5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

I've been on a similar trajectory.

I like to hear about other people's failure. For one, it makes me less critical of my own failures. Then I can also learn and improve for the future.

I have two Android apps. Neither bring in money. One I intentionally did not monetize. The other I tried to. I targeted the wrong audience and my UI could have been more flashy.

I've had ideas for other projects, but they're usually already patented or they're too niche to really make money (involves some hardware).

What seems lacking in the choice of projects is a particular expertise in any of these subjects. Pick an area of study, try and narrow it as much as possible, stick with it over several years, and seek to become the world's expert on that very narrow topic (which is hopefully useful). Then you will understand what needs to be built.

Good for you man. I don’t really see much about customer pain points though.

If people aren’t in pain they aren’t going to buy / use your stuff.

Take the product job board. At first I thought it was product manager jobs, but doesn’t that already exist? Then after seeing accounts payable and other stuff I realized you meant tech, which also exists already. So why would people use yours?

Your startup HAS to solve something better than existing solutions. For example -Uber was a taxi, but cheaper and much better -Facebook was MySpace but geared toward your in person friends / clean interface. Turns out people preferred not having to customize their page -TikTok was vine but done way better. Its learning algorithm is unbelievable, it leans into Adding music which makes everything more fun, etc. it’s a markedly better way for people to express themselves

The one project you build for yourself, the metronome, already had a solution you discovered after you started building

So I’d really spend some time on the problem first. Read the lean startup. Talk to customers. And figure out if a project is actually a smart bet. Your product has to be markedly better for some group of customers - if it’s just a little better, people aren’t going to switch

I find this kind of post very interesting. The key takeaways from my point of view is that none of these projects actually created value. Most of them didn’t solve a problem that other software hadn’t already solved. The most interesting one I think was the appartment notitication one. Especially that today there is such a race if you want to find a good and affordable appartment. It’s just too bad the author wasn’t able to create something simple for this. At the end of the day, you have to try 10 ideas to get one off the ground. But you also have to give them a serious shot, which doesn’t seem to have been the case here. You often will have to invest actual money to get your idea out there and popular. Unless it’s a one in a million that will go viral on its own.