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Hi everyone!
I would like to ask you to help me see things clearer regarding a project that I developed over the last years and have sunken a lot of cost into. I've probably been suffering from "sunken cost fallacy" but now I'm ready to throw it away (or not). But I would like to have some opinions about it to make up my mind if you would help me!
Let's get started
(A) Leaving the project as it is. It basically runs itself. And maybe in the future I have an idea what I want to do with it. However it costs about $1000 a month and earns about $500 a month (some good will donations and some affiliate stuff), so it's a net loss.
(B) Killing the project, take the lessons and go to the next project (which I already have ideas for)
(C) Search for investors to turn this project into something new.
We developed the platform in a very general fashion. So my idea is that we can develop it futher to become a service which I would call "SMPaaS" Social Media Platform as a service. Like Squarespace which "frees" the user from knowing HTML to create their website our SMPaaS would offer the business owner to create their own social media platform with a couple of clicks.
Like with wordpress you can customize everything with free themes or buy some unique theme. You can also choose which features you want to have and which not (video hosting is more expensive). And for those features you can also choose from different layouts - for example how you would like your comments to look like - facebook style (not exactly of course), Youtube style, our own style etc
Our business model would be to to either earn with advertisements for free users (on all communities) or by a pay-to-not-see-ads or by paywall percentages etc. Everything you know from the other platforms.
But
What do you think? Should I do something else? Should I try to find investors? Should I even try it myself, risking my last savings and another 4 years and even if we make it being too late because we couldn't develop it fast enough?
I'm a bit torn. But as I said that might be due to the sunken cost fallacy. I learnt a lot and I can also move on to the next project. But I want to make sure that I'm not stopping to dig - 5 inches over the pot of gold.
What do you think?
I would like to ask you to help me see things clearer regarding a project that I developed over the last years and have sunken a lot of cost into. I've probably been suffering from "sunken cost fallacy" but now I'm ready to throw it away (or not). But I would like to have some opinions about it to make up my mind if you would help me!
Let's get started
- From 2015 - 2019 I've been a relatively successful (patriotic) political influencer in Germany. That didn't really materialize in money because when I started I was purely doing it for idealistic reasons plus my monetization was taken away when political content started to get heavily "limited" on YouTube from 2017 onwards and I only took donations to pay my editor. However I had 40M views on my channel and about 100K subscribers when it was deleted. Besides that I have been and still am working as a Full Stack developer
- In 2018 with 2 programmer friends I started working on a new streaming platform to create a refuge from Youtube. I programmed and paid them so I needed money and I used my platform to crowdfund $68.000 in 2 months. Unfortunately I overpromised and underdelivered (at least regarding the time frame) so the platform was not ready in 2019 like we promised but last year 2021.
- Worse I didn't even have a business model for it. We just tried to do it really well and I think we did. But Bitchute and Odysee were already established so donations would be tough. And our project was only national, not international like Odysee and Bitchute. Although we had language options ready to go. But I mean we didn't have any notoriety in the international market.
- We have about 20.000 registered users and about 90.000 unique visits a month. And I see little room for growth because the current users are highly political and this deters non-political users
- Technologically the platform has really something to offer. We combined functionality from Twitter, Youtube and Facebook and added some new functionaliy. Upload videos, media galleries, posts, articles. Have videos with multiple sources (embedded or true upload). We have a highly developed but easy image editing modal with filters, font, rescaling, rotating, cropping, image adding - let's say you can also easily create memes. We have a comment system which can go deep to infinite levels but still be as readable as a single thread (by filtering). You can have friends, your own pinboard, have multiple channels under one brand and other good stuff.
- The platform also scales linear meaning just pop the containers on a new server and you (almost) have a linear growth of the capacity and performance.
- Back to the cons: The used technologies are not all mainstream anymore. We still used jQuery and we used a somewhat obscure Java Framework called Apache Tapestry
- And worst: I didn't have a real business model. My idea was that we live on advertisement and content funding percentages.
- Also bad: When I didn't deliver on time some "competitors" (for the audience) launched a smear campaign against me and deterred people from supporting the platform reducing good will and further crowdfunding opporunities.
(A) Leaving the project as it is. It basically runs itself. And maybe in the future I have an idea what I want to do with it. However it costs about $1000 a month and earns about $500 a month (some good will donations and some affiliate stuff), so it's a net loss.
(B) Killing the project, take the lessons and go to the next project (which I already have ideas for)
(C) Search for investors to turn this project into something new.
We developed the platform in a very general fashion. So my idea is that we can develop it futher to become a service which I would call "SMPaaS" Social Media Platform as a service. Like Squarespace which "frees" the user from knowing HTML to create their website our SMPaaS would offer the business owner to create their own social media platform with a couple of clicks.
Like with wordpress you can customize everything with free themes or buy some unique theme. You can also choose which features you want to have and which not (video hosting is more expensive). And for those features you can also choose from different layouts - for example how you would like your comments to look like - facebook style (not exactly of course), Youtube style, our own style etc
Our business model would be to to either earn with advertisements for free users (on all communities) or by a pay-to-not-see-ads or by paywall percentages etc. Everything you know from the other platforms.
But
- I don't have the funds so I would rather do something more direct than "wasting" another 4 years with a nothing burger
- I don't know if this idea is any good
- The project is technically very demanding
- And we might have a big crosshair on our forehead too soon by Big Tech (maybe not just a thought)
What do you think? Should I do something else? Should I try to find investors? Should I even try it myself, risking my last savings and another 4 years and even if we make it being too late because we couldn't develop it fast enough?
I'm a bit torn. But as I said that might be due to the sunken cost fallacy. I learnt a lot and I can also move on to the next project. But I want to make sure that I'm not stopping to dig - 5 inches over the pot of gold.
What do you think?
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