I have at least 20 project ideas described in my notebook that I truly believe all of them could be successful businesses and solve a real problem, but the truth is that you can only really build ONE good business at a time. It is very easy to abandon a project and go for the next shiny idea, but it is very hard to stick to a project and make it work.
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.
Alternatively, you commit to a field of expertise, only to become narrow minded, and unable to synthesize simple ideas into products end users care about.
My 10 year project (a computer-geometry-art thing) (yes, 10 years, 1 project) was a great success. I made zip cash. But that was not the aim of the project.
If you don't, you could consider posting some of your art to reddit.com/r/generative or to instagram. It's a really popular concept right now, although a bit plagued with people jumping on the NFT train trying to make money with generative "drops".
Do you have any recommendations as to how to get started creating your style of generative art?
I have been interested in a similar project for sometime, but don’t know the best place to get started. My background is in Math, so I’d really like to understand the “why” and “how” of these types of algorithms rather than just plugging in some parameters and getting a nice picture.
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.
Regarding solving a problem. I think there is always room for a better way to solve a problem. Really, there is room for multiple companies to solve the same problem the same way. If I would have been pitched Airbnb in its early days, I likely would not have given it much thought. After all, VRBO has been doing basically what Airbnb does for 25 years.
Airbnb is a good example of "success" by doing nothing new, just pushing past law or other external difficulties that no one else managed before.
Like you say, there had been similar apps for several years. CouchSurf-style websites were common, and the transition to paid accommodation provided by normal people is obvious from there, but no one could get past the difficulty of getting people to pay for something that was commonly done for free, and getting this done without legal issues.
AirBnb, to my knowledge, was likely illegal in most places it worked, but similar to Uber, was on perhaps a gray area that allowed it to continue working until it was so big it cold lobby politicians to acommodate it within the law.
Only a handful of successes can happen this way, and I think all that could, have already happened.
It wouldn't surprise me if that's far below the average number of "failures" to face before any sort of success anyone, regardless of their aptitude or luck will be met. All I see among people who make it is that they spent years trying things, they won't tweet every disappointment .
"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.
It's ok to fail sometimes, but if you only fail the only way for you to stop failing is to be lucky. It doesn't seem like a good strategy to me.
But yeah if the goal of OP is the guy he quoted at the end "Had a business idea that I think could build in 24 hours and get to $5,000 MRR in 30 days". Keep trying, survivor bias is still alive
There are a ton of ideas that could get someone to $5000 MRR in 30 days; they're just not passive income. For example, if he had started a facilities maintenance company and found one customer, he'd be set!
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 of dollars immediately. Those are exceedingly rare, and you might be able to pull it off when you have a massive audience. Jumping from project to project won’t net you that audience, so you end up spending time in circles… and earning $0.
This chart is a good example of having no traction for years and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an overnight success.
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.
I'm working on social software at the moment, and when I explain it to potential users, they seem to love the concept (which gives me confidence), but truthfully I don't know if will live up to expectations. I've found it best to downplay any potential success in my own mind so that I'm not disappointed if it doesn't take off. I hope your launch goes well; your comments are always insightful and glad to have someone of your experience around the traps.
I think that the general Quality of the app will be phenomenal. I spend a great deal of time “polishing the fenders.” This is stuff like making sure that popovers are pixel-perfect, Dark Mode is supported, it’s localizable and accessible, and has various fast animations for “flourish,” etc.
We know the target demographic well, and all indications are, that it will be well-received.
But I don’t think it has much monetary potential, which I feel is fine. We’re a nonprofit, anyway. It will be funny, because a free app will have a level of refinement that leaves many money-making apps in a cloud of dust.
Grr... It wasn't even that. A couple of days ago, the hosting provider had some kind of server bork. I complained, and I guess as they were looking at it, they renamed the plugins directory (fairly common practice).
After they figured out it was their server, they never went back and renamed the directory.
This seems true of small scale things but companies like google have been able to release good software on the first try. I don't remember it vividly but I used google docs and drive on the first year and I don't remember having a single issue with them and I can't even think of anything it does now almost 10 years later that I would have wanted back then.
Completely agree. Good ideas are abandoned too often because of bad advice from influencers and unrealistic expectations. I actually wrote about this a few weeks ago ^1.
So much this sentiment. I ask people I mentor "why do you measure yourself in dollars?" and they often respond with something like "all the successful people I admire are rich." or something along those lines.
Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator.
Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.
One the one hand, I'd observe that most people's side-projects, aka hobbies, were never expected to make money. Short of opening a shop your pottery or whatever wasjust something you did.
On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
I was just referring to expectations that projects you do outside of your main job can be turned into money-making enterprises. And, from my perspective, this is usually not the case and I'm fine with it but it's easy to see that being dismissive of side hustles assumes a well-paying 9-5 job.
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 you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites.
Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for.
They are also extremely competitive.
The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing.
There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid.
High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.
You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your ideas)!
I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then file them away, however. Things can change.
Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't have any more to work.
Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that. Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate more capital to "do it right".
You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products because of high competition you won't likely match.
Yeah the first step if you want to be successful on some metric is to type “time tracker” into AppStore search and see that is completely hopeless and pick something else that doesn’t already have 100+ professional and commercial implementations
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 issue is: we don't know which ideas are good or bad.
The stats from Venture Capital markets are showing that clearly.
Before someone even gets a meeting with a good VC firm the idea is already filtered 100-1 if not 1000-1.
Of those who get the meeting, maybe 1 in 100 get an investment.
Of those that get an investment, out of 10 maybe 1 or 2 become the really great successes and the remaining 8 are somewhere between "mild return" and "complete failure".
Since even the best of the best cannot tell what idea is good and which one is bad, we value all ideas as bad ideas i.e. at zero.
I'm quite sure that in that list I've posted there are at least few good ideas i.e. ideas that, when well executed, would lead to a profitable, solo business.
I think this is part of the issue. Unlike the GP, I think the expectation is often both difficult and sometimes expensive. Often ideas seem bad only because they were executed poorly; good execution acts as a type of filter.
Almost all the “ideas” in your list are “make X with Y”. They’re not unique by definition. It’s a nice exercise for the brain, but you won’t really ship anything people use that way.
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.
Figuring out what problem to solve is the most difficult part for most side projects. Unless you personally have an unsolved problem that by chance many other people also have, finding something good requires either luck or talking to many potential customers.
I think one way to narrow down to something relatively unique is to look for the Ven diagram of skills and interests. If you layer enough, there's bound to be some areas where relatively few people how the knowledge and passion to pursue. It's no guarantee you'll make money, but it at least helps identify areas you can stand out.
How thorough have you been in researching competitors? I'm willing to bet that there'll be some differences either in target market or execution. Even if it's effectively the same product maybe there's something they've missed which would give you a significant advantage early on?
“Stick with it” is by no means what I said. A time tracker isn’t an end-all product - you start with it, then spiral out based on customer feedback. I’ve seen plenty of companies start that way and succeed, even time tracker and job posts.
High competition is also not a red flag by definition. It’s a strong indication that the market exists, and as a solo or bootstrapped founder, that’s a HUGE time & money saver.
Low value to users isn’t necessarily a issue on itself either - you start with something with low value, then value-add as you grow. There’s room in the world for vitamins and painkillers.
There’s room in the world for red sea strategies and blue ocean strategies. In none of these worlds is “not doing projects in the first place” a good idea though, no matter if they fail. The best way to never succeed is to keep dreaming and never try :)
> High competition is also not a red flag by definition. It’s a strong indication that the market exists, and as a solo or bootstrapped founder, that’s a HUGE time & money saver.
I can't tell you how much this resonates with me having been slowly and methodically building a project in a competitive domain over the past two years. I have a handful of organic users who've continued to show up and inspire me to continue pushing forward, but in that time I've also had people close to me question what I'm doing and why it's taking so long (as if there is a finish line).
My experience so far is that building a software product is a hard and time-consuming process fraught with obstacles of all variety. There are many instances where abandoning it will sound like a good idea, so you just have to ask yourself how determined are you to bring it to life and push through when it gets difficult?
>>Nothing fancy or intrusive. We just needed a record of how much time a certain project took in a certain month, and how much we need to bill clients.
I think you just said “stick with it is by no means what I said”, and then gave a longer, richer explanation why he should have indeed just “stuck with it”. I agree with the original commenter. Seems these app ideas were all pretty unoriginal and in markets with giants already. Making a video game is the software equivalent of opening a restaurant… And so are a few other of these app ideas.
