[HN Gopher] 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
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5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
Author : kw_dev
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-10-24 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kwcodes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kwcodes.com)
| giantg2 wrote:
| I like to hear about other people's failure. For one, it makes me
| less critical of my own failures. Then I can also learn and
| improve for the future.
|
| I have two Android apps. Neither bring in money. One I
| intentionally did not monetize. The other I tried to. I targeted
| the wrong audience and my UI could have been more flashy.
|
| I've had ideas for other projects, but they're usually already
| patented or they're too niche to really make money (involves some
| hardware).
| mfollert wrote:
| "Get a Product Job (May 2020 - May 2021) This time the main
| objective was to learn something new by doing. I chose Ruby on
| Rails. It's a great framework to build websites quickly."
|
| Choosing Roby on Rails in 2020 as a "new framework" for web
| development ... sheesh.
| luto wrote:
| I'm not a RoR developer, but still: which framework would you
| use for a new web project in 2021?
| hoofhearted wrote:
| Laravel, VueJS for quick prototyping.
|
| Asp.net core with ReactJS for web, and React Native for
| Windows for any serious projects with SLA's or multiple
| developers.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| node.js + express or rust + rocket
| schnebbau wrote:
| Django with python, or express with js/ts.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| It was clear to me the author meant "new to me"
| joshmanders wrote:
| Right, Ruby on Rails was out for a whole decade by the time I
| heard of it.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I don't like using RoR personally, but it's not a dying
| platform. There's still a large active community around it.
| It's fine.
| mehphp wrote:
| I don't either but ruby isn't just active, it's larger than
| it's ever been.
| ezekg wrote:
| Another day, another person saying Rails is dead.
|
| *sigh*
| zapstar wrote:
| I hope this write-up was a healthy and effective way to help you
| mourn these losses. (And then move on to the next big idea!)
| Kudos to you for experimenting like this.
|
| Would you consider adding them to the Project Cemetery[0]? Then
| others could learn from them too!
|
| [0] https://projectcemetery.com
| brailsafe wrote:
| What a lot of loud successful people wouldn't like to admit, is
| that even if you show up and do the work, you have to be very
| lucky to get traction for anything, regardless of novelty. True
| for being an employee or a business. For the latter, it helps to
| be very lucky and opportunistic with timing to begin with.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| What's the genre of the "planetoid" game called? I remember many
| games like this, both open source and flash, but can't find any
| of them and don't know if there's a name for the genre.
| polote wrote:
| It's ok to fail sometimes, but if you only fail the only way for
| you to stop failing is to be lucky. It doesn't seem like a good
| strategy to me.
|
| But yeah if the goal of OP is the guy he quoted at the end "Had a
| business idea that I think could build in 24 hours and get to
| $5,000 MRR in 30 days". Keep trying, survivor bias is still alive
| herval wrote:
| All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren't
| immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months
| isn't the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again,
| but it's 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and
| why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there.
|
| We're too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate
| success and MVPs making tens of thousands of dollars immediately.
| Those are exceedingly rare, and you might be able to pull it off
| when you have a massive audience. Jumping from project to project
| won't net you that audience, so you end up spending time in
| circles... and earning $0.
| codegeek wrote:
| Yea if you read the article, it is actually more like 5 side
| projects in 4 years (took a 2 year break). That is way too many
| projects to try for real results. Nothing to take away from the
| effort and learnings though. I commend people who try to build
| anything. However, most people give up too quickly. It takes
| months or even a year or 2 to really get traction on any
| project if you want to be serious and I am not talking VC
| funded but bootstrapped. Yes the risk of doing something for 2
| years is big but you need to do a lot more customer
| discovery/validation than just 2-3 months before you give up.
|
| If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5
| projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to
| make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few
| months on it. That is why software developers are not all
| entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff,
| we don't know what to do with it.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Also, only one of the side projects actually broke any ground
| at all. Mostly they were abandoned after less than a month.
|
| A couple of weeks of part time desk research is not a side
| hustle. It's simply due diligence.
|
| Disappointed that the game didn't go ahead as it's something
| I'd definitely play. Reminds me of x-battle.
| pytlicek wrote:
| Absolutely agree with you, 5 users here, 5 there and you will
| have hundreds in 1 year, 500 after 2 years and so on... This
| happened to me with my side project hostbeat.info. I have
| started it bcs some of my friends wanted this kind of service.
