How to get my project off the ground? (a gamified study site)
I am a former web developer trying to get back into the profession. Dealing with ageism and a jungle of new languages, libraries, frameworks, and standards, I have failed to get employed so far; but I also have ideas for projects that could make me money running them myself. One of them is a gamified online study tool I am currently building.
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This project faces me with a bunch of issues where I could use some good tips, for example in which forum to persue any of the following issues (and am I overlooking other important issues???):
___1.)_Funding___
Since the tool should probably be free in order to grow a user base, I think I should start it out as donationware (a free website with optional donations). Problem: (A) How to implement online donations (personal payments? register a business?)? (B) How to avoid chargeback fraud costing me for example $20 in chargeback fee for a $1 refund when there should be no permissible refund requests at all? (C) How to avoid that a third-party transaction service like PayPal, Stripe or Patreon meddles with my complex transnational tax situation (wrongly reporting my money collection to wrong tax agencies, rather than leaving the reporting to the one held responsible: me)
___2.)_Traffic___
How to easily measure number of visits & users? With certain hosting services? With WordPress using traffic plugins? Or build myself a PHP code that saves user visit totals inside files named as cryptic hashes of the users' IPs? With lots of users might this overwhelm a server? Would a database be less easily overwhelmed, say by a million users? (Quizlet allegedly has 50 million!)
___3.)_Community/CMS/DB___
To let users save and share learning material, maybe make it a WordPress site? Or is it better today to link a frontend site to some database via API calls? Or is it all too risky because of potential copyright violations?
___4.)_Quizlet-API___
Maybe manage to link it up with Quizlet's learning materials (allegedly Quizlet has an API for that) so I can focus on the gaming code AND don't have to worry about copyright violations of learning materials? Anybody know anything about this API?
___5.)_Freemium___
If it grows, but donations are lacking too much, time might come to advance to a freemium model. What's a good way to do that? Binding the project into WordPress and use some kind of Fremium plugin? Or set up some money transaction that delivers a random code then hashed with the user's IP as a server file? Or do the latter as a cookie on the user's device so there is no server-side account management needed?
___6.)_Copycats___
Potential competitors with deep pockets and the possible audacity to copycat my project or even outright steal the code could ruin it all, too, especially if I am slowed down by the other points mentioned. Any ideas?
SEMrush
___7.)_Hosting___
And what might be a good hosting service to use? (ideally free to start out with, paid when the bandwidth rises, and not blocking potentially necessary things like PHP or PHP's mail() function; maybe offering automatic backups, easy maintenance, easy scalability...)
Can anybody give me some clues about any of these issues (or others I failed to mention)? What's the fitting forum for getting deeply into any single issue?
Thanks a million for any hints or clues. :)
Hi - well done for doing your homework before completely committing to the project
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Use google analytics
There are many dedicated education CMS like Moodle. I would be looking at WordPress as a last resort unless you find a decent plugin but even then... meh Not what it's designed for
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Freemium is a great idea, but I'd need to see your plans re target market, the length of time they'll use it etc before I'd know for sure
Protecting your intellectual property is always going to be a big part of running the site. You want to be big enough to make money but small enough to avoid being ripped off. Talk to your real-world lawyer about what real-world protections you can put in place.
You should be able to use pretty much any competent hosting company. If your userbase is likely to be large then a dedicated server would be good or you could look at Google's Cloud hosting or Amazon. The right answer will be obvious when you've picked your software and worked out your projected loading. I'm kind of involved in a project delivering distributed training to thousands of users - but in reality, we'd be lucky to have more than a handful online at any given time and that would be a huge success for that organisation because of the nature of the information imparted. Others need much, much more traffic to be considered a success. The software might be identical but the hosting requirements will be different.
Oh, and don't rely on mail() if you have a big site, it'll be throttled. Look instead at services like Mandrill and MailGun. A small extra cost which is easily justified.
> 2. Google analytics
I thought about it too, but (A) it may be overkill (like tracking where visitors came from when I mostly just want to know how big the user base is and how often they re-visit) and it may cause trouble with new privacy laws like the awful European GDPR. But maybe I should take another look at it.
> 3. Moodle vs WordPress
Since my project is a self-study tool rather than classroom platform, and since I know WordPress (WP), I prefer the latter. My main worry is that if I use WP for letting users save their learning material and share it with others, it creates an inflexible connection between a given learning material and a chosen game version (when I may create multiple versions and a variety of games)
It would be best to somehow let users choose both the game (version or type) AND the learning material independently from each other. Hence my musing about some form of API call approach to some database or some PHP coding linking to a same-server database or some such. Any tip there could be VERY useful.
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> 6. ... You want to be ... small enough to avoid being ripped off.
That part I fail to understand. If the project got big, how would it/I be ripped off more than otherwise?
> 6. ... Talk to your real-world lawyer about what real-world protections you can put in place.
Hm... any tips on how to find a suitable lawyer? (there are so many lawyer specializations, which to look for, esp. in the U.S.?)
> Oh, and don't rely on mail() if you have a big site, it'll be throttled.
Hm? How?
Thanks, anyone, for more tips and experience sharing. :)
> 3. Moodle vs WordPress
Since my project is a self-study tool rather than classroom platform, and since I know WordPress (WP), I prefer the latter. My main worry is that if I use WP for letting users save their learning material and share it with others, it creates an inflexible connection between a given learning material and a chosen game version (when I may create multiple versions and a variety of games)
It would be best to somehow let users choose both the game (version or type) AND the learning material independently from each other. Hence my musing about some form of API call approach to some database or some PHP coding linking to a same-server database or some such. Any tip there could be VERY useful.
Click to expand...
Moodle and the other education platforms allow for self-paced study. I'm rusty but I'd spend time evaluating the main players in that space before choosing WP just because it's comfortable.
Dirk the Web Phoenix said: ↑
> 6. ... You want to be ... small enough to avoid being ripped off.
That part I fail to understand. If the project got big, how would it/I be ripped off more than otherwise?
From re-reading your first post you seem to have identified copy cats as a very real threat. If your server is secure and you have proper login processes your Intellectual Property should be secure. If someone signs up, pays up, there's little you can do to stop them stealing your concepts - but because of the gamification with users getting different content depending on their progress - they'll never see absolutely everything.
My point was that if your niche is very specific you'll evade the casual copycat. We get them on this forum all the time asking questions like "what's the next big trend?", "how to identify a high paying niche".
So if your site was educating folk on natural hoofcare for horses you probably don't have to worry about copycats
But if your site was on becoming a highly paid copywriter you would
Dirk the Web Phoenix said: ↑
> 6. ... Talk to your real-world lawyer about what real-world protections you can put in place.
Hm... any tips on how to find a suitable lawyer? (there are so many lawyer specializations, which to look for, esp. in the U.S.?)
Your family lawyer should be able to refer you to someone they respect.
Dirk the Web Phoenix said: ↑
> Oh, and don't rely on mail() if you have a big site, it'll be throttled.
Hm? How?
Hosting companies will "throttle" the number of emails you can send to, say, 100 per hour and if anything goes wrong they'll simply turn it off.
I have a client that uses Mandrill, we pay the bare minimum fees at MailChimp and that gives us pretty much unlimited emails. We send them in one big batch and, yes, they're still throttled but I can view their send progress and the throttling is more intelligent than a simple counter. We control the subscribe/unsubscribe which means fewer integrations of our customer information. We also get callbacks so I can feed back to the users how many opens/clicks they get and we get intelligent feedback on bounces.
