Earlier quoted context omitted.
> now in low $$$$ MRR Does this mean low thousands?
sorry, yes
Feel free to drop a link. This is HN!
Ups and downs of a side project
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#32I 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 are you working on if you don't mind me asking?
It's a tool (focused on the Toronto market only for now) that provides detailed reports on the history of a building / area for realtors and/or buyers (and i guess maybe renters or self sellers).
Trying to bring together a lot of open data sources such a building permit history for the property in question and the neighbours, nearby proposed development activity, schools, hospital, police, fire service locations, lead pipe replacement status, legality of any on premise parking etc. Essentially all the "due diligence" related items that come up when you're trying to transact and typically take a fair while to get to the bottom of. A report takes about 1 minute to pull, planning to have the service be a yearly subscription for the customer of around $300/year
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#33I 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?
Real estate and yep SaaS, although I kind of want to offer a pay per use model along side it. Just feels complicated to do both, i'm personally a little exhausted by the number of subscriptions in my life.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry, yes
Feel free to drop a link. This is HN!
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#35The article touches on organizing code which has an interesting aside for me.
When I work on side projects, I certainly encounter periods of boredom or disengagement. What can help is to say something like "you know what... I am just going to rewrite this and make it much cleaner". Only feature parity. Not trying to force anything new or trick myself into solving a hard problem right now.
Sometimes this simple cleanup pass will turn into several hours of deep exploration and development. Sometimes not.
I think of this similar to intense physical exercise. No one in their right mind goes to the gym and deadlifts their 1 rep max without at least a tiny amount of warmup beforehand.
If you are on this path and trying to build a real thing that people might actually want to pay for (or is at least compelling enough to work on for free), you are dealing with a similar mental barrier. Warm yourself up on smaller, more approachable tasks if you are finding trouble with motivation. Rerun a successful prototype from last year to remember why you are still doing all of this in the first place.
Also, if you aren't using source control for your side projects, you really need to get into the rythym. Every personal project I have worked on since ~2017 has a repository tracking it in Github. It takes me 10 seconds to find that clever chunk of code from a few years ago using their global search feature. Little tricks like this keep me from spiraling into distracted nothingness. If I had to manually browse through folders in my filesystem or dropbox, I'd never touch this stuff again.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#36I know from lots of past experiences that I have about 6 weeks of attention before something else shows up and gets me excited. All my side projects get scoped to 6 weeks or I don’t do them.
This is my experience as well. Though, whenever I care about documentation and stuff like that, I'm usually able to return after half a year and can continue.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#37I appreciate many of the comments here. I don’t feel alone.
I’ve been working on something for a couple years (off and on) and some days/weeks/months my motivation takes a nose dive to the point where I stop work completely. Eventually I get back into it but one of these days, I might drop it completely.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#38I wonder how the operational burden for a side project is.
One of my key worries is that if I sell my side project to real users, I have to patch it, I have to monitor it, I have to answer support messages and fix it if it breaks for whatever reason.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#39I've found perhaps the biggest obstacle to working on my side project is something like lacking vision. If I have an idea, it's never hard to implement. Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't but at least shit gets done. The larger the project has gotten, the more planning it needs, and that's I've historically struggled with. Sometimes I don't quite know what to do next, so I sort of fuss with the code and don't rea…
> My project naturally has 2 month "iterations" because that's how often I do a new crawl and load crawl data
I have a similar project type and timeline, and going through one of these iterations now. Could you share how you persist your data in between iterations?
For mine, these were some of the bigger iterations that were spaced out over several months:
1. I started out by writing raw http API responses to python pickle files. Scraping via api.
2. Then wrote some analysis logic in python that read the pickle files, and outputted to a csv that I could use for analysis in spreadsheets.
3. Scaled up to a couple orders of magnitude more data size, and multiple datasets. Added logic to bulk output any dataset to flattened CSV, then bulk import the CSV's to sqlite tables.
For each of those I had to rethink the code, simplify it, and make some parts generic where there was a common need.
I think my next big push will be loading new data to SQLite incrementally, and figuring out how and where to persist the SQLite data cheaply. Right now it's local but too big to check into a GitHub repo.
Re: Ups and downs of a side project
#40The article touches on organizing code which has an interesting aside for me. When I work on side projects, I certainly encounter periods of boredom or disengagement. What can help is to say something like "you know what... I am just going to rewrite this and make it much cleaner". Only feature parity. Not trying to force anything new or trick myself into solving a hard problem right now. Sometimes this simple cleanu…
I feel this too, and I've learned to accept that this is just the way my brain works. Once I've lost my motivation for a certain project there's really no point trying to force it back, and besides, this isn't such a bad thing. The whole point of a side project is that I can work on what I want, even if that means doing something new every 4-6 weeks.
I create a "project" in my to-do list app for each side project, and dump every little idea I have in there while I'm excited and switched on about the idea. When my motivation ebbs and eventually returns (months or years later), I have a low-friction starting point to jump back in, which makes all the difference.
Jumping into a months-old codebase _and_ having to figure out what to build next usually means I feel a bit discouraged and never really get back to that project.