| Then I have realized that I can do it as a multi-user SaaS. I
| was expecting thousands of users in the first month, still
| don't know why :) (perhaps I made it free of charge?) Made a
| post on 3-4 forums/discussions, etc... scaled my server to
| handle load almost to 10.000 daily active users. And.... 2
| registrations happened in the first month. This was not
| expected and hit me hard. But later on, as you write, it
| started to gain some traction. One user per week, 2, then 3
| users. Sometimes 2 new per day, the other day or week or month
| nothing. Sometimes I am surprised that some big player on the
| IT market has registered and is also actively using it (2
| largest telco operators in DE and AT fe.) I don't care anymore
| about profit or userbase. I'm happy with it as is and sometimes
| users are sending me emails and thanking me for such service.
| conradfr wrote:
| So, do your friends use it? :)
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| I think the common thing here is not giving up w/o immediate
| success. That is a very good idea sometimes. Homer Simpson
| built a goofy car, people were exposed to it and he got
| negative feedback, and he rightly abandoned it. Some projects
| are a bad idea, you don't know they are, and once you find out
| they are, you absolutely should not keep wasting resources due
| to the sunk cost of wishful thinking.
|
| His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money.
| You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes
| laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is
| borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out
| credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being
| poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on
| a foundation of nothing, your house collapses.
|
| He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it
| more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal
| savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make
| money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea.
| Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because
| you plan on being a rockstar.
|
| The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a
| new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a
| year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I
| don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few
| seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to
| have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons.
|
| It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or
| used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare
| they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest.
| Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid
| focus group.
|
| So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on
| letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing
| that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the
| paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and
| people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| So much this sentiment. I ask people I mentor "why do you
| measure yourself in dollars?" and they often respond with
| something like "all the successful people I admire are rich."
| or something along those lines.
|
| Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging
| indicator.
|
| Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you
| will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be
| in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you
| that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well
| as experience. Why? Because you'll _know_ what is important and
| what is not, you will _know_ how things waste money and how to
| avoid them, you will _know_ what metrics are important and what
| they mean.
| ghaff wrote:
| One the one hand, I'd observe that most people's side-
| projects, aka hobbies, were never expected to make money.
| Short of opening a shop your pottery or whatever wasjust
| something you did.
|
| On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to
| just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
| jabl wrote:
| Well, it's also kind of privileged to expect to have such a
| "side hustle" that you enjoy doing, and that generates
| income.
|
| Sure, people used to have side hustles back in the day, but
| maybe more like weeding your potato plants after a back-
| breaking day at the factory.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I would be interested in how you got to here:
|
| > On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to
| just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
|
| Was it from what I wrote or was it unrelated?
| ghaff wrote:
| I was just referring to expectations that projects you do
| outside of your main job can be turned into money-making
| enterprises. And, from my perspective, this is usually
| not the case and I'm fine with it but it's easy to see
| that being dismissive of side hustles assumes a well-
| paying 9-5 job.
| rahimiali wrote:
| > Money is a 'first derivative' of success
|
| Does that mean that even if my success stagnates at "quite
| successful", I make no money at all? That doesn't make sense
| to me. How would that work?
| Buge wrote:
| Yeah I think it would be the other way around: money would
| be the integral of success.
| martincmartin wrote:
| Reminds me of "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it."
| by Joel Spolsky.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-
| content/uploads/...
|
| This chart is a good example of having no traction for years
| and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a
| company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an
| overnight success.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| "no traction" lol. After 2 years that chart shows 35k
| users. That's only no traction in relation to the final
| outcome.
|
| Imagine this was money instead, where the final result was
| $1B and after the first 2 years it was _only_ $1M.
|
| $1M is only "no traction" in relation to $1B. In absolute
| terms it's pretty damn good.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This has been my experience.
|
| I'm working on an app that will be released in the next few
| months (we don't have a definite ship date, yet).
|
| It's based on two servers that I wrote. One, I wrote eleven
| or twelve years ago, and has become a world standard; but
| only in the last three years. Since it's a specialized
| demographic, the numbers are quite small, for "world
| standard."
|
| The other server is one that I wrote, about four years ago.
| It took me seven months. It's a very good general-purpose
| application server. I wrote it for practice, but it's also
| ideal for the app I'm writing.
|
| I've been working on the frontend app for over a year. It's
| really, really good. I deliberately took my time, because we
| went through a lot of "MVP" stuff, during its development.
