DUMP PROJECT and start all over?

[hgrell]

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

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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
8. And worst: I didn't have a real business model. My idea was that we live on advertisement and content funding percentages.
9. 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.

Ok and now I'm thinking about

(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

1. I don't have the funds so I would rather do something more direct than "wasting" another 4 years with a nothing burger
2. I don't know if this idea is any good
3. The project is technically very demanding
4. And we might have a big crosshair on our forehead too soon by Big Tech (maybe not just a thought)

So

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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[hgrell]

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

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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
8. And worst: I didn't have a real business model. My idea was that we live on advertisement and content funding percentages.
9. 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.

Ok and now I'm thinking about

(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

1. I don't have the funds so I would rather do something more direct than "wasting" another 4 years with a nothing burger
2. I don't know if this idea is any good
3. The project is technically very demanding
4. And we might have a big crosshair on our forehead too soon by Big Tech (maybe not just a thought)

So

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?

* Push

 

[loop101]

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

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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
8. And worst: I didn't have a real business model. My idea was that we live on advertisement and content funding percentages.
9. 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.

Ok and now I'm thinking about

(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

1. I don't have the funds so I would rather do something more direct than "wasting" another 4 years with a nothing burger
2. I don't know if this idea is any good
3. The project is technically very demanding
4. And we might have a big crosshair on our forehead too soon by Big Tech (maybe not just a thought)

So

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?

If you are going to conduct commerce in the middle of a globalism/nationalism fight, you're dependencies are going to be attacked by your opponent. I believe political discussions are 99% banned on this forum, so the help you get here might be limited. I would figure out what monetization strategies will most likely work for you, then build something that works with them. Otherwise, you may keep building things, only to find you can't monetize them. To learn how to survive "financial de-platforming", you can study how the most banned people on the internet are able to survive financially.

 

[hgrell]

If you are going to conduct commerce in the middle of a globalism/nationalism fight, you're dependencies are going to be attacked by your opponent. I believe political discussions are 99% banned on this forum, so the help you get here might be limited. I would figure out what monetization strategies will most likely work for you, then build something that works with them. Otherwise, you may keep building things, only to find you can't monetize them. To learn how to survive "financial de-platforming", you can study how the most banned people on the internet are able to survive financially.

Thank you for your suggestion!

And I didn't want to spark any political discussion here. Currently I don't even have plans to continue in the "political opinion market". The risks are high and the rewards are low if you're not a political party. At least in Germany. I know in the USA a couple of commentators "make bank", but that's not possible in Germany. At least I know literally nobody that can.

So I'm just asking about the technology. Because basically you could use it for any social media community / platform. Doesn't have to be political. However you could say "it's just a generic or slightly improved social media platform mix of YouTube / Twitter / Facebook".

So my question is: Should I try to repurpose this? But apart from the complicated "SMPaaS" idea I have none. Or should I let it go and start something new? - Just asking your opinion.

 

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[loop101]

Thank you for your suggestion!

And I didn't want to spark any political discussion here. Currently I don't even have plans to continue in the "political opinion market". The risks are high and the rewards are low if you're not a political party. At least in Germany. I know in the USA a couple of commentators "make bank", but that's not possible in Germany. At least I know literally nobody that can.

So I'm just asking about the technology. Because basically you could use it for any social media community / platform. Doesn't have to be political. However you could say "it's just a generic or slightly improved social media platform mix of YouTube / Twitter / Facebook".

So my question is: Should I try to repurpose this? But apart from the complicated "SMPaaS" idea I have none. Or should I let it go and start something new? - Just asking your opinion.

What is your "USP", or "Unique Selling Proposition"? It sounds like political affiliation, or political freedom, is what brings people to your site, not all the cool features. Maybe people are just happy to talk to like-minded people?

I think the technology is least important. No user cares if you are using Java or JQuery. You might really want to read MJ's first book "The Millionaire Fastlane " to help you clarify what you are offering, and to who. And there are thousands of people here who will help you do that. You have the technical skills and drive, you just need to refine it in to you providing something to people, so they will pay you money in exchange.

 

[hgrell]

. And there are thousands of people here who will help you do that. You have the technical skills and drive, you just need to refine it in to you providing something to people, so they will pay you money in exchange.

Thank you. Yes, I've read the book. That's why I'm here, to get some direction. Because I feel I'm "close and yet far away" if that makes sense. Basically I haven't planned the "journey to the first happy paying customer" before I started. And now it feels a bit like I'm shoe-horning in some business model where there was none before.

But even more difficult is that the German "political opinion market" is also dangerous right now. There are a couple of hot-button issues which can get people in trouble. I even went so far as to found a company outside of Germany as a lightning rod for judicial claims against the platform. And the last problem is that the biggest alternative is Telegram which is technologically a little bit less suited as a media platform but way more suited to communicate which - as you correctly stated - was a selling point for my platform as well.