How to Ship Side Projects • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#51

Post by Drdrdrq » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:06 AM UTC

blackflame7000 wrote: post #21

urs2102 wrote: post #3

I really like the idea of approaching rapid development like writing an essay or a blog the first time. Just getting all the words out on the paper goes a long way; same thing goes for programming.

I understand your mindset, but sometimes a little bit of planning upfront can save so much time in refactoring. I'm not sure code is analogous to writing save for maybe a choose your own ending type novel. An Essay is essentially a sequential flow of ideas where as a program is more like a tree. Perhaps what you are referring to is rapidly developing the nodes(classes) of that tree without concerning yourself to much…

From purely technical viewpoint that is correct and engineer in me agrees with you 100%. However: if you look at the bigger picture you will notice that the feature list is not known in advance. Which means the nice abstraction you made are probably unsuitable and will make repurposing software more difficult, not less. Because nobody knows what the end product will look like, so it pays to ship fast, iterate on product design and refactor / rewrite later.

But I know what you are saying, I have struggles with that inner engineer daily and he just won't shut up. :)

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#52

Post by flippant » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:29 AM UTC

Maybe the "tenth callback" is just a bad example, but I would emphasize not doing anything that will sap your motivation on the path to shipping. For me, that's having to deal with brittle code when I'm constantly reevaluating the requirements.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#53

Post by kchauhan » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:47 AM UTC

skbohra123 wrote: post #10

One big issue with working on side projects is that you get emotionally attached to it and sometimes it takes over your mind, more than it should. Learning to balance that would help you be at peace at slow speed of the side project, after all it's called side project for a reason.

How you manage in that case?

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#54

Post by Swizec » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:58 AM UTC

xiaoma wrote: post #48

Swizec wrote: post #7

Start with a credit card form. If nobody would pay for it, why would you invest precious time building it? You have better things to do. :)

And if everyone followed this advice, we'd have no Kahn Academy, no Wikipedia, no Linux and a much poorer world.

None of those are side projects. There's a time and place for change the world free stuff and a busy person's free time is rarely it.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#55

Post by Swizec » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

katkattac wrote: post #43

Swizec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've paid for products that were literally just a form and someone doing shit manually.

Examples? I can't really think of anything I've paid for where at least a solid prototype didn't already exist.

Why can't someone doing it manually be a solid prototype? If it provides value it's valuable no matter how it's done.

One such product I bought was https://mastermindjam.com

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#56

Post by amorphic » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

I wrote this a while back which touches on some similar points: https://jimter.net/open-source-the-journey-from-project-to-p...

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#57

Post by ezequiel-garzon » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 7:05 AM UTC

leeoniya wrote: post #46

Clubber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Building a usable, shippable, commercial grade product and actually getting people to pay you money for it is quite an ordeal. An enormous amount of attention needs to be paid to get a product nobody cares about installed, even for free. Even after the sale, you have to provide support which will run at a loss until you reach a customer threshold. The SaaS and subscription model evens out the revenue s…

This is usually why you need 2 people. Someone to build the product and someone to sell the product. There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns. It's not surprising that the presence or absence of co-founders is a strong signal to investors.

I thought the only down-to-earth meaning of unicorn was a startup with a $1B+ valuation, regardless of the number of co-founders, no? [1] Your statement "There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns." seems to indicate a restriction to one founder for unicorns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#58

Post by jcoffland » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 7:14 AM UTC

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #57

leeoniya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually why you need 2 people. Someone to build the product and someone to sell the product. There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns. It's not surprising that the presence or absence of co-founders is a strong signal to investors.

I thought the only down-to-earth meaning of unicorn was a startup with a $1B+ valuation, regardless of the number of co-founders, no? [1] Your statement "There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns." seems to indicate a restriction to one founder for unicorns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

There can be multiple species of unicorn.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#59

Post by sharmi » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 7:24 AM UTC

kalid wrote: post #18

otoburb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

InstaCalc is great! Love the natural language oriented input for calculations. Tangentially related to the article, did BetterExplained itself start out as a side project, or did you double-down from the start?

Thanks! BetterExplained started as a collection of notes on my university website: Sadly after a decade the CS department shut down my alumni account :(. But I have a cached backup here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150708043012/http://www.cs.pri... https://betterexplained.com/~kazad/ I started BetterExplained about 10 years ago exactly (wow), just taking some of the notes online. Thankfully they were on evergreen m…

Looking forward to the retrospective post! Motivation tends to be highly fluctuating. Perseverance is the key to success. Would love to hear how you maintained a decade long streak.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#60

Post by techstrategist » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 7:30 AM UTC

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #57

leeoniya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually why you need 2 people. Someone to build the product and someone to sell the product. There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns. It's not surprising that the presence or absence of co-founders is a strong signal to investors.

I thought the only down-to-earth meaning of unicorn was a startup with a $1B+ valuation, regardless of the number of co-founders, no? [1] Your statement "There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns." seems to indicate a restriction to one founder for unicorns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

No, another common use 2-3 years ago was a single person who could accomplish disparate (founder) roles, such as design + code or sales + code. "Unicorn" is still used for various types of rare events.