While reading the post, I realised that it was a really great idea to say the least but I was very shocked when I saw that OP earned $18000 off the project. Although, one down-side of using email addresses which contain emojis is that some email clients do not support them.
Also, are domains not $5-$10 say? ~$2000 on 'tiny projects'?
...ahh, read the full breakdown, it is approximately something like that, which seems crazy, but I dunno, guy has some money to spare and went nuts with the project and sold a bunch of accounts. (also weird, but tiktokers susceptible to random stuff I guess)
Depends on how much time you plan on putting into it and if it sounds like fun. Most people have a bit of free time to spend on side projects, even if they're silly.
Or if you're going to learn something new. I do side projects when I want to learn websockets or something like that. Even when the project doesn't go anywhere, I got something out of it.
I actually agree with this. There are a bunch of low-cost ways to prototype and collect user feedback. The paper notebook idea could have started with surveying people and finding if anyone actually existed who say it would be useful and they would pay for it. Or even just launch a one-page product site with an email sign-up list to get notified when the alpha version releases and wait until it reached some critical mass. All of this would have taken less investment than actually building it first lol.
> It's a paradox, but I've found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.
Building and failing and building and failing might be a faster way of getting to something great than vetting, vetting, vetting, building, vetting, vetting building...
It’s only faster if you have the skills personally to build (which is many, but not all, HN users). If you don’t then vetting is a better place to start.
That was actually a pleasant read. I especially like the conclusion to which I can relate.
> If you're stuck for ideas, I recommend just building something; anything; even if it's terrible, and I guarantee a better idea will pop into your brain shortly after.
I have been working on a long project for a few years now and it will not be finished before another few years and I envy the speed at which the author gets feedback after he launches his products.
I completely agree with this, I almost have too many ideas and find combining them and building “something” usually results in filtering out the bad ones and brining the better ones to the forefront. Sometimes you just find that something “new” and better comes out of the process of trying to build “anything”.
That conclusion is really applicable to just about everything. Want to start woodworking? Start building something. Want to become a runner? Start running. Want to be a musician? Start making some songs.
A lot of the initial tries will be terrible but it only gets better from there.
When I lived in an apartment building, a guy in the next building decided he wanted to learn to play the saxophone and practiced on his balcony everyday. I hate the advice "just start playing" :)
Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty, etc) has some advice on this:
> Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft.
I believe this is a good way to quickly filter through a bunch of ideas that may or may not work and stick with those that have potential. Luckily these days launching new ideas is easy. You don't need to invest too much money and time as long as you keep it simple and to the point.
As someone who perpetually overscopes side projects and ends up biting off more than I can reasonably chew given my free time, I really love this idea. What happens with me is I start a new project, then add a new feature here and there (because coding is fun) and end up never reaching anything close to "done" then getting into analysis paralysis of what to do next because there is so much. Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects - not that this is horrible, I do them for fun and not profit, but it would be nice to launch a few.
If OP is actually the author, a question - what was your approach in keeping the projects tightly scoped and not introducing feature creep? Deadlines or time-boxing? Pre-emptive deciding on what you will and won't do? Lowering your standards for "good enough"? Just plain old discipline? Something else?
> Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects
Could be worse. I used to have this problem all the time, and at some point managed to fix it. Now I've spent 3 years on a side project (which I originally thought should take a couple of months, and considering its lack of complexity really only should have taken at most a year), and even though I'm fully aware its an "unworkable" idea, I can't stop until its done.
I've read tiny projects in the past though and really like it, I really want to try a similar thing at some point...just as soon as this current project is done ;)
This idea comes up in painting. The rule of thumb is that it's done when there's nothing left to add; when adding the next thing does not provide much more value value than it costs in terms complexity.
With coding, it seems like it's much more difficult question to answer.
With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Or maybe more to do with users buying more of a particular brand of Bluetooth headphones and not having an arbitrary and universal input (you can do a lot of crazy stuff with an audio jack see square).
I suppose that might be one reading, though IMO the battery, jack, and card slot have just been replaced by more bells and whistles like more/fancier cameras, biometric sensors, NFC, and other gobbledygook that was more important to someone than being able to plug into the cassette adapter in my car. Not exactly what I think of when I hear "nothing left to take away."
Building for fun vs building for profit are very different and it's important to set your intention for a project, even though the line often gets blurred.
When you are building for fun, it is for yourself. When you are building for profit, it is for other people. When you are building for fun, you get to decide what to work on and when to stop - usually when it is no longer fun. When you are building for profit, other people decide what you work on and when you are done - usually when no new features are requested, you have no competition, and you have absolutely saturated your market. This rarely ever happens so you always have something propelling you.
The biggest failure most engineers encounter is they build things nobody asked for. They build products without customers lined up, for markets that do not currently exist, with only feedback from themselves. This is because they built the product for fun thinking they were building it for profit.
The line between the two is very easy to blur - especially when reading OP's blog where he genuinely sounds like he had fun building his projects, but I guarantee there was also a lot of very unfun background work done in the name of profit.
I've seen your projects before, and I am like you where I don't like projects that depend on me creating content but I rather like technical challenges. Great write up!