|
| The rest of the team seems to think it will take the world by
| storm, when it's released, but I don't think it will.
|
| That's fine with me. I don't mind a slow burn. I've written
| software that lasts _decades_.
| ezekg wrote:
| Completely agree. Good ideas are abandoned too often because of
| bad advice from influencers and unrealistic expectations. I
| actually wrote about this a few weeks ago ^1.
|
| ^1: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/
| kjksf wrote:
| I don't think "just stick with it" is a good advice in general
| and especially not for his projects.
|
| He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal
| metronome and jobs website.
|
| BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5
| people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of
| non-existing product.
|
| Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first
| place.
|
| With jobs websites you need a giant, unfair advantage over all
| other job websites.
|
| Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain
| killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are
| obviously willing to pay for.
|
| They are also extremely competitive.
|
| The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but
| only if he managed to stand out from all the other time
| trackers and masterfully execute both the product and
| marketing.
|
| There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are
| plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid.
|
| High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is
| a red flag.
| prox wrote:
| As Guy Kawasaki once said in Art of the Start : "You want to
| be high and on the right." You make something everyone wants
| and is of great value, and only you can make it. The worst
| place is making something that 50 others do and is of no
| value to the customer.
| zeroc8 wrote:
| The only problem is that pretty much anything I can do has
| been done a zillion times by others.
| kjksf wrote:
| I doubt that's true.
|
| I have literally hundreds of ideas.
|
| As an experiment I put them on a website for anyone to
| see and "steal": https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e413
| 2d5a44014b2aad81d815...
|
| I'm not saying those are all great, profitable ideas.
|
| I'm saying that they are doable by a competent programmer
| and unique enough. Certainly not "done a zillion times by
| others".
| zepolen wrote:
| That list really drives home the 'ideas are cheap'
| phrase.
|
| I guess the good ideas are expensive.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That might _appear to be_ the case, but probably isn't.
| There's often not anything harder to implement a CRUD app
| that solves a novel problem than implementing a CRUD app
| that solves the same problem as 100 other people are
| hawking.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Yep!
|
| You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your
| ideas)!
|
| I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them
| don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you
| research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you
| plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to
| learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then
| file them away, however. Things can change.
|
| Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that
| survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and
| milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't
| have any more to work.
|
| Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that
| jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that.
| Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority
| venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have
| to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or
| you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate
| more capital to "do it right".
|
| You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market
| exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products
| because of high competition you won't likely match.
| redisman wrote:
| Yeah the first step if you want to be successful on some
| metric is to type "time tracker" into AppStore search and see
| that is completely hopeless and pick something else that
| doesn't already have 100+ professional and commercial
| implementations
| askvictor wrote:
| My 5-odd side side projects over the last decade have mostly been
| tools I've built for myself, that I thought other people might
| also find useful (and a bit for developing new skills, and fun).
| Though I thought it might be nice to get a few dollars for
| ongoing work/support, but in most of my cases, the options to
| monetize are too complicated to bother with - in my case wanting
| corporate users to pay some amount, while being free for personal
| users. The time involved in setting this up isn't worth the
| likely (lack of) return.
|
| Honestly, even listing in an app store is a pretty big barrier
| (bureaucracy-wise) these days for a side-project - on one project
| I probably spent more time jumping through these hoops than on
| developing a MVP.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Minimal metronome and minimal time tracker are close to useless,
| because the market is so saturated, and there are tons of free
| options.
|
| You need to start with validating your idea instead of wasting
| days/months on coding.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Also, I think we need to stop rewarding 'minimal' products.
| Like you said, there's no room for minimal time tracking, but
| there's definitely room for more high quality, feature-dense
| time tracking tools.
| necovek wrote:
| This was 3 projects from 5 ideas of projects.
|
| If I count ideas I had that I never seriously started on, I've
| failed hundreds of projects.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Just get a web site ready for the next time a ship gets stuck.
| mehphp wrote:
| I see this a lot: a clearly talented person who is unable to
| monetize their project.
|
| At a glance, it looks like OP is just building stuff, throwing it
| at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course, that is bound to
| fail. You are, essentially, playing the lottery.
|
| Nowhere in that blog did I see any mention of figuring out what a
| customer is looking for in a game or a product.
|
| What is the niche you are trying to fill or pain-point you are
| trying to solve? It would be much better to build something
| _after_ you know people want it, not before.
