I've had a rather uncreative year, and I'd love some inspiration going into 2020. Please share your side projects/businesses/hobbies, ideally with links and traction numbers. :-) Have a lovely new year!
Tagmap (https://tagmap.io/) - allows communities to have a map of their members and easily message people nearby or similar to you to make new friends. Currently have a few thousand MAU, hoping to pick this up significantly in 2020.
Looked around and clicked the tag that had a few thousand users (because everything else was a hundred or less) and the few near me were bizarre NSFW shock value profiles. Is that normal for this?
There's been a few malicious users here and there and some interesting communities, we usually remove them pretty quickly, especially when they're reported. I'll do a check right now and try to remove whatever it was you stumbled across, thanks!
We're also working on a more robust system to filter content that some users might not want to see, although anything extreme should be removed either way.
It could also be the community. For example, I don't know what "r9k" means but it's far and away the one with the most users. Considering the number of 4chan related tags I saw maybe it's something unsavory.
Thanks! It's difficult to get the product to be right for so many varying types of use cases and communities, but hopefully we'll get a lot of traction either way.
I built a new web application front-end to an old warehouse inventory tracking and catalog management system for a very large corporation everyone is familiar with. But thanks to the contracting arrangement, I can't talk about it. Makes it tough to attract new clients.
Construpdate (http://construpdate.com/): Project management synchronization for construction teams.
Project managers import a project schedule from Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project via Excel. Each contractor gets a personalized link where they can submit daily updates on the status of their tasks. All changes are tracked for auditing purposes.
It's a work in progress, comments and suggestions are welcome!
Blook (https://blook.io): Helping US and Foreign entrepreneurs register their company in the US as an LLC or C-Corp. Go-live will be on the first :) Particularly looking to work with the latin america market.
Looks great. Wish you all the best for the go live. We are in the same business. I do this for Germany with firma.de. Trying my best to increase the amount of entrepreneurs here.
If you ever want to talk about bundling other service offerings into the company formation offering let me know. We had our fair share of learnings there :)
Totally! Building a community has helped me to know what customers wanted.
How I did it:
- Started a small Facebook group, added friends
- Started connecting on FB with productized service entrepreneurs, added them to the group
- Mentioned the group in various places (Twitter/Indie Hackers/...)
Interesting, thanks for the info! Did you create a separate account for your product, or did you just use your personal account? What sort of information do you post to the group? Thanks again!
Adopt Animals (https://www.adoptanimals.io/) - a charitable passion project for free, independent, and ad/tracking-free animal rehoming listings in the UK.
We're partnering with one shelter in Edinburgh (Scotland) to start, and built the website and a pair of apps to showcase animal listings. We've had a few success stories of people finding pets already, which is really motivating!
If you know of a shelter in the UK who might want their listings on there (ideally they'll have a means of exporting them and we'll build an importer), let them know to get in touch with us :)
For interest, we also just submitted our annual report to our regulator, if you'd like to read about the first year of our parent charity https://www.kale.charity/reports
There are currently 3 trustees of the charity, including myself, and no employees. It’s illegal for trustees to be compensated for work relating to the charity. We’re careful to pick problems (and solutions) that we can make and maintain.
I focus on the engineering, my partner focuses on anything design related, and our third trustee manages finances.
We do it because we’re passionate about it, and the legal structure gives us a lot of weight and ability to negotiate reduced rates with services we depend on. It also sets us up to pay other developers, if/when we decide there’s too much for us to do as a team. Folks might want to donate their time as well, but we will need to be mindful of properly compensating people for their time.
I recoded my HTML5 canvas Javascript library from scratch. Partly to add fun stuff like modules, web workers, promises etc - but mainly because I'm determined to make the canvas element much more accessible (and easier to add analytics to, etc) - progress report here: http://scrawl-v8-progress-0919.rikworks.co.uk/
Question: traction numbers? If this is "how many people are using my side project", I'm fairly sure the answer is "nobody" - which has the bonus that I don't need to worry about supporting backwards compatibility.
I rewrote my social, score-tracking app for Pinball in react-native. Previously it was in Angularjs (ionic/cordova). Has ~6k registered users, ~300 daily active users, and earns ~$200 a month on Patreon.
I am a classical musician, programming for fun. I found guile scheme about 2 years ago, and I have been writing all my software in it since. Such a nice language to be working in!
I wrote a SRFI (scheme request for implementation) for transducers, which are efficient composable algorithmic transformations. They allow you to eagerly transform collections, say like using map and filter, but without building intermediate collections. The SRFI document is here: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-171/srfi-171.html
They are zero cost (apart from negligible macro expansion) and provide a homogenous way to iterate through various collections. I am now in the process of implementing foldr for it, which will allow for a general way of writing lazy iterations.
