Hi,
I started my passion project back in college in 2018 and learnt by myself programming. My idea was to create a recommendation website for movies and TV shows. I was so passionate about that idea to the point that I dedicated countless hours coding and searching about algorithms.
Back then, I didn’t even think about business plans nor promotion (a big mistake I know). My main drive was creating the best possible version of my idea with all the features I always dreamt of: in other words, an enhanced version of IMDb and Letterboxd with an emphasis on recommendations. This was the plan.
After two years of efforts and pain, my website >!www.tastoid.com!< was released in 2020. I find that, in some instances, my recommendation engine is superior to the other similar popular websites (that I won’t name). Also, I provide for free features that are paying on other apps (such as advanced search filters). The main differentiating factors are that, for each movie, tags are assigned to describe the mood, plot, etc. and based on that classification, recommendations are generated.
But, here is the thing, although I like my project and it is like my baby, I am paying the server charges myself (ca. USD 300 per month) and it started to take a toll on my personal finances. I had a huge increase in views over the last 30 days (14K sessions – more than +100% compared to the last period). But I only rely on Adsense revenues which amounted to $7. As you can see, it is unsustainable for me to continue this way. I did everything possible to reduce the costs: but medium computing powers are needed for the database which is constantly growing and machine learning to assign tags to movies.
Last month, I created a subscription option (taking inspiration from Backloggd which is also maintained by one person) to allow users to support me for a monthly fee of $5 in exchange of a few perks. I am not after any monetary gain, only trying to have a self-sustainable service. However, not even one user subscribed… even though so far the feedback I received is mostly positive and I have some active recurring users.
This is a hard pill to swallow and, today, I made a realisation. There is no solution to my problem. My mistake was to think that passion and hardwork were sufficient to overcome all obstacles. I thought about selling my service as an API, but again this is my side project, I am the solo developer and I do not have much time dedicated to market it, etc.
So the only rational option, if I don’t want to burn my hard-earned cash, is to close the website. The thought breaks my heart, as I had dedicated so much time and love creating this dream project, and losing all that will be very hard to bear. I feel that my website has potential to help people finding new interesting movies based on their taste and that it provides a certain value, only I have not the budget anymore. Reality check, I guess…
What would have you done? Any advice?
TL; DR: I worked on my passion project for years, a movie recommendation website (launched in 2020). I am paying the server charges myself ($300 monthly). Introduced a $5/month subscription option for user to support me, but no one subscribed. Considering shutting down due to financial strain, despite positive feedback and my attachment to the project. Seeking advice.
Whatever you do please don’t give up you seem to be very close to real success
A major problem is youre competing with imdb. A site with zero ads. Then i open your site then im immediately met with this.
It’s a horrible first impression that would immediately lose me as a user and i havent even scrolled or read anything.
Also as others have said your server costs seem crazy
You really went for it so nobody can knock what you achieved.
I’ve learnt good ideas don’t necessarily mean success.
I wonder if you could’ve hosted for cheaper though. $300 is a heck of a lot.
First of all, this looks like a really cool passion project. I’m sure you learned a lot while making it and you had fun developing it.
If it doesn’t make money it’s just a hobby. You are posting about this hobby project in the Entrepreneur sub so I assume you aspire to become a professional someday.
Since you rather abandon your project than make it profitable I would suggest selling the entire website and source code on a site like Flippa.com. Someone might like what they see and find a business model for it.
If you want to keep your site however you’ll need to lower costs if possible and increase earnings most importantly.
Think about what your site offers to people, how it brings them value and how you can make money out of it. There have to be possibilities.
Hey first off, I’ve found passions projects as the best way to learn.
Many of mine have only resulted in expense, but what I’ve gained in learning has almost always been worth the expense.
There are some good ideas here on reducing cost or increasing revenue. Maybe they will work…
However what I like to do from these learnings is find a way to turn my learning into profit, not necessarily the project.
For example, I’m sure you can find a client who would be interested in building a “discovery” app that uses algorithmic abilities to serve its customers the best recommendations.
And apparently you know how to do this, here is the proof right in front of us. You even found a potential path to profitability for an entrepreneur who has the right marketing skills.
That is how I would use this…
Sell your ability to deliver this concept or sell the entire thing on a website like flippa to a marketer who doesn’t have the tech ability
Good work
Co-signed on this. Turn your current content into a portfolio piece (or your whole portfolio). Otherwise, it seems like you’re experiencing sunk cost fallacy, which is normal, but I’d decide to either pull the plug or accept that it simply costs that amount of money to run.