I think it’s good to see failure posts like this on HN. Helps balance out some of the toxic positivity you can run into. Not everyone will succeed, even the ones that work hard for years and are very talented (like these folks).
The thing is he might have learnt something if he had continued the project. Maybe he would have learnt something about marketing and market positioning. Or maybe he would have learnt about delivery and server provisioning, even without any commercial merit to his product.
The whole thing reads like he had a vague idea that writing a basic piece of software would allow him to retire, but could only bring himself to make a very limited effort.
The rule is: if you want to get money from it, you have to be prepared to work hard, and on parts of it that you don't find interesting, with no guarantee of success. If you aren't motivated by money and ready to put a lot into it with a high chance of failure, just work on things you enjoy. You will get further and learn more.
In neither case will you get much from it if you just do the minimum and then abandon the project.
'Side projects' have become the new programmer blogs, as something which everyone feels they need to have in order to get a job. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO STUFF LIKE THIS. If you're not excited by it then just don't. Just getting good at your job and enjoying your spare time will get you much further in life than pursuing things which it will be clear to an employer you don't really care about. For every employer which looks for stuff like this, there is another who just wants someone who does a good job and doesn't waste their energy on side hustles.
Yea if you read the article, it is actually more like 5 side projects in 4 years (took a 2 year break). That is way too many projects to try for real results. Nothing to take away from the effort and learnings though. I commend people who try to build anything. However, most people give up too quickly. It takes months or even a year or 2 to really get traction on any project if you want to be serious and I am not talking VC funded but bootstrapped. Yes the risk of doing something for 2 years is big but you need to do a lot more customer discovery/validation than just 2-3 months before you give up.
If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5 projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few months on it. That is why software developers are not all entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff, we don't know what to do with it.
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?)
Made a post on 3-4 forums/discussions, etc... scaled my server to handle load almost to 10.000 daily active users. And.... 2 registrations happened in the first month. This was not expected and hit me hard. But later on, as you write, it started to gain some traction. One user per week, 2, then 3 users. Sometimes 2 new per day, the other day or week or month nothing. Sometimes I am surprised that some big player on the IT market has registered and is also actively using it (2 largest telco operators in DE and AT fe.) I don't care anymore about profit or userbase. I'm happy with it as is and sometimes users are sending me emails and thanking me for such service.
Yes, they do. I did admin work a long time ago and mostly it was planned to have information about the connection, in case they have a dynamic IP. It works reliably to this day.
I think the common thing here is not giving up w/o immediate success. That is a very good idea sometimes. Homer Simpson built a goofy car, people were exposed to it and he got negative feedback, and he rightly abandoned it. Some projects are a bad idea, you don't know they are, and once you find out they are, you absolutely should not keep wasting resources due to the sunk cost of wishful thinking.
His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses.
He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar.
The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons.
It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group.
So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.
Also contrary to what is often professed here, a landing page is not a product. If you lure me to your website and there is no download and only a textbox to extract a personal information from me to spam me in the future, you just lost my present and future respect. Don't waste people's time like this please.
When it comes to the time management app, he did exactly the right thing: created a mailing list, found out there is no market, left it alone.
Generally 'just making an app' does not produce a business, and has not for the past 10 years at least.
Games are a very special business, and there is no science as to what makes a game compelling: flappy bird was created in a weekend and made millions, some million dollar projects make nothing. I think that you have to be very passionate about games and have deep understanding of gameplay to even compete.
Counterpoint: He is trying to compete in sexy, very competitive industries. I launched a landscaping business with a partner four months ago and we already have over $100,000 in revenue.
Sharing some thoughts in the spirit of us all learning and improving:
Re: Planetoid my immediate first impression was "I don't understand what's going on here". With that one it seems like maybe the author should have vetted the basic idea with friends and family first and see if they get it.
Re: Minfinity it seems useful and is actually right up my alley! I feel like the strategy here would be to keep it in maintenance mode and wait and see if it ever picks up popularity (such as in a thread like this).
My big takeaway from reading the author's post is that it seems to drive home the importance of marketing/advertising/selling/etc. Those stories about the Collison brothers pitching their product to developers and then doing the somewhat socially awkward thing of pressuring them try it out right there on the spot is burned in my memory.
Also, I think we need to stop rewarding 'minimal' products. Like you said, there's no room for minimal time tracking, but there's definitely room for more high quality, feature-dense time tracking tools.