One thing I would have loved to read about is more about how they did market validation for these ideas. For a micro-bet strategy knowing which one (outside of really interesting projects that would trend on HN), it feels like market validation chops would be crucial.
The author seems to be batting an insanely high average for just building things and having them actually get some traction, and be exit-able.
> When I started this mission, I had a big list of project ideas that I'd built up in my phone. Maybe you have one of those lists too.
> Two years later, I've realised a lot of these initial ideas were pretty terrible.
> It's a paradox, but I've found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.
Funnily enough, I went the other way and started sharing my large list of ideas with others (I send 3 non-terrible ones to subscribers every week[0]). Of course, running a mailing list and sharing the ideas was one of the ideas...
At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing. Knowing you should take the month to build before you do, but reading the post it feels like maybe bounding initial development time sometimes can work in lieu of validating the market.
[EDIT] - please see previous discussion about the mailing list as well![1] -- it's released every sunday night.
[EDIT2] - is anyone having trouble sending email to the author? I'm using protonmail and wanted to get in touch but I can't -- email looks to be no bueno for proton mail. I guess I'll either try thunderbird or twitter.
[EDIT3] - Looks like proton mail does not like emoji email addresses currently... Thunderbird happily sent.
[EDIT4] - Nope, nvm I'm getting a mail lookup error (hn strips the emoji)...
> Delivery to tinyprojects@.gg failed with error: MX lookup error
>At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing.
Market validation - especially for online products and services - is indeed incredibly important, but not many people like to write about it because it is actually very drab and a tiny bit audacious.
His market validation - you are seeing it. It is a submission to Hacker News.
Ok ok, that is a given, but the author alludes to other various ways he gets feedback and validation for his products. He also talks about how well his products were received on Product Hunt and you can also follow him on Twitter.
My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
> His market validation - you are seeing it. It is a submission to Hacker News.
Yup you're totally right. All these ideas really seemed like things that would trend on HN (but that's easy to say in retrospect, getting to the front page isn't quite so easy!).
> My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
This is one thing I know I'm terrible at. I barely use any SEO tools properly, I should probably just hurry up and pay for ahrefs or whatever already.
I don't think the concept of checking backlinks even clicked properly in my head until I read your explanation, thank you very much.
You can get a general idea with free backlink checkers, just won't be able to deep dive and do various filters.
Ignore all the spammy websites that usually regurgitate random links. Focus on the sites with high DR that don't have the "NoFollow" attribute. These are the hard-hitting websites that boost your domain for SEO purposes and can be good places to get feedback on your own product.
While I want to execute the idea I am always put off by the essential administrative stuff such as user management, payment gateway linking, subscription management.
Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?
There are a few SaaS templates out there and services such as Memberstack that make it easier to implement the boilerplate SaaS features in Webflow. I'd also recommend just doing the boring work once and keeping that as a template for future projects.
They other option is to not worry about those things. Start with a free product and see if people will even use that. Then worry about payment and subscriptions once you validate that people will use it.
Try to think about a way your product (or at least a minimal version of it) could work without "user management." Sounds counterintuitive but sometimes it is a requirement that has never really been thought about, just assumed to be necessary.
Does anyone let the tax implications of launching (several) tiny projects prevent them from even starting?
I know LLCs allow for pass-through taxation and you don't have to file as a business, but I get frozen by the idea that generating a few hundred dollars in revenue from some silly side project means I have to spend hours/days of my time the next Spring figuring out how to properly pay taxes on it.
You can launch multiple tiny projects under a single LLC, then just pay taxes on the total income from all of them for the year - you wouldn't have to do any separate filing
A past manager once gave me great advice for situations like these when I was thinking about applying to grad school worrying about my then-job if I got in: "deal with this problem if you get in." The chances of you making a few hundred dollars in revenue by next Spring are statistically very low. And if you are persistent and talented and lucky enough to generate hundreds of dollars in revenue, you're certainly capable of paying taxes on your earnings.
The fact that you're asking this question means you're interested in launching things. If so, the cliched, true advice is: launch.
If you want practical advice: I run a one-person LLC in the US. Taxes on a few hundred dollars are nothing to worry about.
For inevitable naysayers: my manager's advice doesn't mean you shouldn't ever plan or prepare. Just that when your chances of success are very low, don't worry too much about the repercussions of success. I applied to grad school, and didn't get in. My career continued on just fine.
(assuming you're in the US) if you've never had a business before, a couple hundred dollars of extra income is not material to your taxes and I wouldn't worry about it at all.
Once you get to the scale of a few thousand dollars a year, you can file what's called a Form 1040 Schedule C which allows you to declare your business income, claim expenses and other deductions, and include it in your taxable income. For that scale it's an extra 10 minutes with your tax software or even by hand, as long as you keep good records, and you're done.
The point at which an LLC or other more formal business structure makes sense is fuzzy and can have different ranges depending on the business, but typically you probably don't need or want to invoke the expense of a CPA until you're making more than six figures (or if you've taken outside investment, obv).
