Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

kwcodes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 206 posts

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#71

Post by zeroc8 »

prox wrote: post #60
kjksf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "just stick with it" is a good advice in general and especially not for his projects. He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal metronome and jobs website. BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5 people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of non-existing product. Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first place. With jobs websites y…

As Guy Kawasaki once said in Art of the Start : “You want to be high and on the right.” You make something everyone wants and is of great value, and only you can make it. The worst place is making something that 50 others do and is of no value to the customer.

The only problem is that pretty much anything I can do has been done a zillion times by others.

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#72

Post by cryptica »

I launched 5 major software projects over the last 15 years. The first one was a failure; the big lesson I learned from that failure was that I couldn't salvage or re-purpose any of the code; aside from educational value, all that work had been wasted. After that experience, I tried to build all my projects in such a way that I could always salvage/re-purpose my work.

My second project was a software development framework which I tried to sell it as a SaaS platform. The platform was a commercial failure but the open source framework became popular and I was able to convince the founders of a popular blockchain project to use it as part of their P2P layer.

Although that project was a technical success, because I didn't own any meaningful stake in that blockchain project, I wasn't able to capitalize on this opportunity so it was a commercial failure for me.

So then we (me and some open source community members who joined along the way) used that blockchain as a base to build a Decentralized Exchange and 2 new blockchain projects. Although these projects have not yet succeeded commercially (still working on it), I managed to secure passive income as a blockchain validator on the base blockchain. Securing this passive income was my first hint of commercial success after 10 years of trying. Anyway, it's an ongoing story but if my current 3 active projects don't succeed commercially, I have already planned for the next projects to build on top...

The goal is to just keep building stuff on top of this blockchain ecosystem, welcoming new contributors along the way and keeping everything open source.

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#73

Post by kjksf »

zeroc8 wrote: post #71
prox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Guy Kawasaki once said in Art of the Start : “You want to be high and on the right.” You make something everyone wants and is of great value, and only you can make it. The worst place is making something that 50 others do and is of no value to the customer.

The only problem is that pretty much anything I can do has been done a zillion times by others.

I doubt that's true.

I have literally hundreds of ideas.

As an experiment I put them on a website for anyone to see and "steal": https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d815...

I'm not saying those are all great, profitable ideas.

I'm saying that they are doable by a competent programmer and unique enough. Certainly not "done a zillion times by others".

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#74

Post by sokoloff »

zeroc8 wrote: post #71
prox wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Guy Kawasaki once said in Art of the Start : “You want to be high and on the right.” You make something everyone wants and is of great value, and only you can make it. The worst place is making something that 50 others do and is of no value to the customer.

The only problem is that pretty much anything I can do has been done a zillion times by others.

That might appear to be the case, but probably isn’t. There’s often not anything harder to implement a CRUD app that solves a novel problem than implementing a CRUD app that solves the same problem as 100 other people are hawking.

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#76

Post by jokethrowaway »

luto wrote: post #20
mfollert wrote: post #13

"Get a Product Job (May 2020 - May 2021) This time the main objective was to learn something new by doing. I chose Ruby on Rails. It's a great framework to build websites quickly." Choosing Roby on Rails in 2020 as a "new framework" for web development ... sheesh.

I'm not a RoR developer, but still: which framework would you use for a new web project in 2021?

node.js + express or rust + rocket

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#77

Post by askvictor »

My 5-odd side side projects over the last decade have mostly been tools I've built for myself, that I thought other people might also find useful (and a bit for developing new skills, and fun). Though I thought it might be nice to get a few dollars for ongoing work/support, but in most of my cases, the options to monetize are too complicated to bother with - in my case wanting corporate users to pay some amount, while being free for personal users. The time involved in setting this up isn't worth the likely (lack of) return.

Honestly, even listing in an app store is a pretty big barrier (bureaucracy-wise) these days for a side-project - on one project I probably spent more time jumping through these hoops than on developing a MVP.

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#78

Post by conradfr »

pytlicek wrote: post #45
herval wrote: post #15

All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again, but it’s 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there. We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands…

Absolutely agree with you, 5 users here, 5 there and you will have hundreds in 1 year, 500 after 2 years and so on... This happened to me with my side project hostbeat.info. I have started it bcs some of my friends wanted this kind of service. Then I have realized that I can do it as a multi-user SaaS. I was expecting thousands of users in the first month, still don't know why :) (perhaps I made it free of charge?) M…

So, do your friends use it? :)

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#79

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

martincmartin wrote: post #25
herval wrote: post #15

All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again, but it’s 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there. We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands…

Reminds me of "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it." by Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...

This has been my experience.

I'm working on an app that will be released in the next few months (we don't have a definite ship date, yet).

It's based on two servers that I wrote. One, I wrote eleven or twelve years ago, and has become a world standard; but only in the last three years. Since it's a specialized demographic, the numbers are quite small, for "world standard."

The other server is one that I wrote, about four years ago. It took me seven months. It's a very good general-purpose application server. I wrote it for practice, but it's also ideal for the app I'm writing.

I've been working on the frontend app for over a year. It's really, really good. I deliberately took my time, because we went through a lot of "MVP" stuff, during its development.

The rest of the team seems to think it will take the world by storm, when it's released, but I don't think it will.

That's fine with me. I don't mind a slow burn. I've written software that lasts decades.

Re: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

#80

Post by bluewalt »

StevePerkins wrote: post #68

Maybe I'm just old and cranky and this is a generational thing, but when did "side project" become mixed up with "side hustle"? I think the dead horse has been beaten already in this thread, with what the author "should have done" in terms of market research, A/B testing, MVP, etc. No need for me to pile on further there. But what strikes me is that the author really seems to draw no distinction between personal side…

That's a relevant advice IMO.

However, as a tech guy trying to build stuff too, I need continuous motivation for this. I need to stay in a "flow" state. And a good fuel to this is to learn new cool things during the journey.

To put it differently, I think you need to find the right balance between fun and efficiency, even if your goal is to earn money in the end. Trying to always look for the maximum efficiency could be a short term vision that quickly lead to boringness.

Post reply on HN