| [deleted]
| carlsborg wrote:
| Carlsborg's law: Distribution is as important as product,
| especially when the barriers to entry are low.
| jll29 wrote:
| There's something called _market analysis_: you either find a gap
| in the market for software tools, or you talk to people and ask
| what they would pay for _before_ starting to code.
|
| Yes, you can jump straight into coding for your side projects,
| but not if your primary goal is to earn a steady side income (it
| may work but unlikely so).
|
| But good to see negative outcome reports to counter-balance the
| extreme survivor bias on here.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
|
| Not earning money is not a failure. Wasting time on non-free
| software the purpose of which is making money - now that's
| unfortunate.
|
| My advice to that guy would be:
|
| * Write software you need personally. You will at least have one
| happy user - and if you write something you like, other people
| will probably want to use it too.
|
| * Think of the software needs of people you know - in your
| family, physical community, or online communities - and see
| whether you can't help implement it or adapt/improve existing
| software for that purpose.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Maybe I'm just old and cranky and this is a generational thing,
| but when did "side project" become mixed up with "side hustle"?
|
| I think the dead horse has been beaten already in this thread,
| with what the author "should have done" in terms of market
| research, A/B testing, MVP, etc. No need for me to pile on
| further there.
|
| But what strikes me is that the author _really_ seems to draw no
| distinction between personal side projects, done for the purpose
| of developing new skills that you aren 't learning at your day
| job (e.g. iOS development, Ruby on Rails, etc)... versus
| entrepreneurial side hustles that you pursue for the dream of
| financial independence.
|
| I think the the lesson here is, "Pick one". If you're trying to
| get rich, then that's not the time dive into some completely
| unfamiliar tech whose learning curve will slow down your
| velocity. You should be leveraging whatever boring tech you
| already know and are already most productive in, so you can focus
| on the marketing research and business side of things.
| Conversely, if you're trying to dive into an educational side
| project to learn new skills, then it's rather naive to expect
| that to be a path to riches. It won't be, and that's okay!
| bluewalt wrote:
| That's a relevant advice IMO.
|
| However, as a tech guy trying to build stuff too, I need
| continuous motivation for this. I need to stay in a "flow"
| state. And a good fuel to this is to learn new cool things
| during the journey.
|
| To put it differently, I think you need to find the right
| balance between fun and efficiency, even if your goal is to
| earn money in the end. Trying to always look for the maximum
| efficiency could be a short term vision that quickly lead to
| boringness.
| [deleted]
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| > personal side projects, done for the purpose of developing
| new skills
|
| That sounds like a work focused side project to me. Things I've
| made that are personal side projects - iot blind controls
| (because I wanted it), magic mirror (because I wamted it),
| triathlon result parser (because me and my so wanted to settle
| some race stats debates), groupable containerised desktop apps
| (because I wanted it) etc.
|
| None of my personal side projects set out to develop new
| skills, they set out to make me or a loved one happy. Often
| they _do_ develop new skills. My partner is currently stripping
| and repainting an old bike - shes learning loads, but thats not
| the intent. The intent is to make it match her other gear
| because that makes her happy.
| alirsgp wrote:
| I've published ~20 iOS apps. Only 4 make money, but they allowed
| me to reach financial independence and never have to work for
| someone gain at the age of 24.
| IkmoIkmo wrote:
| Bit of a painful read. On the first game, it's a common game
| concept (very much not novel) that I've seen many people
| recreate. I built one myself with better graphics and gameplay
| over the course of a week and sold it for 5k to a games publisher
| around 2013-2014, about 2-3 years before they released their
| game. That publisher offered it for free on an ad model. I can't
| believe working on it for a year, with two people, for free,
| releasing it in 2016 and expecting any sales.
|
| Enough has been said about the projects in general already which
| mostly mimics the game (not solving a real user problem, late-
| entry, competing with existing solutions, no marketing)
| ffhhj wrote:
| And you know what's worst than earning $0?
|
| - The store not accepting your app because there are too many of
| the same topic (horoscopes, memes, sound boards, whatever-craft
| names, etc.)
|
| - Spending lots of money on Google/FB ads.
|
| - Spending lots of money on AWS.
|
| - Burning out yourself and your friends.
| skeoh wrote:
| Could you expound on this? Are you speaking from experience?