The part about "just don't worry about it" is not really great advice, IMO. I think the rest is good, particularly the part about using tax software and/or doing a Schedule C. Just do what it says - it's pretty simple for small businesses - the amount in taxes paid will be fairly minimal. If you use tax software, use the business version and answer the questions and it'll figure it all out for you basically (might even find some deductions if you had expenses, like domain names, hosting, etc.).
While the IRS likely won't audit you for a few hundred dollars (US), there are laws about what you have to do. You don't need to become a tax expert, but knowing the very basics so you don't run afoul of any laws and end up owing some $$ or penalties is probably worth taking a bit of time to do at the end of the year.
That's fair, and I'm definitely not advocating tax fraud or anything of the sort. There's a $400 minimum for filing Schedule SE but no minimum for Schedule C. That said, it's _exceedingly_ unlikely (basically impossible, afaict) that the IRS will audit for Schedule C if you've never filed one and you don't exceed the filing requirements for 1099-NEC or 1099-K. The maximum tax in that case is measured in dozens of dollars.
As a side hustler, even with pass-through taxation, you will still have to pay the self-employment tax (15.3% of net earnings) on top of taxes at your federal and state tax bracket. However, side-hustle money spent on qualified business expenses, is not taxable. (Tax people please chime in.)
That's me. Note that I'm not a US citizen (in fact, I never set foot on US soil, nor I intend to, in my whole life), so your mileage may vary.
In the end, I decided to launch all my side-projects for free (sometimes I outright include a "non commercial" clause because I don't see why somebody should profit off my free work). I find this reduces all the project related stress to a fraction.
I know HN leans heavily US, but if anyone is in the UK, you can now earn up to £1000 in side income without having to declare it or file a self assessment tax return.
But yes, I was thinking of that ('entrepreneur's relief' I believe) too - it solves this problem nicely: don't worry about it until you know you're making money.
(And also other problems like 'hang on I sold some old crap on eBay.. was that income')
Ha! I'm old enough that 2017, when the "trading allowance" was introduced, feels like a year or two ago.. :-|
(Entrepreneurs' Relief was a thing that let you get reduced capital gains of 10% on up to £10m of proceeds from selling certain types of shareholdings or assets of a personal business. It's now called Business Asset Disposal Relief and has been decimated to just £1m.)
Damn, that's nice. In Germany it's enough to have the intention to make money outside of regular employment. You won't pay taxes until a certain amount is reached, but you'll have to get a business license and fill out tax forms every year. And if you don't register yourself as "Kleingewerbe" (small business below 22k €), then you'll have to do sales tax too.
There are lawyers and some very shady businesses, that sweep through the web and report anyone who doesn't comply to any kind of law. They actually make money with this. When i had a small business, i've got a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer of a "competitor" because a single link in my imprint page wasn't clickable. I guess that's why so many people are afraid of starting a business...
Thats a dumb reason to get frozen. Just in case you needed that perspective.
All your costs are tax deductions, whether you incorporate or not. The incorporation cost is negligible and you can ignore everything about a local/foreign llc registration simply because the consequences are improbable and inconsequential, just make the llc in the best states. If your employer is withholding any taxes, you’ll get so much more of it back because you have so many deductions now.
If you make any revenue its easy to count.
Your standing in society is based on gross revenue, your tax footprint is a fraction of net revenues. Its low key perfect. Net operating losses are the greatest of all time.
In addition, You get massively disproportionate security and anonymity by operating under entities you created. And you can prove product market fit in private and then inherit all the credit for it when it works.
I believe Delaware is one of the best tax-wise, but unless you're bringing in lots of revenue, the additional hassle of getting a (representative? agent? can't remember the term for the entity that allows you to set up in a different state) might not be worth the additional complication (in comparison to just setting up everything in your home state). As far as I know, that's something you can change later, anyway...I think the most important thing is not getting hung up on the technicalities and just going ahead and getting started.
Wyoming, followed by Delaware, but save Delaware for the C-Corp when you need formalities from outside capital.
Both offer levels of privacy, Wyoming’s aren't codified they just dont care (and will help you), there all you have to do is just have anyone else sign the organization documents. Your registered agent or your lawyer can.
Everyone that is saying just "put the earnings on Schedule C or Schedule 1 of your tax form" is overlooking the part about your side project getting you sued and you having much more to worry about than just taxes.
The LLC (and other entity types) increases the deterrent of this ever affecting you.
The LLC specifically has some theoretical weaknesses, but the reason it is a deterrent is because it deters people from spending more money to find out about those weakenesses, and it also increases the odds that people won't be able to know where you are or serve you properly. The more expensive it is to find out anything, the less potential aggrieved people will bother, and "finding out" for them could mean "even harder to create liability and a payout", so they get bounced, or deterred, from trying.
It is a bit less of a problem for me lately, because I now feel somewhat more confident about many things in life. But for the most of my life, absolutely. It isn't like there is any real problem, but it was fear of the unknown for me. I was confident about how to make things, solve technical problems and such, and absolutely clueless about anything else. I was somewhat envious of how everyone files taxes on his own in USA. I just knew that my employer pays taxes for me, that I would have to if I want to start a business, and that I can get in jail if I fuck up. It isn't just about taxes, really, just anything law-related. But I had absolutely no idea what I actually have to do, or how do I even find out. I know it sounds silly, but it wasn't funny to me, it was infuriating helplessness.
