow. I have free time if it's valuable, a lot of other people would love to work 5-10 hours/week for 1-3k/month, especially if they knew it could grow!

codingdave• 11 years ago

Across the board, you need to prioritize.

Do you need to "manage sales", if your current userbase is already overhwelming? Or can you find someone to to that work for you, and be paid on commission only?

Can you outsource at least the intial response to support tickets, so you only need to worry about 2nd tier responses?

Are you prioritizing new coding toward reducing support tickets?

Is there any automation that can be done to streamline your daily tasks, either for school or for this work?

Frankly, can you slack off on your schoolwork a bit? Unless you plan on grad school, your final GPA at college is not really all that important. (Within reason -- drop from a 3.5 to a 3.0 is OK, but from a 3.5 to a 2.0 might be a mistake.)

Can you reduce your monthly personal expenses, to help afford to hire someone? Are these other ways to simplify your personal life?

In general, you need to performance tune your life. Fix all the small stuff before worrying about major changes.

drostie• 11 years ago

Asking for help is a good way to start. HN can sometimes be very harsh or critical, so I hope that you are happy with your responses.

If you are 19 then you are probably worried about disappointing users, parents, and other people. You need to understand something important, which I will give to you in a story. Think like you're a professional chef, and your kitchen gets overwhelmed: I will tell you, your customers will wait an hour for their food to come out, if that food is good. Obviously you don't want to make them wait an hour, obviously they will be impatiently staring at their watches, but all of that will be forgiven if what they're waiting for is good. Similarly, a good product will be much easier to sell, when you have time for it. So: if you start thinking of yourself as an adult and a professional, do not be afraid of making your clients wait. You have professional courtesy: they want your product, and they will wait, within reason.

If you want, universities make it very easy to take a year away from your studies: it's called a "leave of absence" in English. You can thus spend a year focusing on your tool without abandoning your studies, if you want.

If you really want to hire another developer, you may be able to borrow money, especially since you've proven that you're making money. Check out what banks will offer you in terms of loans.

You can do both at once, but you must be single-minded. If you want some inspiration, read the Water Book of the Book of Five Rings by Musashi -- it's freely available as public domain online. Pay attention to what he says about striking (cutting, in many translations): "When you wield your sword, your intent must be to strike the enemy. As you strike him your grip must remain, your hands must not flinch. Even if you parry the enemy's sword, only change your thumb and forefinger a little. Most importantly, you must hold the sword intent on striking the enemy. Your grip is the same in theory and practice: grip the sword as if you want to kill a man... Striking and slashing are two different things. However you strike, the act is decisive and resolute in your heart. Slashing is just touching the enemy. Even when slashing with vigor, even when the enemy dies, it is merely slashing. When you strike, your heart is resolved: you must learn to appreciate the difference. If you do slash the enemy's hands or legs, follow it up with a powerful strike. Slashing at heart is no different from touching with a sword. One who understands cannot tell the difference."

Similarly, if you want to make a dent in your work, you have to put your whole heart into the strike. You have to have the intent to destroy some bug, to get rid of some task, to finish some homework. It is very different from just investigative coding and meandering: it is singleminded and heartfelt. It comes with a certain joy/euphoria when it is over and you have made the change -- and this is addictive.

If you approach both your studies and your tool with singleminded intensity, you can do both at once. If you do not approach them this way, then work will pile up on one of them until you are overwhelmed by numbers.

If you already are overwhelmed by the amount of work, do not fear. Most people, especially teenagers, underestimate how much power patience and persistence have. A tiny river over time erodes a canyon; a sink will still drain, no matter the water flowing into it, if you can free up whatever is clogging it. Actually, this is the deep truth about how magic works: You say "how could that magician have known I would randomly draw the four of clubs," not letting yourself think that he or she might have simply taken 50 decks of cards, pulled out the four of clubs from all of them, and put them together into one deck, so that you had no choice. If someone can't see your patient actions, the results will be indistinguishable from magic.

bengali3• 11 years ago

Can you hire a VA to handle your most basic support/ reply? bug capture, reproducing, basic troubleshooting, email etc?

Episode 196- how to use a va in your startup http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-196

sgricci• 11 years ago

That's a solid position to be in. I can understand it can become overwhelming. I don't think dropping school is a very good option, unless you think you've learned as much as you can. I'd love to figure out how to help out. Contact me (email is in my profile) and maybe I can help in some way.

reybango• 11 years ago

What's the tool/project? If it's popular and you're struggling, a lot of folks may not know about it and may step up to help out.

wildpeaks• 11 years ago

You could get a fulltime dev from Europe at 2k/mo if the workload is too much.

ashraful• 11 years ago

Why not list the name of the tool here. Maybe someone will offer to help you out for free, or in exchange for equity if the product has the potential to generate revenue.

atmosx• 11 years ago

Don't hire anyone, find a partner and share responsibilities. That's how business grows. You should be happy, you have a very good income, especially considering your age.

thepredestrian• 11 years ago

OP, if you are serious about needing help, I'd love to offer my services for free. I am the same age as you and would love to take this project on to explore and develop myself in this aspect.

nextw33k• 11 years ago

You need to clarify the 4-5K per month, its being assumed it's US Dollars.

If it were Rupees or Yen then I'd get your point and suggest you sell the revenue source. But do it in a way that works as a double win. Find a development shop that will take you on part time and buy the tool. You'll get a lump sum and a steady job, they'll get a proven money maker and motivated employee.

This is one of those nice problems to have.

In the mean time, get community member(s) to be a bug triager and forum voice. Communicate through them.

s_extra_s4• 11 years ago

It's USD.

SMDM• 11 years ago

Go to the thefoundation.com or hire a co-founder on assembly.com. Hope that helps.

s_extra_s4• 11 years ago

Thanks a lot everyone for your suggestions, I feel great being part of this great community. I apologize of not disclosing the currency upfront (you know my english ). It's USD. Thanks again.

Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

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