Nope, sometimes I just want no bloat software that can cook my eggs during I use it for time tracking. I just want this one feature.
But don't suppose to make money with an app like this, because there are 20 other people that released one before you.
He needs to make ten times as many applications/solutions at least in the same time frame. His ratio comes to less than one project a year and across different markets. In fact he doesn't even release but two of the projects mentioned. The product startup world moves a lot faster than that.
It needs to become a habit so that he can release at greater velocity. Regulary thinking about new ideas and the writing code 1-2 hours everyday is ideal.
I'm one of the folks who took part in The Quittening that the last year has made for us. I left a demanding, unfulfilling startup job in July. The main factors in why I was able to do this was:
* a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean FIRE".)
* being married to someone who had the understanding to support me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)
I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.
Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service. That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances. (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)
I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope! Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some combination of:
* lucky,
* very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or
* blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility that doesn't exist yet.
OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try. It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times, and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.
People pay for services because it's work that they are unable or unwilling to do themselves
Building things that people will not pay for is called a hobby.
You're not entited to an income from your hobbies.
> This is a story about me dreaming
Yup
> 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 (kwcodes.com)
You didn't even try to finish 2 of the 5 projects
You didn't even do anything in 2 of the 6 years.
Your title is clickbait. Seems like you want attention more than you want money.
By comparison, looking at my github, I started over 50 projects in last year and finished a dozen of them. Hobbies all of them and I didn't expect to make a dime. If you want a reality check, head over to https://itch.io/jams. You'll find 10,000 hobbies projects not making any money.
> How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
Not earning money is not a failure. Wasting time on non-free software the purpose of which is making money - now that's unfortunate.
My advice to that guy would be:
* Write software you need personally. You will at least have one happy user - and if you write something you like, other people will probably want to use it too.
* Think of the software needs of people you know - in your family, physical community, or online communities - and see whether you can't help implement it or adapt/improve existing software for that purpose.
> I really doubt that throwing it up as open source would fix anything.
You're probably right. What I'm saying is that the cause for embarking on a software project should be different. If you write software to address needs and desires, then you're more likely to succeed in doing that. And maybe you'll make money off it somehow, or maybe not.
Bit of a painful read. On the first game, it's a common game concept (very much not novel) that I've seen many people recreate. I built one myself with better graphics and gameplay over the course of a week and sold it for 5k to a games publisher around 2013-2014, about 2-3 years before they released their game. That publisher offered it for free on an ad model. I can't believe working on it for a year, with two people, for free, releasing it in 2016 and expecting any sales.
Enough has been said about the projects in general already which mostly mimics the game (not solving a real user problem, late-entry, competing with existing solutions, no marketing)
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadIf I count ideas I had that I never seriously started on, I've failed hundreds of projects.
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).
http://www.fleen.org/generative-art/
I have been interested in a similar project for sometime, but don’t know the best place to get started. My background is in Math, so I’d really like to understand the “why” and “how” of these types of algorithms rather than just plugging in some parameters and getting a nice picture.
https://github.com/johnalexandergreene/Geom_Kisrhombille
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
Like you say, there had been similar apps for several years. CouchSurf-style websites were common, and the transition to paid accommodation provided by normal people is obvious from there, but no one could get past the difficulty of getting people to pay for something that was commonly done for free, and getting this done without legal issues.
AirBnb, to my knowledge, was likely illegal in most places it worked, but similar to Uber, was on perhaps a gray area that allowed it to continue working until it was so big it cold lobby politicians to acommodate it within the law.
Only a handful of successes can happen this way, and I think all that could, have already happened.
Choosing Roby on Rails in 2020 as a "new framework" for web development ... sheesh.
Asp.net core with ReactJS for web, and React Native for Windows for any serious projects with SLA’s or multiple developers.
*sigh*
But yeah if the goal of OP is the guy he quoted at the end "Had a business idea that I think could build in 24 hours and get to $5,000 MRR in 30 days". Keep trying, survivor bias is still alive
We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands of dollars immediately. Those are exceedingly rare, and you might be able to pull it off when you have a massive audience. Jumping from project to project won’t net you that audience, so you end up spending time in circles… and earning $0.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
This chart is a good example of having no traction for years and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an overnight success.
Imagine this was money instead, where the final result was $1B and after the first 2 years it was only $1M.