Then I became older and just started caring less about doing things "the right way". It was liberating.
I used to fear this, until I read posts on a similar site about how frequently founders botch this and how understanding the IRS is with these situations. Obviously this only applies to the US. When I saw my first success, I paid a CPA ~$1000 (for hundreds of thousands in revenue) to help sort out the first year of taxes (before they were due) and it wasn't a problem.
To summarize someone else's better point: worry about this problem when you have it. In the mean time worry about problems you have right now.
That is odd that he would be involved with auditing duplicate domain names. You'd think FB the company would of done the snatching, not Mark Zuckerberg. neat.
I really like this idea of creating small projects instead of just building a startup as it would be too much work for me. Can you guys give me more examples about projects that generate money or least a lot of people use it for free.
I've been following these, and it seems like such a fun thing to do. He seems to have been lucky that he caught on to his real product on day 1 -- semi-viral blog posts.
Still I imagine it's hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.
I basically launch tiny projects full time, and have noticed that these have a power law to them. He'll mostly hit $0, with some occasional mid-hits as he has listed, but if he keeps at it I wouldn't be surprised to see one of the later projects make 10x as much as the best one now.
I started my professional life ~25y ago with a side project that by 2022 led to roughly 50 more side projects — The vast majority failed, some turned into 200 employee businesses, some others got acquired. In essence, I make a living out of side projects. Side projects are life.
I built the first Android Twitter client, sold that to Idealab* and given our huge market share (~40% IIRC ) pitched them the idea to build our own Twitter clone in order to move those users over. Twitter took notice and locked all our apps which eventually kicked off the anti-third-party tendency that we see today. Good times.
Another time I turned my private news aggregator into a public service (Popurls) which kicked off thousands of clones and was at one time the number one traffic referrer to Digg and Reddit. A year later Guy Kawasaki cloned it, and I find myself invited to a Ramen lunch with Kevin Kelly who blogged about it as being his favorite website. 15 years later, I got funding from Mark Cuban for building a successor. All from a private solo side project that started as a 20-line Perl script.
I'm not the person you're responding too but I thought I'd mention some of mine. I wrote a blog post called "How to Lose Money With 25 Years of Failed Businesses" where I discuss some of the little side hustles I've managed to kill over the years.
Besides maximising luck, the only real strategy I follow is buy low, sell high in a sense of keeping the burn low and counting on a win every 3-4 years that will create enough cash to finance the next period of failures — because what got you here won't get you there ...
2h sports and a 1h walk every day but that's it. I get motivated from failures because they're the default I expect from having taking actions. Also helps to lower your expectations from life and stay away from comparing your track record with those of others. You know, those 18y olds who flipped their newsletter for 20 millions.
To be honest, I would never do something that requires a single employee ever again. I sold my first company because soon enough, all you get to do is manage politics and not the thing you signed up for — Sounds infantile but at some point you have to stay true to yourself no matter the benefits. If you're more of a team-player, there are obviously better options today (remote, etc.) — The only thing I would recommend is not getting too romantic with a co-founder, having clear responsibilities from day one and don't try to make friends along the way — in the end it's all about building success.
It is now a year later and I'm still wondering the same thing as I was back then (as in, I haven't changed up my work setup at all / haven't hired people). I do rely on contractors here and there, but it's rare.
I quite enjoy the peace and quiet that comes with no employees. These days I just do a bit of focused work each day, prioritise spending time with my family, and enjoy sticking to my daily training regiment (the latter has been a key aspect of my life ever since I started my entrepreneurial journey).
Every time I consider hiring people for the sake of more growth, I find myself asking if it'll be worth it, and whether I'll regret it.
I doubt I'd be able to enjoy the work/life balance I currently have if I were responsible for managing people at scale.
Perhaps I'm being narrow-minded here, but it's good to receive affirmation from someone whose done it all before.
Sounds good to me — Feeding one or a thousand employees doesn't make a lot of difference because you can lose only so many hours of sleep over it each night.
Thank you for posting this and previous year's Ask HN. Knowing that it's possible to run some successful && semi-passive && one-person && work/life-balancing SaaS businesses for such a long time is inspiring.
FWIW I know a handful of people of all ranges of success in the tech startup world, managing tens to hundreds or thousands.
Some of them are very driven by the stress of management, and seek it out. Their mentality is that a work situation isn't worthwhile if it isn't pushing you to your limit.
But they're the minority. I feel like you either know that you're this kind of person or you're not.
The rest feel burdened by their situation, and would happily trade for yours 300 days out of the year. They not-irregularly make comments, in private to friends, along the lines of "sometimes I wonder if I'm living life wrong? maybe I should be in the park with my kids instead of on the nth investor call or one-on-one with a direct report".
Like most questions, I think you can answer this with a mixture of experiments and introspection. You say you've manage contractors, for example.
Do you ever feel like you wish you had more responsibility for their lives? The urge to give mentorship is real, do you wish you could do that in a professional setting?
You can probably find ways to scratch those itches that are outside your company, too, for what it's worth.
