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But I have a decent half-baked AI based investment portfolio manager, one month of hard work (nights/weekends) dreaming of selling it for a bank. Projects of such complexity are impossible for people stuck in the ordinary life (job/family). PS: I'm not complaining - I love my family. But it demands energy.
I'll say as long as you’re not repeating the same mistakes and each project teaches you something, you’re getting closer to the exit of the maze.
Honestly I doubt this. You can learn endlessly and never get any closer to succeeding in something. It’s like the developer equivalent of people who keep reading business books and case studies and going to network events because they want to start a business. After 1 or 2 failed side projects, you should have learned roughly 80% of what you need to know. A few more might get you the next 20%, but 17 failed projects…
I'm also have a decent graveyard of domains. I've all but accepted that I'll never create anything of value in my life or even anything awesome.
But the dark side of that is now there's no point to being alive, so I'm planning to die. What are these better opportunities you referenced? Anything that will make a life of mediocrity bearable?
I’ve done the same , bought many domain names, got super hyped, coded for a few nights… then lost interest. Now I’ve got a bunch of random projects that never saw the light of day.
But honestly, I learned a lot from each one. Even if they didn’t go anywhere, I got better at building stuff. And who knows, maybe one of them will work out someday.
Glad I’m not the only one doing this.
Man I built an app a while back called Kanji Plus. The idea was to build a small side project to generate an income, then use that to fund my magnum opus, Phrasing [1] I built the prototype in a weekend. I spent the next 8 months turning it into a product people cared about. As soon as people started using it, I realized I was going to spend the next 10 years beating around the bush on a product with a very low ceili…
I would not subscribe to your new app that is not yet finished when you have a previous product that was cancelled without fanfare.
Check back in 10 years though, Phrasing will still be running, and it will have had all the features of kanji plus for 9 years and then some :-)
Vibe coding actually helped me get a few projects out of the door finally! But even now I can't resist the urge to buy a domain when I get an idea for a new side project.
And, I bought my last domain less than 10-days back. Built a landing but left it to research further and talk to customers. :-)
This feels way too real. I’ve done the same , bought many domain names, got super hyped, coded for a few nights… then lost interest. Now I’ve got a bunch of random projects that never saw the light of day. But honestly, I learned a lot from each one. Even if they didn’t go anywhere, I got better at building stuff. And who knows, maybe one of them will work out someday. Glad I’m not the only one doing this.
> I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again. At least you're actually doing the "I code for 3 all-nighters" step! I've stopped too many projects at the "I buy a domain name" stage, and added an intermediate "I create a Trello board" step between that and starting to write code. No need to pull all-nighters, which are hard to do with family and a full-time job, if all I need to…
i have lots of ideas for fun little side projects that would never be revenue generating.
i'll go on a tear and start building it, but when it comes time to figure out how much it'd cost each month for domains/cloud services/etc I talk myself out of it. I'm not talking about big LLM bills here, just things like $25/month for the database, $10-50/year for a domain, etc.
I don't think it's just that I'm being cheap, it's that I don't like the idea of having to pay for something in perpetuity. Because that leads to me thinking about how long I plan to keep it active and when I'll sunset it. And once you start thinking about that before you've even launched, it's pretty easy to conclude it's not worth the time to build it given its limited shelf life. If I could just do a one-time upfront payment I'd probably go through with it.
The solutions to this are either buying a server and self-hosting (no thanks) OR making peace with having a recurring 'goofy computer stuff' monthly bill.
So... how much do yall spend each month on your side-projects? Having some numbers would help me contextualize and justify this