| thanatos519 wrote:
| "I have not failed 10,000 times -- I've successfully found 10,000
| ways that will not work." -- Thomas Edison
| tomcooks wrote:
| Alessandro Cruto, Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin, James Bowman
| Lindsay, Nikola Tesla, and many others have different opinion
| on said quote.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I'm one of the folks who took part in The Quittening that the
| last year has made for us. I left a demanding, unfulfilling
| startup job in July. The main factors in why I was able to do
| this was:
|
| * a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much
| excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE
| community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean
| FIRE".)
|
| * being married to someone who had the understanding to support
| me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable
| health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)
|
| I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except
| for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda
| stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards
| launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my
| main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a
| month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of
| newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried
| launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all
| of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.
|
| Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project
| has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side
| business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to
| spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP
| stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just
| figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service.
| That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud
| providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of
| those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances.
| (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)
|
| I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to
| launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope!
| Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your
| working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that
| there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and
| make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's
| true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some
| combination of:
|
| * lucky,
|
| * very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or
|
| * blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility
| that doesn't exist yet.
|
| OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary
| success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try.
| It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times,
| and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that
| what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to
| admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards
| continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.
| cryptica wrote:
| I launched 5 major software projects over the last 15 years. The
| first one was a failure; the big lesson I learned from that
| failure was that I couldn't salvage or re-purpose any of the
| code; aside from educational value, all that work had been
| wasted. After that experience, I tried to build all my projects
| in such a way that I could always salvage/re-purpose my work.
|
| My second project was a software development framework which I
| tried to sell it as a SaaS platform. The platform was a
| commercial failure but the open source framework became popular
| and I was able to convince the founders of a popular blockchain
| project to use it as part of their P2P layer.
|
| Although that project was a technical success, because I didn't
| own any meaningful stake in that blockchain project, I wasn't
| able to capitalize on this opportunity so it was a commercial
| failure for me.
|
| So then we (me and some open source community members who joined
| along the way) used that blockchain as a base to build a
| Decentralized Exchange and 2 new blockchain projects. Although
| these projects have not yet succeeded commercially (still working
| on it), I managed to secure passive income as a blockchain
| validator on the base blockchain. Securing this passive income
| was my first hint of commercial success after 10 years of trying.
| Anyway, it's an ongoing story but if my current 3 active projects
| don't succeed commercially, I have already planned for the next
| projects to build on top...
|
| The goal is to just keep building stuff on top of this blockchain
| ecosystem, welcoming new contributors along the way and keeping
| everything open source.
| encoderer wrote:
| Main lesson that seems to not have been learned yet, since it's
| not mentioned at the end:
|
| If you want to make money (any money at all), stop focusing on
| consumer products, build a small B2B product instead.
| pcj-github wrote:
| What seems lacking in the choice of projects is a particular
| expertise in any of these subjects. Pick an area of study, try
| and narrow it as much as possible, stick with it over several
| years, and seek to become the world's expert on that very narrow
| topic (which is hopefully useful). Then you will understand what
| needs to be built.
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| Alternatively, you commit to a field of expertise, only to
| become narrow minded, and unable to synthesize simple ideas
| into products end users care about.
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| "Success Is Going From Failure to Failure Without Losing Your
| Enthusiasm"
|
| Lincoln
| yesenadam wrote:
| More commonly attributed to Churchill, but apparently there's
| no evidence either of them said it.
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/28/success/
| crispyalmond wrote:
| I wouldn't consider projects which make $0 to be failures, unless
| your intent was to make money from them. I like making
| tools/games in my spare time with no intention of profiting from
| them. I simply enjoy the programming aspect way more than any
| monetary value. I'm not saying that I wouldn't like the money,
| but it's not my primary focus for making these projects.
| bluewalt wrote:
| That's a very strong advice to remove irrelevant guilt. Many
| people bind success with money. That's just one thing you can
| benefit.
| swayvil wrote:
| My 10 year project (a computer-geometry-art thing) (yes, 10
| years, 1 project) was a great success. I made zip cash. But that
| was not the aim of the project.
|
| http://www.fleen.org/generative-art/
| cableshaft wrote:
| Damn that's impressive. I could see that on the floor of an
| important building. Somebody make that happen!
| tekstar wrote:
| If you don't, you could consider posting some of your art to
| reddit.com/r/generative or to instagram. It's a really popular
| concept right now, although a bit plagued with people jumping
| on the NFT train trying to make money with generative "drops".
| oa335 wrote:
| Do you have any recommendations as to how to get started
| creating your style of generative art?
|
| I have been interested in a similar project for sometime, but
| don't know the best place to get started. My background is in
| Math, so I'd really like to understand the "why" and "how" of
| these types of algorithms rather than just plugging in some
| parameters and getting a nice picture.
| swayvil wrote:
| Here's a little paper on the geometry
|
| https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille
| bellajbadr wrote:
| Why didn't you open source your projects!!
