Some Tips from Eight Years in the Webapp Trenches
In 2017 we launched kpopping.com, I had been a kpop fan for a long time and could feel it was about to burst on the world stage without any supporting software. In the eight years since I have seen many companies come into this niche, spend a half million and die. Hopefully, these years of pain can be condensed into tiny bite-sized paragraphs will serve someone trying to build a similar app.
Starting Out in the Luck-Based World of Webapps
If no one has told you yet, making money by building a web app is not skill-based. No, you will not be able to force your way to the top of Google results by being a better product (see below).
It's a dangerous world out there for a baby web app but the first step to survival is knowing that everything is gonna suck for a long time. You will receive praise from your friends and family for launching—they will try to fill your head with ideas. If they haven't built a product before just smile politely. The Trough of Sorrow is approaching and you must be prepared for the long winter.
People expect B2C apps to need a lot of runway to be successful, but it is even worse. You should think of this like you are Napoleon in 1812 looking over at Russia. You must provision what you will need financially for the next year and beyond very carefully or you will get killed during a few low CPM months.
(Every month is a low CPM month btw.)
Life Is Violent and Short in the Jungles of Google Search
Ah, we're through the Trough of Sorrow, the Trough of Slow SQL Queries, and the Trough of Subcontinental SEO Spammer Bots. Congratulations! Hopefully by now you're saying, "I like the way this sucks."
Every year a few new companies join in the carnage of internet kpop trying to cash in. There were some very cool apps built in the latest tech stacks. Doesn't matter— still died. A lot of these companies just have no path to revenue generation with ad rates being what they are. You need to break 1M monthly traffic to even have a chance in this niche. Today these competitor websites are pretty likely to be redirecting to a Vietnamese hotel because they focused on the wrong problems.
International Audience, CPM, and Ad Blockers
Kpop as a niche probably has one of the most international audiences in the world —but what's fascinating to me is how Korea isn't just using America's infrastructure for this. Some of our largest audiences are in places like Iran and Russia. These places have very low CPM rates and your American audience will effectively be subsidizing their content.
Well, the ones without ad blockers anyway, may God protect their souls.
SEO and Competition
Other Kpop websites have owners that have leaked underage nudes in the past and yet have faced no consequences. Google is not going to punish a website based on a tweet, no matter how popular it is. There's a certain Machiavellian promotional aspect that the modern web encourages even among the established players to play these risky moves and it’s easy to see what contempt they have for their users.
But holding this in tension is your reputation with the players in the industry, advertisers, sponsors, etc. But you can still get away with quite a lot if you're still bringing in numbers.
Just as an example, right now one of our main competitors, kprofiles.com, which is a purple WordPress. I am not even going to describe it beyond that except to say, that this is one of the most popular websites in Kpop. Compare our websites and then compare our Google search results. This is the reality of building a web app. Some of your competitors will look like this and outrank you on queries because Google is absurd and there's nothing you can do about it.
Love your product anyway.
Outsourcing and Team Building
Now you are broke and one year in. Your product is making $35 a day. What do you do?
Well, you have to fire everyone and start over. If someone sticks around out of loyalty consider yourself the luckiest person on Earth. You will need to have something presentable by now even if you're not quite at PMF, if only for internal team morale.
But firing everyone will only save you so much money and tends to have other drawbacks too. When we crashed and burned through our budget we had to fire the staff we hired and resume doing all the data entry and database grunt work instead of building out additional features.
I would say if you have a website that is a wiki style like mine, you need to form a cadre. Just like with the communists of yore, your cadre is going to fulfill an educational and political officer role within your website, yelling at people about proper formatting and educating the new users.
So that means establishing a basic hierarchy and finding volunteers for roles.
Horrors of War
Years of these problems will take their toll on you.
Here’s a random assortment of problems this week:
Teenagers cybering in the comments section
We're running out of storage again on OVH so have to begin transferring our pics section to the cloud
Dealing with memory spikes from our ad network that we ameliorated but cannot seem to fix completely
Another SEO update crashing our traffic 20%
Love It Anyway
When you look out at the internet today, what do you see? It’s a nonstop parade of soulless money-sucking goblins.
It's not the internet I grew up with. I remember websites like GameFAQs, CastersRealm, and MrFixItOnline where everyone worked together to build something great.
So in summary, even though it won't matter at all, you should take the cathedral-builders approach and build with love and integrity and believe you’re building for eternity.