Looking back at my past attempts to make money online

Audio junkie

What I tried

The thought was it is damn hard to discover great new podcasts, there has to be a better way to discover podcasts.

What I did wrong

• I started building too soon. I got super excited, as a dev does, about jumping in to this side project. Within a weekend I had spun up the site that was importing podcasts, episodes, and reviews from the iTunes store (RIP). But I never really slowed down and thought about the problem that I was solving, I just kept building. Why?
• I was afraid of putting it out there and getting feedback; afraid of it not being perfect and being judged on that -- who cares? I did and I do, but I shouldn't. You'll hear a lot about that in my musings.
• I went too broad. The site quickly became just another index of podcasts, and it was pretty cool to see a few reviews and comments get organically left, and watch it grow on google search console. But pain point was I solving? What did I want people to do on the site, and was I driving them towards that action? I determined creating lists of your favourite podcasts or episodes could be the core feature, as well as making a community where people could chat about episodes and what they thought about them.
• This all sounds great, but back to fear, I never did any marketing. It was much easier and more fun to get up in the morning and add new features, make it faster, upgrade to the latest version of rails. But it was all a lot of trees falling in the woods with no one to hear, for the most part. I was being avoidant, the death knell for productivity.
• Not knowing how to monetise form the start. I spent heaps of time researching into ad networks
• Another mistake was trudging through for too long with no growth. I completely forgot my commerce degree learning about sunk costs. I had put in so much time, I didn't want to waste it! What really put the nail in the coffin was finally getting accepted to the google ad network and chucking up ads, only to end up pulling in less than $10/month when my hosting costs were $20-$30. Ouch.
• Finally, I let the failure bring down my entrepreneurial spirit for too long. I spent all my energy on it for about 3 years and slowly petered out. It has only really been the last couple of months I've built it back up. But why? I shouldn't let failure define me. That one didn't work; let's learn some lessons and move on to the next thing.

Where can I go from here?

Well I have the exciting proposition of having an aged domain now. I found that most of the users who signed up to audio junkie and took action like leaving a review were likely the podcast creators themselves. Of course you would google your own creation and leave reviews on it. So I now have a small list of emails of podcast creators, and an aged domain related to podcasts.

I reckon there will be something I can do with it soon in the niche of podcast creators, one I don't see getting smaller anytime soon.

If you want to check out its current state, head over to audio junkie. It may be something new by the time you read this!

Shyftly

What I tried

This was a real interesting one. A friend was involved with several big music festivals, specifically organising volunteers for them. Festivals will often give a volunteer a free ticket in exchange for one or two 8 hour shifts at the event of picking up trash, putting new toilet paper in the stalls, etc. She wanted me to build her a platform where volunteers could sign up, put in their t-shirt size, and receive notifications.

At the time, although I was excited about it and spent countless hours on it, I really thought it was too small of an idea. I wasn't proud of it as it didn't feel like some big startup. Looking back, this is an excellent niche for a solopreneur to focus on. There weren't any major players in the space, and there was money to be made.

What I did wrong

We got the site up and running for a fairly major Aussie festival. We managed the sign up and shift times of hundreds of volunteers. The site charged them $5 each to sign up, and netted me several thousand $ personally. Not bad! Weird pricing model to have volunteers to have to pay, though. I never felt great about that, but frankly I was a bit greedy and afraid of talking directly to festivals to make them pay a fee.

After the festival, I decided to white-label the site as "Shyftly", a SAAS app for music festival volunteer management. I spun up a pretty nice landing page. Without any real content on the site (ding ding ding, easy niche!) I had a couple of festivals actually sign up from finding it on google.

I even did some cold reaching out to festivals in the NYC area. I'm pretty proud of that, looking back - pat on the back, self! I left work one day as I got a call from a pretty huge festival that had a volunteer program I had done. It was a way for the festival to get in the good graces of the city by giving out tickets in exchange for volunteering at soup kitchens, meals on wheels, and the like. They wanted to use my platform! This would have been a significant deal if I had made it happen. But I let it slip, saying that maybe this year was too soon; the platform wasn't ready. I never followed up next year.

There was demand 🤦 . I didn't capitalise on leads and build what they needed. Why? I was burned out from building and tensions I created with my friend (would we make this a business together? would we be good business partners?) and with full time work, I just wasn't in the right head space. And that is OK. I'm always hard on myself - take the positives and move forward!

This is the closest I have come to online solopreneur success at this point. It serves as a reminder that I can make money online.

I don't have the domain anymore, but my business is still out there in crunchbase I've just realised while looking for something to link to!

What can I learn from this?

• Business opportunities can come at you fast. Be ready for them - be ready to be proud of what you have built, and cancel your plans when a real live customer wants to work with you. Those opportunities might come a couple of times in a lifetime.
• Don't be greedy. You'll find ways to monetise. Get customers and make them super happy, rather than try to milk them right off the bat.