https://pushback.io - 3 year side project, total failure (money wise)
I originally started it to scratch my own itch. I wanted a notification from my temperature sensor when my new born son's room got too cold (we didn't have AC, so we left the window open).
I knew solutions already existed, but I wanted to get better at programming. Which I did.
Pushback has a little bit of everything and has been rewritten 3 times going from:
- go to rails to hybrid
- puppet to k8s to Ansible
- most react native libraries and their successors
- Hugo to Gatsby
After all of that I thought, hmm maybe I should make this a SaaS. That sparked interest in business development, which I learned a ton. Did startup school 2 times, but still didn't make hardly any money.
Eventually I cut my losses and made something new, Tellspin. I did everything opposite of pushback with my new product.
- landing page first
- didn't write any code of the actual product until I had initial user interest
- chose boring tech
- stopped chasing shiny things
- spent a large portion of time doing marketing rather than building the product.
Tellspin has made way more than pushback in a third of the time. In fact, I don't think I'm even close in terms of hours spent. I'm pretty my hourly rate on pushback's is like $0.001 per hour.
With tellspin, all I did instead was focus on getting interest, talking to users, and distribution.
When a customer gave some feedback, I spent more time on the product. Then went back to marketing.
At this point, I'd say I've spent about 50% time on product, 50% on getting the word out there (blog posts, SEO, guest posts, etc)
Hopefully that's helpful to the ambitious people out there. Your product might be great, but if you focus too much on tech, no one will find out about it.
I wrote a detailed one year retrospective on tellspin's blog if there's continued interest in what I did. Nothing special really, just talking to customers and solving what problem they have.