You're in a good position where you get to "choose your own adventure", so you should experiment with it! Document your feelings, find somebody to talk it through with, iterate towards a happier spot. There's always ways to test your curiosities without sacrificing everything, if you get clever with it. :)
I've been through a number of startups and there are jobs that I really really dislike down to my core.
My 2nd startup I did the CEO role and i hated every day of it -- I really respect those who can spend day after day in investor meetings, sales calls, marketing catch-ups; that person isn't me.
My 3rd startup I decided to stick to technology - with a heavy dose of management - and partner with someone who could do the above.
Startups are already barely tolerable as it is, you can at least help yourself a little by being able to focus on the areas that bring a little joy into your life.
There's no exact rule but I'd say 12 to 16 months is a good time to expect some sort of positive trend. I don't do any of that MVP stuff and go full-blown right away because user expecations are high and I'm too old to get pleasure from starting something out of a notion-hosted website. Cash-wise I try to keep it under 20k - keeping in mind that I don't do physical projects and all by myself (no freelancers, contractors, etc).
Your career is what I aspired to when I started in this industry over a decade ago. But what ended up happening was that I (a) worked full-time while dabbling on nights and weekends, (b) spent several years trying to decide which project I wanted to really pursue in earnest, and then (c) after picking the project, obsessing over it so much that I never felt it was ready to release. So it's...not going well so far lol.
Can you recall any specific thing you did that brought you success?
This is my story as well, more or less. Want to compare notes? Perhaps figuring out what we have in common would help us understand what we're doing wrong.
As someone who is squarely outside the industry of "side project entrepreneurism," it sounds like the problem is obsessing over minor details about the project and never launching it.
The other person literally said they tried like 50 things and you two haven't launched any yet.
I put that in there to make it more or less obvious that perfectionism was one of the reasons I haven't accomplished much yet. The point was to probe deeper and see if there's some other insight, because everyone already knows that perfectionism kills productivity.
At the same time, if you're doing it for a hobby, taking your time until you're happy can be meditative. That's why I'm taking my side project slowly - because I enjoy coding and am using my side project as a form of relaxation.
You have no idea and irregardless of evidence that you have gathered if something will work or not. Based on this, it would be very bad to work on something for a year without knowing or getting frequent feedback (cash sent to your bank account by customers).
So the only way is to treat this like poker. You place several bets over a period of time (max 1 month). This way you launch 12 projects in a year and have a better success chance of hitting something that actually works. You have to place bets until the card is right, then you can go all-in.
I think first and foremost is bringing yourself into a position that gets you enough runway (time and money) to be able to take things seriously — even if that sounds like the opposite of a side project. For me it was skipping university and having kids in favour of starting a web agency in the dotcom days. Also, I don't believe in working on something you love — you just need to hate it a little less than the other ideas and be positive that someone will find it useful. Like I mentioned below, luck and timing play an important role and these days I'd say you will also need one unfair advantage (contacts, cash, distribution, etc) to increase your chances.
Was there a general goal for each one or any sort of decision tree you used to decide on what to build next... for example, did you only work on things that could potentially be big, or huge, etc? Did you analyze the market size of each idea before starting, etc?
I've outlined a few things in an answer below but another aspect I use more and more these days is a negative inbound filter for ideas. Ranging from macro problems like 'Will it require an app' down to even 'do I need user accounts'. Basically, try to put together a few things that you need or want to absolutely avoid due to certain constraints or knowledge and go from there.
I just wanted to say that I love your phrasing of working on something that "you hate a little less".
In general I believe the idea of "work on what you love" to be awful advice; I have found that I get deep satisfaction out of working on something that someone is willing to pay for, even if that means that sometimes it is a headache and I hate doing some of the things that need to be done. Once you accept that those things will continue to exist and continue to need to be done, and it's not going to be bliss, those things seem to matter less.
I prefer to try to learn to love something that you believe can bring you success. It is very difficult to do something day in and day out that you don't love some part of. You just have to figure out your angle. I don't love my current business, but I love business in general and I love building things that people like to use.
The "love requirement" makes it hard to continue once you wake up one day and find you no longer love it. The "hate it a little less" is much more useful is you dont want to give up on stuff because you have a bad day/week/month with it.
I'm probably the last person you'd want to ask about this but it sounds like you failed to take risk, possibly due to mild (or not so mild?) perfectionism.
I launched my one and only three years ago and it still doesn't pay its own bills. I work on it when I can, but at this point I feel rather resigned to it never being something I can really be proud of.
By actually launching, you’ve achieved what most engineers only think about. I’m not sure if it would mean anything to you, but I look up to what you’ve achieved so far and hope I can ship something in the next 3 years.
Time is easy. Find a work with 20 hours/week schedule and a lifestyle to live for earned money. Should be possible for software developer. Now you have 20 hours a week without sacrificing free time (or more with sacrifices if you feel it worth it).
Choosing good idea worthy of implementation and finding enough inspiration to finish it is another matter.
How do you decide whether a side project/idea is worth pursuing? You mentioned in another comment that you don’t “do the MVP stuff” and go full blown from the beginning. That seems like a big time sink without a rigorous way of validating whether users want what you’re building.
