41–50 of 272 posts
I got a question for everyone reading. How to even decide what side project to work on? Should I keep all ideas in a spreadsheet and then choose one, or make a grading system for ideas?
It doesn't matter if one idea could be the next big thing if you aren't motivated to complete it and make it well. You'll execute better on the ideas you are interested in.
That said, I've got manufacturing and fulfillment mostly outsourced, so my day-to-day is really marketing emails, managing FB ad spend and sending product to the warehouse when I run low on inventory. Given that, it's looking like this is going to get relegated back to a side project while I find myself a real job.
While I'd obviously prefer to be making a boatload of cash, it has been really enjoyable so far, and I have learned a ton. The most painful thing has been Apple's privacy changes - before those, I was running FB ads that were effective enough to be immediately profitable from customers' first purchases. Now the cost of acquiring a customer is greater than the profit I make on the first purchase but less than the lifetime profit I make from a customer, so I can still do it profitably but it requires investing cash up front.
I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value. We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I…
This sounds more like an algorithm to maximize your benefit from the $15k you spent. As opposed to a "money making business". (Still very cool though).
The way I think of it is more of taking advantage of an arbitrage (~20% discount on season tickets to face value). Instead of selling all the tickets to earn ~$2k each year, we kept and used the tickets to our benefit.
But still makes a decent passive income.
After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…
My dad has Parkinson's and I can relate. My take is: people feel bad for you but society doesn't have canned responses like we do for more common situations like the death of a loved one. This makes people uncomfortable since they don't know what's an appropriate reaction.
Please don't get discouraged though, I didn't even know this existed! The amount of people that will benefit from you bringing this up is >0.
My dad's not interested anymore in computers (more about the cognitive overload than the hand tremors) but this would've helped enormously during the early stages.
After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…
If you don’t mind me asking, what do you find hard to talk about?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're a SaaS basically?
Spreadsheet as a Subscription?
I staked $15k, bought season tickets for my favourite baseball team, wrote an electron app to auto-price and market those tickets under face value. We ended up going to 6-7 games for free, sat in MUCH better seats than we ever could have afforded to, and had access to playoff tickets at face value. Further, my friends had access to great seats at reasonable prices and I avoided having to buy from resale sites (who I…
After my grandfather got Parkinson’s disease circa 2005, I developed hand tremor cancelling software for the mouse [1]. It has gone through a lot of development since then; it is my best work as a developer. It suffers from the common flaw us engineers have of hyperfocus on the product while not caring about marketing enough. It makes enough. I have a hard time talking about it in everyday life for some reason. It fe…
I once experimented with a tremor-compensating extension and some css that hid the “natural” cursor and overlaid a cursor image instead whose position I controlled (using a basic rolling window average to make it steady). This basic test seemed to hold up.
That could potentially open up a whole new market for you…? Just curious if you’ve considered this. Don’t hesitate to reach out by email too if this sounds interesting!
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictation-for-gmai...