A $5 subscription seems to be too high for the service provided. Netflix / Spotify/ YouTube are just x2-3, but they are providing actual content (music/movies/videos) and paying authors at the same time. I would suggest $1, this should bring you more subscriptions
It’s still too much. 200k items in a database is nothing. I’m familiar with elasticsearch as well.
What size server are you running? Are you sure you needed an EC2 instance? Why not lightsail instead?
Are you using RDS? Redundancies? LB with multiple servers – doesn’t look like it.
Zoho for email was a good choice – are you using the free tier?
Your bill for your infrastructure and what is needed is high.
Now onto the revenue. Even at $7 you would barely be able to pay for a lightsail instance and break even. Though, it could buy you some time with the 3 mo free.
Your traffic is decent. But, your offering is near impossible to find. Are you referring to Patron?
How many of your users are on mobile vs desktop? On mobile it looks confusing. How many are repeat users? I read some, but percentage? Why do they return? Is what you’re offering for the $5 worth it to them or how did you decide on the “perks”?
When you talked to your users what did they say?
I visited your website and thought it is way more complicated/versatile than I expected. You even have added a dark mode. You are so passionate about this project, and you must have learned a lot in this journey.
However, I have several questions as follows:
- If I am not wrong you started with two categories (movies and TV shows), and then expanded your scope to books, music albums and people without considerable revenue growth. Right? Why?
- Have you ever talked with your users about the exclusive rewards of being a supporter? Did they think those rewards are attractive enough for a subscription?
- Can the cost be reduced significantly if there were only the two original categories (movies and TV shows)?
- Have you ever thought of just using an embedding to represent an entity (titles, people, etc.), instead of the heavy text based Elasticsearch? Or you simply just use its vector search?
Wish you the best to find your way out.
Admittedly I’m a very junior developer who knows nothing: why can’t you just dump the website in vercel or a droplet/docker container? I feel like that’s enough for 14k sessions no?
For the db I’m guessing planet scale doesn’t cover your basis
Convenience. As a self-taught developer, I could not learn every stack, so I had to look for the most easy to implement solution, hence using AWS. But indeed, it may be time to change the architecture and cloud provider, thanks.
Will your server costs grow with more traffic, or are the costs pretty much set with the database.
Like if you get 100k visitors in a month will your costs be $3000 USD? In this case pull the plug.
If it is still around $300 then you might have something here.
Thank you.
Not necessarily. Tasks are constantly running to add movies and do machine learning to classify movies. It is more about the continuous expansion of the database, as to keep it up-to-date with the last releases.
It’s a cool idea, but 99% of users are going to end up on IMBD, and I don’t think you have the money to advertise or run operations.
Maybe take it as learned experience about operating costs and put it in your resume. AI generally requires high processing costs $$, does your app really need this? Maybe you simply can’t support that feature due to costs.
I would also consider revamping the UX, seems a bit cluttered.
Perhaps instead of subscription, you can ask for donations(like what Wikipedia and Adblocker do). You’d be surprise how many people might be willing to support. Since I assume you’re providing this service ads free. Donation in crypto (bitcoin) is a plus.
I’m a paid member of episodecalendar.com, which seems to be a similar sort of site. I got my friend onto it, and she’s a paid member too.
I did a lifetime plan, and I don’t remember what I paid, but it’s $39 US at the moment.
If the dude had to shut down the site and asked for a bit more cash to cover expenses, I’d probably chip in. It’s probably not worth me paying $10/mo for, but it’s a website I find useful.
I think the main reason I upgraded to a paid plan was because he had a limit on how many shows I could add to my list.
Having looked at your membership options, yeah, dude, $5/mo just seems. I dunno, I hate paying things like this monthly. It’s useful, but I could live without it. You should at least have multiple pricing tiers.
And uh, “be our first supporter” looks sad dude, take that bit + the “backers list” out. You ever seen a begger shaking an empty tin? There’s always gotta be a coin in there to make that rattle, to show that someone else has shown a generosity that you’re at risk of not having.
Is there some sort of social aspect you can incorporate? Make it like a good reads but for different media.
Also agree with the other user that it needs a UI refresh, and the post about affiliate links is brilliant.
ui is huge turn off for me
Thank you for the honest feedback