$1M is only "no traction" in relation to $1B. In absolute terms it's pretty damn good.
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.
I think that the general Quality of the app will be phenomenal. I spend a great deal of time “polishing the fenders.” This is stuff like making sure that popovers are pixel-perfect, Dark Mode is supported, it’s localizable and accessible, and has various fast animations for “flourish,” etc.
We know the target demographic well, and all indications are, that it will be well-received.
But I don’t think it has much monetary potential, which I feel is fine. We’re a nonprofit, anyway. It will be funny, because a free app will have a level of refinement that leaves many money-making apps in a cloud of dust.
Time will tell. More will be revealed…
Thanks. I’ll get on it. I may need to do a fairly significant site upgrade. I’ve been avoiding it.
Other websites have full lorem ipsum pages or have someones dubious web shop selling crystals running in a subfolder.
(Idea for webmasters: set up a few scheduled search for <words that should not be on your website> site:<yourwebsite.example>)
After they figured out it was their server, they never went back and renamed the directory.
^1: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/
Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator.
Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.
On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
Sure, people used to have side hustles back in the day, but maybe more like weeding your potato plants after a back-breaking day at the factory.
> On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
Was it from what I wrote or was it unrelated?
Does that mean that even if my success stagnates at “quite successful”, I make no money at all? That doesn’t make sense to me. How would that work?
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 you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites.
Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for.
They are also extremely competitive.
The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing.
There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid.
High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.
You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your ideas)!
I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then file them away, however. Things can change.
Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't have any more to work.
Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that. Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate more capital to "do it right".
You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products because of high competition you won't likely match.
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".
I guess the good ideas are expensive.
I don't agree that "good ideas are expensive".
The issue is: we don't know which ideas are good or bad.
The stats from Venture Capital markets are showing that clearly.
Before someone even gets a meeting with a good VC firm the idea is already filtered 100-1 if not 1000-1.
Of those who get the meeting, maybe 1 in 100 get an investment.
Of those that get an investment, out of 10 maybe 1 or 2 become the really great successes and the remaining 8 are somewhere between "mild return" and "complete failure".
Since even the best of the best cannot tell what idea is good and which one is bad, we value all ideas as bad ideas i.e. at zero.
I'm quite sure that in that list I've posted there are at least few good ideas i.e. ideas that, when well executed, would lead to a profitable, solo business.
I just don't know which ones are good.
I think this is part of the issue. Unlike the GP, I think the expectation is often both difficult and sometimes expensive. Often ideas seem bad only because they were executed poorly; good execution acts as a type of filter.
Let [customer group] do [pain point solved].
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your work on SumatraPDF. My favorite, hands down.
(Following the link you posted, I realized you're the author.)
perfect market = Market with a perfect allocation between demand and supply, because of no information deficiencies.
Sorry for the snark, but how is this actionable advice? It's just a fortune cookie anecdote of a situation that of course would be profitable.
High competition is also not a red flag by definition. It’s a strong indication that the market exists, and as a solo or bootstrapped founder, that’s a HUGE time & money saver.
Low value to users isn’t necessarily a issue on itself either - you start with something with low value, then value-add as you grow. There’s room in the world for vitamins and painkillers.
There’s room in the world for red sea strategies and blue ocean strategies. In none of these worlds is “not doing projects in the first place” a good idea though, no matter if they fail. The best way to never succeed is to keep dreaming and never try :)
I can't tell you how much this resonates with me having been slowly and methodically building a project in a competitive domain over the past two years. I have a handful of organic users who've continued to show up and inspire me to continue pushing forward, but in that time I've also had people close to me question what I'm doing and why it's taking so long (as if there is a finish line).
My experience so far is that building a software product is a hard and time-consuming process fraught with obstacles of all variety. There are many instances where abandoning it will sound like a good idea, so you just have to ask yourself how determined are you to bring it to life and push through when it gets difficult?
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
That would be a good argument if you mentioned which ones.
>>Nothing fancy or intrusive. We just needed a record of how much time a certain project took in a certain month, and how much we need to bill clients.
I think it’s good to see failure posts like this on HN. Helps balance out some of the toxic positivity you can run into. Not everyone will succeed, even the ones that work hard for years and are very talented (like these folks).
The whole thing reads like he had a vague idea that writing a basic piece of software would allow him to retire, but could only bring himself to make a very limited effort.