Yes it is a time sink and I can't claim having a specific methodology but if you look at all the conflicting theories, literature and endless blog posts that have been written about validation, you might as well just trust your gut.
My amateurish approach is to jot down every idea in a single line of a text file, then walk away. If the same idea or topic strikes me again, I give it a separate text file and write some copy that might go on the product page, together with links to related stuff, screenshots, etc. Then, after another few weeks and only if I still believe in the idea I come up with more details, perhaps do some light coding, brand ideas, register domains, etc. Then (You guessed it), I wait another few weeks or even months and if it passes my still-relevant check I start working on it on the side of my existing, well, side project. The challenge these days is when to pull the plug or go all-in since the market, interests and attention shifts so quickly that it's tough to adapt without losing temper. Doesn't get easier as you get I older.
I deeply appreciate this perspective (and the similar perspective in this HN submission). Thanks for sharing -- it feels so permissive for me to hear these kinds of perspectives and just get to work on side stuff.
I feel like I often hang up on if something should be done or if it is something that will be "successful". So it's cool to hear stories where the goal isn't the financial success of X project -- the goal is the journey and it's a bonus if it's financially beneficial.
Thanks again, know that it helped me to read this comment!
My problem is a bit different, and I'm curious if others can relate. I constantly have a project in the works, but once I solve the interesting technical hurdles and prove that the concept works, I suddenly think of a "better idea" and never actually release anything. I've been in this cycle for the better part of a decade now.
But let me tell you, if my current project works out, I'll never have to work a W2 job again!
100% this. I have become better about not nixing projects I am working on when I hit technical walls recently. My strategy has basically become to just do the bare minimum to test whether an idea is good or not and if it sucks I will at least have fulfilled my intellectual curiosity and then I can stop being distracted by that idea.
For example, I am currently working on a project to send personalized slack messages in bulk. But I then became really interested in the idea of automatic podcast transcription using GPT-3. So I ended up just one night banging out a prototype on jupyter notebook and it turns out the auto transcription was pretty bad and expensive, but at least I know now. So now I don't feel as bad and I can focus on the boring aspects of building this slack plugin, like accepting payments.
This is exactly me. It is like I get bored as soon as I realize that I could do something, and move on to the next thing.
The book "Refuse to choose" was really enlightening to me, it talks about "scanners", people that have this attribute. I felt very seen and it taught me that this style of working can be an incredible strength.
I once had an artist friend who was world class in his medium. I mentioned to him one day that I have a lot of unfinished code and his response has stuck with for over 20 years.
He said great artists have one thing in common, they finish projects. It's OK to have a workshop full of experiments, but you must finish projects.
I've always taken it to mean that forcing your self to do that last 20% of a project is the only way to learn how to make something great.
Maybe, as a suggestion, launch a Notion page with your “100 side-project ideas I never got around to making” — perhaps this will get that juices flowing?
IMO tiny ideas like this are mostly for fun and learning, they don't need to be unique. Build another take on a blog or a game or utility or whatever you like to do online, but put your own spin on it.
Speaking from personal experience: just seeing what unsolved needs you have yields a lot of ideas. I had coworkers who would go to email something confidential to someone and click the wrong auto-complete contact and then we had a full-blown crisis. I thought "is there a way to stop that without the user hating me?" and that's how I got the idea for https://jiminyclick.com
Ummm. Interesting about mailoji. Not actually legit according to ICANN to use "non collating" punycode or multiple languages in an ICANN-controlled domain: you can't register them.
But, it's a CC TLD, in fact it's .kz who I still carry a scar or two from when they issued some domains starting with "-": you know what happens when you "dig -yo.tld"? OWASP applies to domain names.
However, the RFCs for the actual _protocol_ declare a label can contain "any octet", so you can use and abuse this in FQDNs under your control and the internet police won't come to get you. "poop".example.com would be fine if you control example.com (either as a quoted string or as an emoji), so would "rm -rf *.example.com".
This is awesome and what I initially set out to do but always found a way to talk myself out of it. I dream big. I found a project to stick to "completion" but it took me two years to build alone. I've only lost money but it's been a wild ride of an experience. This tiny project approach sounds like a lot of fun and conveniently my project will help me down that path while I try to market my work.
I love this post. Thanks Ben. It's especially generous to share pageviews and revenue numbers which are so frequently kept private. I didn't though understand this point from the post:
> One other weird downside is that .. I sometimes catch myself thinking "should I build something just for the upvotes".
Is the author saying the attention from social media sites like Hacker News sometimes seems like motivation enough to build the next project?
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] thread...ahh, read the full breakdown, it is approximately something like that, which seems crazy, but I dunno, guy has some money to spare and went nuts with the project and sold a bunch of accounts. (also weird, but tiktokers susceptible to random stuff I guess)
Quick, iterative feedback is by far a superior approach when attempting to understand how to build a successful product.
Building and failing and building and failing might be a faster way of getting to something great than vetting, vetting, vetting, building, vetting, vetting building...
Building hundreds of AviSynth filters won't bring in a cent.
On the other hand, if you are having fun and learning something along the way, who cares?
> If you're stuck for ideas, I recommend just building something; anything; even if it's terrible, and I guarantee a better idea will pop into your brain shortly after.