In this initial version, theres photo sharing. But yes, planning to integrate messaging system as well.
I take photos and record videos on my phone. All my friends and family too. I used to share them on different media sharing platforms. Used to have a meaningful discussion/conversation on the shared content with the people I know.
Things changed and got worse. I hated infinite scrolling and public feed which I still do. I never really liked the idea of "liking/hearting" - rarely "liked" stuff. Also, these days it's all about influencers and things get lost in the feed.
Keeping all this in mind, inspired by good aspects of the existing platforms and really based on what I needed, I decided to build Storry.
The biggest thing I have built this year is Hexadecimal (https://tryhexadecimal.com). It is my first SaaS business, so it is a pretty rough endeavor, both on the development and the business side. Built on the vanilla Rails stack. As boring as it could possibly get. I have described in some detail the tech behind it: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/9-running-a-websi...
Lessons learned:
* If you'd like to start making money on the Internets, don't start with a SaaS
* Making your first $currency will give you a (much needed) morale boost
* If you're just starting out and you're in for the long-term, optimize for learning and building relationships
* Worthwile Things take time
* You probably won't get it right from the first time (whatever it is). It is far more important to keep iterating rather than getting the right answers from the very beginning.
* Most minor decisions won't matter in a few months', let alone in a few years' time. Don't overthink it. Make a fast decision and if necessary, re-evaluate it down the road
* Don't rush to automate tasks
* Build it, and they will do absolutely nothing
* Businesses live and die by their distribution channels
* Running a lean operation (i.e. low-cost) is a competitive advantage
* Having an audience is an unfair advantage
* Writing is a gift that keeps giving. Write more!
* The true validation is people paying you money
After many months (or years?) of procrastinating, I finally published my personal website (https://jmstfv.com). I have been meaning to do this for a long time but kept putting it off for various (artificial) reasons. So, I hand wrote the HTML, copy pasted the CSS from my other projects, and called it a day.
Lesson learned: start with the least painful solution.
This is cool. I'm curious about what your main marketing channels are. There is another project this reminds me of another project called Simple Analytics.
This is really well done. FYI, in Firefox on macOS, the search box doesn't seem to do anything for me. I don't see any outputs or requests in the JS console or network tab.
I released ModularPro, a tool for the Unity game engine to massively improve the process of assembling modular assets during level design. It started as a side project and I ended up releasing it in the Unity store. Would be great to get some feedback from anyone who actually does level design for a living to see if they think it would be useful for them.
I built out my idea for a VR urban planning tool earlier this year & more recently I built a network based music recommendation system as part of a hackathon project. I’m still in school but hackathons really help keep my creativity flowing!
* Making money with affiliate models in this space can be hard if you don't already have a big existing audience (ie. from a Youtube channel) - wrote a bit about it here
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadTalkative (meettalkative.com) - The easier way to interview your users
Referlist (referlist.co) - Increase sign-ups via Robinhood-style referrals
Verbly (https://verbly.3digit.dev/) -- Simple app for practicing Italian verb conjugations in various ways
Sw/Sh Pokedex (https://dex.3digit.dev/) -- Easy little app for type matchup information and party-planning for the new Pokemon Sword/Shield
We're also working on a more robust system to filter content that some users might not want to see, although anything extreme should be removed either way.
I made some enhancements in 2019 to my Hacker News reader (https://webbindustries.com/hackernews), but who hasn't made one of those.
Elm Resources (https://wolfadex.github.io/elm-resources) - opinionated list of tutorials and tools for Elm
elm-license-finder (https://github.com/wolfadex/elm-license-finder) - tool for listing elm dependencies
elm-text-adventure (https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/wolfadex/elm-text-adve...) - package for building text adventures in Elm
Grove (https://github.com/wolfadex/grove) - WIP GUI tool for management of Elm projects
Slime Buddy (https://slime-buddy.netlify.com) - A little slime pal that you can take care of (re-wrote it from JS to Elm)
And I have 2 other projects that aren't quite ready to show. Maybe I'll have something for 1 of them before the 1st?
Project managers import a project schedule from Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project via Excel. Each contractor gets a personalized link where they can submit daily updates on the status of their tasks. All changes are tracked for auditing purposes.
It's a work in progress, comments and suggestions are welcome!
If you ever want to talk about bundling other service offerings into the company formation offering let me know. We had our fair share of learnings there :)
- A SaaS for productized services (https://www.manyrequests.com)
- I wrote a book (in 24 hours) on productized services: (http://www.productizebook.co)
- I also grew a FB group (Productized Startups) to 1950+ members on the topic of productized services.
