Minimal metronome and minimal time tracker are close to useless, because the market is so saturated, and there are tons of free options.
You need to start with validating your idea instead of wasting days/months on coding.
5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#32Carlsborg's law: Distribution is as important as product, especially when the barriers to entry are low.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#33And you know what's worst than earning $0?
- The store not accepting your app because there are too many of the same topic (horoscopes, memes, sound boards, whatever-craft names, etc.)
- Spending lots of money on Google/FB ads.
- Spending lots of money on AWS.
- Burning out yourself and your friends.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#34I'm one of the folks who took part in The Quittening that the last year has made for us. I left a demanding, unfulfilling startup job in July. The main factors in why I was able to do this was:
* a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean FIRE".)
* being married to someone who had the understanding to support me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)
I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.
Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service. That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances. (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)
I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope! Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some combination of:
* lucky,
* very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or
* blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility that doesn't exist yet.
OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try. It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times, and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#35"Success Is Going From Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm"
Lincoln
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#36For every remoteok.io which is a single PHP file and makes $100k a month, there are 1000 of failed job boards. I suppose this is the reality.
There it simply becomes a marketing project not a software project.
It's true, but developers don't like to hear that because we like writing code not marketing shit.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#37All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again, but it’s 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there. We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands…
So much this sentiment. I ask people I mentor "why do you measure yourself in dollars?" and they often respond with something like "all the successful people I admire are rich." or something along those lines.
Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator.
Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#38All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again, but it’s 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there. We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands…
I don't think "just stick with it" is a good advice in general and especially not for his projects.
He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal metronome and jobs website.
BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5 people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of non-existing product.
Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first place.
With jobs websites you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites.
Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for.
They are also extremely competitive.
The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing.
There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid.
High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#39Minimal metronome and minimal time tracker are close to useless, because the market is so saturated, and there are tons of free options. You need to start with validating your idea instead of wasting days/months on coding.
Also, I think we need to stop rewarding 'minimal' products. Like you said, there's no room for minimal time tracking, but there's definitely room for more high quality, feature-dense time tracking tools.
Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
#40People pay for services because it's work that they are unable or unwilling to do themselves
Building things that people will not pay for is called a hobby.
You're not entited to an income from your hobbies.
> This is a story about me dreaming
Yup
> 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 (kwcodes.com)
You didn't even try to finish 2 of the 5 projects You didn't even do anything in 2 of the 6 years.
Your title is clickbait. Seems like you want attention more than you want money.
By comparison, looking at my github, I started over 50 projects in last year and finished a dozen of them. Hobbies all of them and I didn't expect to make a dime. If you want a reality check, head over to https://itch.io/jams. You'll find 10,000 hobbies projects not making any money.