I have been working on a long project for a few years now and it will not be finished before another few years and I envy the speed at which the author gets feedback after he launches his products.
A lot of the initial tries will be terrible but it only gets better from there.
> Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft.
https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/read-dan-harmons-excellent-a...
If OP is actually the author, a question - what was your approach in keeping the projects tightly scoped and not introducing feature creep? Deadlines or time-boxing? Pre-emptive deciding on what you will and won't do? Lowering your standards for "good enough"? Just plain old discipline? Something else?
Could be worse. I used to have this problem all the time, and at some point managed to fix it. Now I've spent 3 years on a side project (which I originally thought should take a couple of months, and considering its lack of complexity really only should have taken at most a year), and even though I'm fully aware its an "unworkable" idea, I can't stop until its done.
I've read tiny projects in the past though and really like it, I really want to try a similar thing at some point...just as soon as this current project is done ;)
With coding, it seems like it's much more difficult question to answer.
that advanced waterproofing is awesome.
When you are building for fun, it is for yourself. When you are building for profit, it is for other people. When you are building for fun, you get to decide what to work on and when to stop - usually when it is no longer fun. When you are building for profit, other people decide what you work on and when you are done - usually when no new features are requested, you have no competition, and you have absolutely saturated your market. This rarely ever happens so you always have something propelling you.
The biggest failure most engineers encounter is they build things nobody asked for. They build products without customers lined up, for markets that do not currently exist, with only feedback from themselves. This is because they built the product for fun thinking they were building it for profit.
The line between the two is very easy to blur - especially when reading OP's blog where he genuinely sounds like he had fun building his projects, but I guarantee there was also a lot of very unfun background work done in the name of profit.
Edit: Don't just take my guarantee for it, read about his challenges for One Item Store https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store
The author seems to be batting an insanely high average for just building things and having them actually get some traction, and be exit-able.
> When I started this mission, I had a big list of project ideas that I'd built up in my phone. Maybe you have one of those lists too.
> Two years later, I've realised a lot of these initial ideas were pretty terrible.
> It's a paradox, but I've found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.
Funnily enough, I went the other way and started sharing my large list of ideas with others (I send 3 non-terrible ones to subscribers every week[0]). Of course, running a mailing list and sharing the ideas was one of the ideas...
At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing. Knowing you should take the month to build before you do, but reading the post it feels like maybe bounding initial development time sometimes can work in lieu of validating the market.
[EDIT] - please see previous discussion about the mailing list as well![1] -- it's released every sunday night.
[EDIT2] - is anyone having trouble sending email to the author? I'm using protonmail and wanted to get in touch but I can't -- email looks to be no bueno for proton mail. I guess I'll either try thunderbird or twitter.
[EDIT3] - Looks like proton mail does not like emoji email addresses currently... Thunderbird happily sent.
[EDIT4] - Nope, nvm I'm getting a mail lookup error (hn strips the emoji)...
> Delivery to tinyprojects@.gg failed with error: MX lookup error
[0]: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388399
If it does fit or is close to fitting, great! If it doesn't fit, oh well, not much is lost (after all, it is a tiny project).
Market validation - especially for online products and services - is indeed incredibly important, but not many people like to write about it because it is actually very drab and a tiny bit audacious.
His market validation - you are seeing it. It is a submission to Hacker News.
Ok ok, that is a given, but the author alludes to other various ways he gets feedback and validation for his products. He also talks about how well his products were received on Product Hunt and you can also follow him on Twitter.
My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
Yup you're totally right. All these ideas really seemed like things that would trend on HN (but that's easy to say in retrospect, getting to the front page isn't quite so easy!).
> My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
This is one thing I know I'm terrible at. I barely use any SEO tools properly, I should probably just hurry up and pay for ahrefs or whatever already.
I don't think the concept of checking backlinks even clicked properly in my head until I read your explanation, thank you very much.
Ignore all the spammy websites that usually regurgitate random links. Focus on the sites with high DR that don't have the "NoFollow" attribute. These are the hard-hitting websites that boost your domain for SEO purposes and can be good places to get feedback on your own product.
One of these days, I need to sit down and write th origin story of Murmel, and how I came to it.
Cheers!
Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?
I know LLCs allow for pass-through taxation and you don't have to file as a business, but I get frozen by the idea that generating a few hundred dollars in revenue from some silly side project means I have to spend hours/days of my time the next Spring figuring out how to properly pay taxes on it.
The fact that you're asking this question means you're interested in launching things. If so, the cliched, true advice is: launch.
If you want practical advice: I run a one-person LLC in the US. Taxes on a few hundred dollars are nothing to worry about.
For inevitable naysayers: my manager's advice doesn't mean you shouldn't ever plan or prepare. Just that when your chances of success are very low, don't worry too much about the repercussions of success. I applied to grad school, and didn't get in. My career continued on just fine.
Once you get to the scale of a few thousand dollars a year, you can file what's called a Form 1040 Schedule C which allows you to declare your business income, claim expenses and other deductions, and include it in your taxable income. For that scale it's an extra 10 minutes with your tax software or even by hand, as long as you keep good records, and you're done.
