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Six Months of Tiny Projects

tinyprojects.dev

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Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#91

Post by mgreenleaf »

dsabanin wrote: post #70
gallerdude wrote: post #55

I don't understand why the other comments are being so negative, this is awesome . There's a Jony Ive quote along the lines of "when you build something, you get the actual thing, but even more valuable is how you've grown and changed from building that thing. Best of luck on your future projects, great on you to make awesome stuff and grow as a person!

I think those negative commenters tend to miss what in my opinion is the most critical ingredient of what being a true "hacker" is – doing some things just because you want to, because you're having fun and because you want to see where it may lead. It breeds creativity and original ideas. A silly idea in the beginning may turn out to not be so silly in the end.

I've been doing a similar thing where I build lots of different SAAS type projects, lots of them will go nowhere, but what I have learned about design, abstraction, and trade-offs is enormous. Definitely worth the time to do something like this. One of my first priorities in hiring someone is to see if they have side projects where they learn things unconstrained by the normal grind of daily professional life.

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#92

Post by reggieband »

There is an old story about pottery students. A school split a pottery class into two groups. They instructed the first group to focus on making a few exceptional pieces. They judged the second group based on the number of pieces they created measured by weight. The result was that the best pieces came from the second group; those that focused on quantity.

There is value in the experience gained when focusing on quantity instead of quality. Early in ones career it seems wise to spend some time on increasing quantity.

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#93

Post by chongli »

dsabanin wrote: post #70
gallerdude wrote: post #55

I don't understand why the other comments are being so negative, this is awesome . There's a Jony Ive quote along the lines of "when you build something, you get the actual thing, but even more valuable is how you've grown and changed from building that thing. Best of luck on your future projects, great on you to make awesome stuff and grow as a person!

I think those negative commenters tend to miss what in my opinion is the most critical ingredient of what being a true "hacker" is – doing some things just because you want to, because you're having fun and because you want to see where it may lead. It breeds creativity and original ideas. A silly idea in the beginning may turn out to not be so silly in the end.

Well it’s inevitable that the culture of a community is going to drift as it grows. We even have a name for the effect in the hacker community: Eternal September.

I also think the negativity may be reflective of the mood of society overall. This has been a very tough year for so many people. When people are having a tough time I think they can latch on to one of their pet peeves and use it to blow off some steam. We just need to be careful as a community that we don’t allow the discussion to devolve into a toxic flame war. Our tireless moderator dang has been tremendous at that thus far.

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#94

Post by OldHand2018 »

state_less wrote: post #16
bluedevil2k wrote: post #5

> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on. While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’…

Please keep in mind that we may not all share the same idea of what a business is, what a meaningful amount of money is and what success looks like. When you repeatedly make sales and profit, you’re past the hurdle of not losing money on the operation. It’s a nice milestone on the entrepreneurship journey and worthy of a bit of celebration.

> we may not all share the same idea of what a business is

The IRS has an opinion [1], and its a really good list! Make a copy of it and put a recurring appointment in your calendar to revisit it, think about it, and write down your comments.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/faqs/small-business-self-employed-other-...

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#95

Post by cgreinhold »

That's really cool and inspiring. I began the year with a similar idea of creating small projects weekly, although my goals were less ambitious. In the beginning of it I already felt in the "insane schedule" hole and realized that it wouldn't work, so I changed plans to at least creating a blog post each week. With that, I could create a better habit and manage to (almost) handle it.

This approach didn't block me from creating small programs/game clones in this period, which I'm keeping in my blog[0] as well, but seeing projects like yours motivates to push harder for bigger projects.

I wish you luck on keeping your pace as well!

[0] https://cgreinhold.dev/

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#96

Post by dang »

gallerdude wrote: post #55

I don't understand why the other comments are being so negative, this is awesome . There's a Jony Ive quote along the lines of "when you build something, you get the actual thing, but even more valuable is how you've grown and changed from building that thing. Best of luck on your future projects, great on you to make awesome stuff and grow as a person!

> I don't understand why the other comments are being so negative, this is awesome.

This is the contrarian dynamic at work: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The first posts in a thread are usually negative because negative reactions are the easiest to feel and fastest to write. Also, most internet comments are objections to something, and when the thread is blank, the only thing there to object to is the article.

After that, other comments show up to object to the objections. These tend to get upvoted, and that explains the paradox of why so often the top comment says something like "I don't understand why everyone here is so negative".

The main thing to understand is that this has nothing to do with the topic! It's a generic effect of the forum mechanism and group psychology.

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#97

Post by dang »

justiceforsaas wrote: post #56

The gist of the article is: The OP created a tiny project, launched it on Product Hunt/Hacker News, and moved to creating another project. I'm glad he acknowledges the problem with this: "A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing". Here are some tips to help with this: 1) Explore more "steady" acquisition channels. Yes, PH/HN are "spike-y" channels…

Please stop spamming HN with your link. We just asked you about this yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25128211

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#98

Post by bluedevil2k »

elorant wrote: post #32
bluedevil2k wrote: post #5

> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on. While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’…

My main business started as a side-project. Not as tiny as the ones in the article, but it wasn't meant to be my main source of income. And yes, it took years of marketing to reach a mature state, but the essence is that experimenting is what usually brings the real money.

You kind of make my point. You turned your website into a business by spending the time to convert it. Experimenting is fine and it’s fun to build websites and web apps, I do it too. But if I’m not willing to spend the time to listen to clients, figure out what they want and what they’ll pay for, then to me it’s just a hobby.

Re: Six Months of Tiny Projects

#99

Post by bluedevil2k »

ChefboyOG wrote: post #50
bluedevil2k wrote: post #5

> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on. While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’…

Out of curiosity, who do you worry is "pretending this is the path to a successful web business?" Because the author certainly isn't doing so. If you scroll down just a few paragraphs from the sentence fragment you quoted, the author says: > "My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects. A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a…

In my opinion he’d be better off focusing on 1, maybe 2, projects and seeing those through to “completion” (whether that’s positive MRR or closing). Which 1 or 2 products? Well he should have done his market research ahead of time and known from his list which ones were most viable. Better yet, he should have found customers ready to hand over their CC information.
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