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How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.
How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.
- this is very likely a side project. Conclusion made by the fact that the author was writing, re-writing and re-writing again the project because of a new 'cool framework' that came out. They were taking their time to do that and doing it repeatedly for years. Proving that releasing the project was not their first concern, nor making money out of it judging from the fact this was not designed to make money but merely having a github sponsor button. Author's main concern seems to having been to just have with it and learning was likely a bigger factor.
- it didn't need funding to startup, as it seems like the only costs were the operating costs which were likely just a server on vercel
Also, to answer your question more thoroughly
- usually people that make projects like these have a main job, which funds in one way or another their side-projects.
- A million $ is a very unusually big capital. Side projects are very unlikely to need such big amount of funding just to start-up. People just throw a small capital if needed at all, and if the project self-funds itself, maybe they'll throw the money back.
Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch a…
Thanks for posting this insight, because a typical engineer, if they are worth their money, does not like the idea to launch something "unfinished" or "half-baked" or even "not yet perfect", but the business logic behind the MVP (minimal viable product) is clearly correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you also tell them about “server side rendering” capabilities of PHP?
I remember this uncanny feeling when I started reading about a new thing in JS frameworks called "file based routing", coming from PHP it was, wait, didn't we just come from this to proper routing, and now this is a feature again.
Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch a…
+1 Thanks for posting this insight, because a typical engineer, if they are worth their money, does not like the idea to launch something "unfinished" or "half-baked" or even "not yet perfect", but the business logic behind the MVP (minimal viable product) is clearly correct.
I think a typical engineer is more likely to want to evolve towards mature software in small steps. In my experience the "complete it, then release it with a big splash" approach is more likely to come from marketing. "We moved the CTA up the page a bit" isn't the stuff of press releases.
On the other hand, this no doubt will let you learn a lot of useful things along the way and possibly make you a better developer, or at least give you an idea of which technologies are nice or easy to use, or suited for certain problems.
It's nice to have that sort of separation between the categories of what you aim to do - to study or to try and ship something, because without you see a lot of cases (especially in indie game development, for some reason) where people feel disappointed due to not shipping anything in the end. There's nothing wrong with unfinished projects that let you learn, or shipping sub-optimal code to get it out of the door and start generating value.
Good job, though!
I spent eight years and I'm around -$150,000 for my main webapp so you're ahead of the curve!
Same here but I learned so much I think it was worth it, im literally 4y+ in. I made a platform for my own personal website: https://arionhardison.com then Ai education: https://pub.education then Ai healthcare: https://codify.healthcare I used to think my goal was to do this and that and change the world etc... I am starting to think that I just like building things and maybe thats OK.
I appreciate the grind though