How to Ship Side Projects • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#101

Post by epynonymous » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

brechtm wrote: post #70

epynonymous wrote: post #41

i think reid hoffman's quote (linkedin founder) sums it up best, "if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've launched too late." i have seen many posts about mvp and narrowing scope here--all right on the money. some other things that have worked for me, i'm the world's biggest procrastinator and i have literally 20-30 side projects that i've started for some time, was extremely pass…

But what's an MVP? That's very subjective. I'm working on a DITA (to PDF) renderer [1] based on rinohtype [2]. About a year ago I was in a startup coaching project. I was advised to put out an MVP ASAP. Since then, I've worked full-time on the project and only now I'm releasing what I believe is an MVP. One year ago, my product was functional, but it didn't allow easily styling the output PDF. I believe this is the f…

no doubt, you raise an excellent point--mvp is somewhat vague, hard to quantify, and there's no universal answer so unfortunately the answer is it depends on the idea/product/lifecycle. chances are if you're still trying to get a feel for a market, this could be an entirely new market, one that doesn't quite exist, or an existing one with incumbents, like airbnb as an example, an mvp could be like a simple mobile app with login (not even oauth based for facebook/twitter/google), listings, a way to book, and bill. don't implement user feedback on listings where they've stayed, don't implement icons for users, forgotten password is an email to support, etc, i'm sure you could find a million things that are needed, but what are the essentials for getting people to use your app satisfying some specific needs (crashing at a complete stranger's place). each feature doesn't really need all the bells and whistles, enough to get people to start using the basics. your assumptions and hypotheses about how the market would leverage this tool could be entirely off, so you might need to change direction (pivot more or less) and you'd need to get to this conclusion asap, sooner rather than later, etc. if you spent a year coding something you think would be perfect for a market you are defining or discovering, this could be a large waste of time, so fail fast as they say.

in your case, you seem to be quite clear about what you need, what the competitors have and don't have. but let me play devil's advocate because i don't know how much effort "[rendering] tables" would take or how much you've put in the past year, but let's just say you could put something out there in 6 months time as opposed to 12 months time, it probably will have some table rendering, not 100%, but do you think that would be advantageous or not?

thanks for the footnotes, much appreciated and good luck with your app!

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#102

Post by monksy » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 3:47 PM UTC

garysieling wrote: post #39

To add another shameless plug, I built a search engine for lectures ( https://www.findlectures.com ). A great thing about this is that there is no point where it's "done", as long as it has enough content to be useful. As I get more data, it unlocks tons of opportunities for mini-projects. Writing a blog has been a good side-project for the same reason.

That's pretty cool. I would love to see the JVMLS or JavaOne videos to be listed there.

J1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdDhYMT2USoLdh4SZIsu_1g

JVMLS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUY6rQAQTwI...

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#103

Post by epynonymous » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #79

epynonymous wrote: post #41

i think reid hoffman's quote (linkedin founder) sums it up best, "if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've launched too late." i have seen many posts about mvp and narrowing scope here--all right on the money. some other things that have worked for me, i'm the world's biggest procrastinator and i have literally 20-30 side projects that i've started for some time, was extremely pass…

>> "if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've launched too late." Carmack said it as well: Michael Abrash and I once had a discussion kind of justifying ourselves. We said, "Well, if we shipped on time, we probably weren't ambitious enough."

nice. is this the john carmack of doom/quake/duke?

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#104

Post by netrap » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

I just want to say it is OK to give up from time to time. I had a serious side project I worked on for 2 years. Sometimes you need to cut your losses. I was able to use a product that cost me $100, though it doesn't work exactly as I want, it does the job. So just ask yourself, is this worth it?

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#105

Post by garysieling » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

monksy wrote: post #102

garysieling wrote: post #39

To add another shameless plug, I built a search engine for lectures ( https://www.findlectures.com ). A great thing about this is that there is no point where it's "done", as long as it has enough content to be useful. As I get more data, it unlocks tons of opportunities for mini-projects. Writing a blog has been a good side-project for the same reason.

That's pretty cool. I would love to see the JVMLS or JavaOne videos to be listed there. J1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdDhYMT2USoLdh4SZIsu_1g JVMLS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUY6rQAQTwI...

Thanks! I'll add these to the list.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#106

Post by kalid » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 8:39 PM UTC

wingerlang wrote: post #69

kalid wrote: post #12

Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today ( https://instacalc.com ). The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).

Does it have an API? I'd like to plug it into Alfred.

No API yet but that's a great suggestion, thanks.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#107

Post by kalid » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

brechtm wrote: post #67

kalid wrote: post #12

Shameless plug, I just launched an overhaul to a side project today ( https://instacalc.com ). The biggest impetus was having a friend using the old version who pinged me with some feature requests. It reminded me that the service can help people I know directly and gave me a huge boost of motivation. If friends and family are using it, you'll want to help them out :).

Doesn't seem to work on Safari (9.1.3 on macOS).

Ack, I've seen rendering issues on certain browsers. Thanks for the version number, it's really helpful for debugging.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#108

Post by SonicSoul » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

Tarlen wrote: post #89

SonicSoul wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey your product looks good! any way you could share some info on how long first version took and if you made any money with it (or how long it took to start making money etc)? I find these side project cases very inspirational. for example my friends brother created http://www.mailaletter.com/ and its always great to talk to him about it. (it was not making him much for the first year or so, but then it kind of expl…

If I remember correctly, I pushed the barebones chat plugin out (it was embarrassingly bad at this point) after 1-2 months of development. At that point I was also working part-time and finishing my CS degree, so the amount of time I had to work on it was limited. Somehow I still managed to convince a few people to use it though

so you charged right away ?

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#109

Post by rogerdpack » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 10:35 PM UTC

midhir wrote: post #99

I find aggressive scope-cutting to be one of the most compelling things about building side projects. I'm shopping for computer parts at the minute so built a quick app to scan UK shop deals, threw it up at a subdomain of my personal site (plug: http://slackfriday.jhope.ie ) and let it go. Over cyber monday and later it got loads of traffic and watching a stupidly simple app do it's job was thrilling and liberating.…

how did it get loads of traffic, from where?

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#110

Post by rogerdpack » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 10:36 PM UTC

I like it, except for the part about "refactor later" in my mind the best way is refactor "first" so that adding your feature is "easy"...though I don't always follow my own advice with hobby projects LOL. Don't let technical debt subsume you, though, fight back eventually.