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Ups and downs of a side project
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#22I really appreciate reading this, i lay in bed this morning feeling all the doubts the author is experiencing. I’ve spent about 3 months on a new product, i spent all day yesterday trying to figure out how to sell it effectively. I met with sales reps i worked with in the past, wrote really thoughtful messages to prospects…No one has bitten yet. I’ve been here before, this is certainly not my first startup, but man i…
What market or niche? Is this a SaaS?
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
You made the tower yourself, no? Not to sound snarky but by making sure that (1) you do not lock yourself into any dependency and (2) you keep the use of dependencies to a minimal you do prevent most of that pain? At least that is my opinion. As a temporary workaround (sometimes permanent) I opt for a fork, which when kept to the bare minimum is usually not more then a minor annoyance. That’s at least my experience…
That's a really bad attitude. I ran into a bug in NPM that prevented our CI builds running entirely. That NPM bug still isn't fixed (despite the bug having minor security implications), but there's no way I'm re-writing everything to not use NPM, it would be absurd, nor is it sensible to fork NPM and invest time into fixing the bug. I ended up putting in effort to work around the bug entirely, but it was only coincid…
Was the same bug in yarn?
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#24I have several side projects. While I contribute to the ups and downs, the usual dagger that grinds things to a halt is hitting some bug in an open source library or language that I don't have the ability, expertise, what have you to fix. Inevitably, the library is maintained by one person who is minimally active, despite being used by tons of people, and so I just get stuck. Software is a very frustrating endeavor.…
What "stack" are you using for your personal projects that is both widely used but so poorly supported that a bug crops up that prevents you from forward progress? I am genuinely curious about this because I can say that I have never had that experience with something that is popular. Then again, I am an extreme minimalist when it comes to introducing 3rd party dependencies into the code that I write.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You made the tower yourself, no? Not to sound snarky but by making sure that (1) you do not lock yourself into any dependency and (2) you keep the use of dependencies to a minimal you do prevent most of that pain? At least that is my opinion. As a temporary workaround (sometimes permanent) I opt for a fork, which when kept to the bare minimum is usually not more then a minor annoyance. That’s at least my experience…
That's a really bad attitude. I ran into a bug in NPM that prevented our CI builds running entirely. That NPM bug still isn't fixed (despite the bug having minor security implications), but there's no way I'm re-writing everything to not use NPM, it would be absurd, nor is it sensible to fork NPM and invest time into fixing the bug. I ended up putting in effort to work around the bug entirely, but it was only coincid…
It sounds like you have informed npm about the issue? If it is a widely faced issue, chances are that the maintainers will fix the bug. On the other hand you might be using npm in a way that is rather fringe.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#26I wish there was more content like this - "making hundreds (not thousands) of $ in MRR after y years". Give a dose of realism and pinpoint the second benefit — the skillset that is truly unique and worth it. You no longer care about an isolated Jira ticket. You see a thread from vision to execution. As a dev, you start to value other parts of the company and build better bridges/interfaces between teams. As someone s…
> now in low $$$$ MRR
Does this mean low thousands?
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#27I wish there was more content like this - "making hundreds (not thousands) of $ in MRR after y years". Give a dose of realism and pinpoint the second benefit — the skillset that is truly unique and worth it. You no longer care about an isolated Jira ticket. You see a thread from vision to execution. As a dev, you start to value other parts of the company and build better bridges/interfaces between teams. As someone s…
> now in low $$$$ MRR Does this mean low thousands?
sorry, yes
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#28I'm always curious as to how side projects that are so niche and targeted acquire users. I would like to ask the author how much time and effort he has dedicated to marketing and what he learnt from it.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#29I'm always curious as to how side projects that are so niche and targeted acquire users. I would like to ask the author how much time and effort he has dedicated to marketing and what he learnt from it.
This may be the hardest part, especially for technical founders. I was able to bootstrap a profitable subscription based service. In hindsight most credit should go to my wife for getting in the first users by engaging family, social media, forum posts and what not. Another major factor were my subscribers, who write site content on a daily basis, this generated a ton of organic traffic to my site and made a big difference vs having to write a couple of static SEO optimized pages and hope for the best. Writing the actual code was probably the least important part (but the most fun for sure)
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#30It's not mentioned here but one of the biggest mistake experienced hires make on side projects is throwing out all the project planning that would normally be done if it was anyone else's project. Honestly, if you can't draw a stick 'n' box flow of what you'll build, you are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely to build it.