The rule is: if you want to get money from it, you have to be prepared to work hard, and on parts of it that you don't find interesting, with no guarantee of success. If you aren't motivated by money and ready to put a lot into it with a high chance of failure, just work on things you enjoy. You will get further and learn more.
In neither case will you get much from it if you just do the minimum and then abandon the project.
'Side projects' have become the new programmer blogs, as something which everyone feels they need to have in order to get a job. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO STUFF LIKE THIS. If you're not excited by it then just don't. Just getting good at your job and enjoying your spare time will get you much further in life than pursuing things which it will be clear to an employer you don't really care about. For every employer which looks for stuff like this, there is another who just wants someone who does a good job and doesn't waste their energy on side hustles.
If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5 projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few months on it. That is why software developers are not all entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff, we don't know what to do with it.
A couple of weeks of part time desk research is not a side hustle. It’s simply due diligence.
Disappointed that the game didn’t go ahead as it’s something I’d definitely play. Reminds me of x-battle.
His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses.
He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar.
The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons.
It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group.
So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.
[UBI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income)
Generally 'just making an app' does not produce a business, and has not for the past 10 years at least.
Games are a very special business, and there is no science as to what makes a game compelling: flappy bird was created in a weekend and made millions, some million dollar projects make nothing. I think that you have to be very passionate about games and have deep understanding of gameplay to even compete.
If you want to make money (any money at all), stop focusing on consumer products, build a small B2B product instead.
Re: Planetoid my immediate first impression was "I don't understand what's going on here". With that one it seems like maybe the author should have vetted the basic idea with friends and family first and see if they get it.
Re: Minfinity it seems useful and is actually right up my alley! I feel like the strategy here would be to keep it in maintenance mode and wait and see if it ever picks up popularity (such as in a thread like this).
My big takeaway from reading the author's post is that it seems to drive home the importance of marketing/advertising/selling/etc. Those stories about the Collison brothers pitching their product to developers and then doing the somewhat socially awkward thing of pressuring them try it out right there on the spot is burned in my memory.
You need to start with validating your idea instead of wasting days/months on coding.
"How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years"
It needs to become a habit so that he can release at greater velocity. Regulary thinking about new ideas and the writing code 1-2 hours everyday is ideal.
- The store not accepting your app because there are too many of the same topic (horoscopes, memes, sound boards, whatever-craft names, etc.)
- Spending lots of money on Google/FB ads.
- Spending lots of money on AWS.
- Burning out yourself and your friends.
* a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean FIRE".)
* being married to someone who had the understanding to support me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)
I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.
Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service. That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances. (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)
I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope! Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some combination of:
* lucky,
* very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or
* blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility that doesn't exist yet.
OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try. It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times, and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.
Lincoln
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/28/success/
Building things that people will not pay for is called a hobby.
You're not entited to an income from your hobbies.
> This is a story about me dreaming
Yup
> 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 (kwcodes.com)
You didn't even try to finish 2 of the 5 projects You didn't even do anything in 2 of the 6 years.
Your title is clickbait. Seems like you want attention more than you want money.
By comparison, looking at my github, I started over 50 projects in last year and finished a dozen of them. Hobbies all of them and I didn't expect to make a dime. If you want a reality check, head over to https://itch.io/jams. You'll find 10,000 hobbies projects not making any money.
Not earning money is not a failure. Wasting time on non-free software the purpose of which is making money - now that's unfortunate.
My advice to that guy would be:
* Write software you need personally. You will at least have one happy user - and if you write something you like, other people will probably want to use it too.
* Think of the software needs of people you know - in your family, physical community, or online communities - and see whether you can't help implement it or adapt/improve existing software for that purpose.
Most software that's capable of improving lives is capable of making money, isn't it?
> non-free software
I really doubt that throwing it up as open source would fix anything.
And if you remove those two factors then all that's left is "that's unfortunate".
You're probably right. What I'm saying is that the cause for embarking on a software project should be different. If you write software to address needs and desires, then you're more likely to succeed in doing that. And maybe you'll make money off it somehow, or maybe not.
This sounds very ideological. It looks like a personal trap that you might fall in the future. Be careful.
Enough has been said about the projects in general already which mostly mimics the game (not solving a real user problem, late-entry, competing with existing solutions, no marketing)