Side projects don't die from lack of time. They die from success anxiety. Shipping means facing judgment. An eternal WIP stays safe in the "potential" zone where it can't disappoint anyone including yourself
The Sideprocalypse
81–90 of 132 posts
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#82You can only change the rules, you can never stop The Game™. Now, more than ever before, it's faster and easier to create something and deliver its perceived value at scale. Nerds used to rule the roost of tech because they were willing to invest the time and toil in obscurity. Now that's no longer the case. The only skill you need to have now is sales and showmanship. A chatbot can do the rest.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
A cloud-based RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feedly, Inoreader...).
Nobody uses RSS… I thought you were going to say salesforce or something.
Wat. RSS is back!
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would distinguish your cloud-based RSS reader from the many other cloud-based RSS readers, both self-hosted as well as the others?
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first…
Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”.
Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me
so, uh. What's your secret, then?
He's not telling
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first…
Tough market. What’s your differentiator over Readwise? They are crushing it on the “power user feed reader”. Best of luck though, I think this is a very promising space. (But my bet is you can do all the interesting stuff in vibe-coded thin UI + OSS pipeline.)
> What’s your differentiator over Readwise?
Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.
> thin UI + OSS pipeline
No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#87Re: The Sideprocalypse
#88> Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. When you write operational critical code, it matters. No one can blame “the AI made me do it” when things go down and hundreds of thousands of people are without service. When your code can hurt people, it matters. You can’t burn someone’s eye with a laser then point to some AI agent when lawsuits start flying in. When millions of dollars in production data is los…
I just sat on an enterprise onboarding call where their success engineer did in fact blame the AI and the client said "OK"
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a univers…
> This isn't directly relevant to your point Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly. Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to rea…
Your point came through clearly to me. Shared tropes or setting do not make identical stories and, in fact, often enhance them as a counterbalance or familiar thing to compare against.
A wise friend of mine once said, in regard to "ideas are nothing; execution is everything": you can tell a thousand artists to paint a portrait of an Italian woman with a countryside landscape behind her but, good or bad, none of them are the mona lisa.
Re: The Sideprocalypse
#90I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items. Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.
What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?
airtite.shop
Stuff for old men like me