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I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

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Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#51

Post by jvanderbot »

TFA talks a bit about shiny object/library syndrome. I think there's another good reason to avoid new things: LLMs are better with old stuff.

I can sit down and essentially english-type an app together in javascript or an old version of bevy, but if I ask for new APIs it all falls apart until I have built up sufficient examples in my own code. I've tried giving documentation, etc. It's just easier to version pin something from 2022 and chug along using a less featureful but more productive assisted-coding paradigm.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#52

Post by nchmy »

webprofusion wrote: post #38

Technically they didn't put a price tag on the app, the $1 was github sponsor money, so the project was never really designed to make money. The app itself (Midi editor with piano roll UI) looks great but is instantly made much less relevant if you just install Reaper (and actual DAW, free to try, available at the time all this was developed). Cool thing, but the moral of the story is: release that toy thing you spen…

That ain't the moral of the story... It's not even the literal story that they shared

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#53

Post by indulona »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #28
indulona wrote: post #25

i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason.…

Interesting. Link?

not yet. it is nothing world-changing, just sales platform for digital content creators. something like patreon, teachable, audible...mashed together.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#54

Post by flippyhead »

This resonates with me. I've recently come out of retirement, and really gotten back into programming and product building. I've done this a few times before, but even with experience, I STILL find it hard sometimes to not just dive right in and start building. Mostly, it's because I enjoy it so much.

Now though, things are different. After a throw away project to get back into things, I realized I could very nearly just build first and find product market fit second if only because building is sooo much quicker now.

I decided that over the course of a year I was going to try building 3-6 separate projects, and assume at least one will be successful. My most recent project I realized very late that it's probably going to be very hard to ever make much money; so for now, I'm giving it away for free, just to see how people use it (https://seikai.tv).

I've not just started a new project and for sure this one is going to be a unicorn!

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#57

Post by osigurdson »

jll29 wrote: post #45
android521 wrote: post #11

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.

It is definitely hard to break the "but... I'm a professional" mindset. It is good to remember that your code isn't you. If you get PMF, just re-write everything from scratch.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#58

Post by somenameforme »

osigurdson wrote: post #57
jll29 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

It is definitely hard to break the "but... I'm a professional" mindset. It is good to remember that your code isn't you. If you get PMF, just re-write everything from scratch.

As an argument on the other side - so long as you're making enough to live comfortably enough, then there's no real need to abide the business logic though, even if you think it absolutely does maximize income in the longrun. If you spend years working on something and it turns out somehow nobody else likes it, well at least you have something that you're presumably satisfied with, and you often learn an immense amount in process.

Careers that aren't quite so commercialized regularly carry out this process. The obvious example being writers where you may spend months/years writing a book only to find out that nobody wants to publish it. Or perhaps you ultimately just don't like it. I know Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame) wrote about 75,000 words on his next novel before deciding he just didn't like it, and scrapped the entire thing.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#59

Post by AutistiCoder »

kubb wrote: post #29

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.

You could just not do a Web app.

There are plenty of apps you can build that don't require any upfront costs.

I'm working on an app that runs entirely on a consumer PC.

Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)

#60

Post by AutistiCoder »

svantana wrote: post #35
kubb wrote: post #29

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.

It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it was a side project. That's why it took so long. Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the remaining time.

How do you get freelance work?
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