My goal for 2020 for my SaaS is to hit 150 customers or $10k/month in monthly recurring revenue.
To achieve that goal I plan to:
- Improve the UI of the SaaS in Q1 and Q2
- Release one piece of content per day
- Grow my community of productized startups founders to 4k members
How I did it: - Started a small Facebook group, added friends - Started connecting on FB with productized service entrepreneurs, added them to the group - Mentioned the group in various places (Twitter/Indie Hackers/...)
We're partnering with one shelter in Edinburgh (Scotland) to start, and built the website and a pair of apps to showcase animal listings. We've had a few success stories of people finding pets already, which is really motivating!
If you know of a shelter in the UK who might want their listings on there (ideally they'll have a means of exporting them and we'll build an importer), let them know to get in touch with us :)
For interest, we also just submitted our annual report to our regulator, if you'd like to read about the first year of our parent charity https://www.kale.charity/reports
I focus on the engineering, my partner focuses on anything design related, and our third trustee manages finances.
We do it because we’re passionate about it, and the legal structure gives us a lot of weight and ability to negotiate reduced rates with services we depend on. It also sets us up to pay other developers, if/when we decide there’s too much for us to do as a team. Folks might want to donate their time as well, but we will need to be mindful of properly compensating people for their time.
Question: traction numbers? If this is "how many people are using my side project", I'm fairly sure the answer is "nobody" - which has the bonus that I don't need to worry about supporting backwards compatibility.
[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/commits?author=kenneth...
Does that count?
https://joybuddies.com (warning: comic sans)
https://reworkin.com
https://pinplz.com
https://opensimworld.com (older, but redesigned this year)
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ascrewaske...
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pindigo-social-pinball-scores/...
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pindigo
I wrote a SRFI (scheme request for implementation) for transducers, which are efficient composable algorithmic transformations. They allow you to eagerly transform collections, say like using map and filter, but without building intermediate collections. The SRFI document is here: https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-171/srfi-171.html
Then I rewrote a large chunk of racket's for loops for guile: https://hg.sr.ht/~bjoli/guile-for-loops
They are zero cost (apart from negligible macro expansion) and provide a homogenous way to iterate through various collections. I am now in the process of implementing foldr for it, which will allow for a general way of writing lazy iterations.
https://storry.io/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/storry/id1485126254?ls=1
Gonna have to try to convince some friends to hop on it.
I take photos and record videos on my phone. All my friends and family too. I used to share them on different media sharing platforms. Used to have a meaningful discussion/conversation on the shared content with the people I know.
Things changed and got worse. I hated infinite scrolling and public feed which I still do. I never really liked the idea of "liking/hearting" - rarely "liked" stuff. Also, these days it's all about influencers and things get lost in the feed.
Keeping all this in mind, inspired by good aspects of the existing platforms and really based on what I needed, I decided to build Storry.
Lessons learned:
* If you'd like to start making money on the Internets, don't start with a SaaS
* Making your first $currency will give you a (much needed) morale boost
* If you're just starting out and you're in for the long-term, optimize for learning and building relationships
* Worthwile Things take time
* You probably won't get it right from the first time (whatever it is). It is far more important to keep iterating rather than getting the right answers from the very beginning.
* Most minor decisions won't matter in a few months', let alone in a few years' time. Don't overthink it. Make a fast decision and if necessary, re-evaluate it down the road
* Don't rush to automate tasks
* Build it, and they will do absolutely nothing
* Businesses live and die by their distribution channels
* Running a lean operation (i.e. low-cost) is a competitive advantage
* Having an audience is an unfair advantage
* Writing is a gift that keeps giving. Write more!
* The true validation is people paying you money
After many months (or years?) of procrastinating, I finally published my personal website (https://jmstfv.com). I have been meaning to do this for a long time but kept putting it off for various (artificial) reasons. So, I hand wrote the HTML, copy pasted the CSS from my other projects, and called it a day.
Lesson learned: start with the least painful solution.
EDIT: added couple more "lessons learned"
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MvYTbIU1d-c
Store page: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/mod...
Main UI: http://lipcolourmatch.com/
Map of colourfamilies: http://lipcolourmatch.com/colourfamilies
Gallery interface: http://lipcolourmatch.com/browse-all
Main lesson:
* Making money with affiliate models in this space can be hard if you don't already have a big existing audience (ie. from a Youtube channel) - wrote a bit about it here
https://blog.race-conditions.net/posts/experimenting-with-th...