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Good for you man. I don't really see much about customer pain
| points though.
|
| If people aren't in pain they aren't going to buy / use your
| stuff.
|
| Take the product job board. At first I thought it was product
| manager jobs, but doesn't that already exist? Then after seeing
| accounts payable and other stuff I realized you meant tech, which
| also exists already. So why would people use yours?
|
| Your startup HAS to solve something better than existing
| solutions. For example -Uber was a taxi, but cheaper and much
| better -Facebook was MySpace but geared toward your in person
| friends / clean interface. Turns out people preferred not having
| to customize their page -TikTok was vine but done way better. Its
| learning algorithm is unbelievable, it leans into Adding music
| which makes everything more fun, etc. it's a markedly better way
| for people to express themselves
|
| The one project you build for yourself, the metronome, already
| had a solution you discovered after you started building
|
| So I'd really spend some time on the problem first. Read the lean
| startup. Talk to customers. And figure out if a project is
| actually a smart bet. Your product has to be markedly better for
| some group of customers - if it's just a little better, people
| aren't going to switch
| willcate wrote:
| I've been on a similar trajectory.
| jpomykala wrote:
| Try to stay longer on an idea than a few weeks.
| human wrote:
| I find this kind of post very interesting. The key takeaways from
| my point of view is that none of these projects actually created
| value. Most of them didn't solve a problem that other software
| hadn't already solved. The most interesting one I think was the
| appartment notitication one. Especially that today there is such
| a race if you want to find a good and affordable appartment. It's
| just too bad the author wasn't able to create something simple
| for this. At the end of the day, you have to try 10 ideas to get
| one off the ground. But you also have to give them a serious
| shot, which doesn't seem to have been the case here. You often
| will have to invest actual money to get your idea out there and
| popular. Unless it's a one in a million that will go viral on its
| own.
| ergocoder wrote:
| For every remoteok.io which is a single PHP file and makes $100k
| a month, there are 1000 of failed job boards. I suppose this is
| the reality.
| 6510 wrote:
| There it simply becomes a marketing project not a software
| project.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's true, but developers don't like to hear that because we
| like writing code not marketing shit.
| grammarnazzzi wrote:
| People pay for services because it's _work_ that they are unable
| or unwilling to do themselves
|
| Building things that people will not pay for is called a hobby.
|
| You're not entited to an income from your hobbies.
|
| > This is a story about me dreaming
|
| Yup
|
| > 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 (kwcodes.com)
|
| You didn't even try to finish 2 of the 5 projects You didn't even
| do anything in 2 of the 6 years.
|
| Your title is clickbait. Seems like you want attention more than
| you want money.
|
| By comparison, looking at my github, I started over 50 projects
| in last year and finished a dozen of them. Hobbies all of them
| and I didn't expect to make a dime. If you want a reality check,
| head over to https://itch.io/jams. You'll find 10,000 hobbies
| projects not making any money.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if that's far below the average number of
| "failures" to face before any sort of success anyone, regardless
| of their aptitude or luck will be met. All I see among people who
| make it is that they spent years trying things, they won't tweet
| every disappointment .
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Sharing some thoughts in the spirit of us all learning and
| improving:
|
| Re: Planetoid my immediate first impression was "I don't
| understand what's going on here". With that one it seems like
| maybe the author should have vetted the basic idea with friends
| and family first and see if they get it.
|
| Re: Minfinity it seems useful and is actually right up my alley!
| I feel like the strategy here would be to keep it in maintenance
| mode and wait and see if it ever picks up popularity (such as in
| a thread like this).
|
| My big takeaway from reading the author's post is that it seems
| to drive home the importance of
| marketing/advertising/selling/etc. Those stories about the
| Collison brothers pitching their product to developers and then
| doing the somewhat socially awkward thing of pressuring them try
| it out right there on the spot is burned in my memory.
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