The point at which an LLC or other more formal business structure makes sense is fuzzy and can have different ranges depending on the business, but typically you probably don't need or want to invoke the expense of a CPA until you're making more than six figures (or if you've taken outside investment, obv).
While the IRS likely won't audit you for a few hundred dollars (US), there are laws about what you have to do. You don't need to become a tax expert, but knowing the very basics so you don't run afoul of any laws and end up owing some $$ or penalties is probably worth taking a bit of time to do at the end of the year.
In the end, I decided to launch all my side-projects for free (sometimes I outright include a "non commercial" clause because I don't see why somebody should profit off my free work). I find this reduces all the project related stress to a fraction.
Put it on Schedule 1 line 8z and work on making it a few thousand dollars for next time!
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040s1.pdf
But yes, I was thinking of that ('entrepreneur's relief' I believe) too - it solves this problem nicely: don't worry about it until you know you're making money.
(And also other problems like 'hang on I sold some old crap on eBay.. was that income')
(Entrepreneurs' Relief was a thing that let you get reduced capital gains of 10% on up to £10m of proceeds from selling certain types of shareholdings or assets of a personal business. It's now called Business Asset Disposal Relief and has been decimated to just £1m.)
There are lawyers and some very shady businesses, that sweep through the web and report anyone who doesn't comply to any kind of law. They actually make money with this. When i had a small business, i've got a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer of a "competitor" because a single link in my imprint page wasn't clickable. I guess that's why so many people are afraid of starting a business...
All your costs are tax deductions, whether you incorporate or not. The incorporation cost is negligible and you can ignore everything about a local/foreign llc registration simply because the consequences are improbable and inconsequential, just make the llc in the best states. If your employer is withholding any taxes, you’ll get so much more of it back because you have so many deductions now.
If you make any revenue its easy to count.
Your standing in society is based on gross revenue, your tax footprint is a fraction of net revenues. Its low key perfect. Net operating losses are the greatest of all time.
In addition, You get massively disproportionate security and anonymity by operating under entities you created. And you can prove product market fit in private and then inherit all the credit for it when it works.
Both offer levels of privacy, Wyoming’s aren't codified they just dont care (and will help you), there all you have to do is just have anyone else sign the organization documents. Your registered agent or your lawyer can.
The LLC (and other entity types) increases the deterrent of this ever affecting you.
The LLC specifically has some theoretical weaknesses, but the reason it is a deterrent is because it deters people from spending more money to find out about those weakenesses, and it also increases the odds that people won't be able to know where you are or serve you properly. The more expensive it is to find out anything, the less potential aggrieved people will bother, and "finding out" for them could mean "even harder to create liability and a payout", so they get bounced, or deterred, from trying.
Then I became older and just started caring less about doing things "the right way". It was liberating.
To summarize someone else's better point: worry about this problem when you have it. In the mean time worry about problems you have right now.
LMAO. The emoji emails is really cool though. [1]
[1] https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji
Suppose he'll just make a tinydomainmanager.com or something.
Also Indiehackers.
Still I imagine it's hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.
* https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-a...
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
I build a lot of tiny projects and Ben (original blog post) is inspiring me to get them better organized.
That's waaay more than your avg office worker though.
Incredible comment overall but this line was particularly Woah!
What advice would have for solo founders of a side project (that later becomes a full time day job) in terms of evolving to a large team?
First hire(s), things to look out for, etc.
I’d find this insight incredible! Hope I’m not asking too much. But such an incredible story you have.
A little over a year ago I submitted this Ask HN, which helps shed light on my situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039701
It is now a year later and I'm still wondering the same thing as I was back then (as in, I haven't changed up my work setup at all / haven't hired people). I do rely on contractors here and there, but it's rare.
I quite enjoy the peace and quiet that comes with no employees. These days I just do a bit of focused work each day, prioritise spending time with my family, and enjoy sticking to my daily training regiment (the latter has been a key aspect of my life ever since I started my entrepreneurial journey).
Every time I consider hiring people for the sake of more growth, I find myself asking if it'll be worth it, and whether I'll regret it.
I doubt I'd be able to enjoy the work/life balance I currently have if I were responsible for managing people at scale.
Perhaps I'm being narrow-minded here, but it's good to receive affirmation from someone whose done it all before.
Cheers mate.
Some of them are very driven by the stress of management, and seek it out. Their mentality is that a work situation isn't worthwhile if it isn't pushing you to your limit.
But they're the minority. I feel like you either know that you're this kind of person or you're not.
The rest feel burdened by their situation, and would happily trade for yours 300 days out of the year. They not-irregularly make comments, in private to friends, along the lines of "sometimes I wonder if I'm living life wrong? maybe I should be in the park with my kids instead of on the nth investor call or one-on-one with a direct report".
Like most questions, I think you can answer this with a mixture of experiments and introspection. You say you've manage contractors, for example.
Do you ever feel like you wish you had more responsibility for their lives? The urge to give mentorship is real, do you wish you could do that in a professional setting?
You can probably find ways to scratch those itches that are outside your company, too, for what it's worth.
You're in a good position where you get to "choose your own adventure", so you should experiment with it! Document your feelings, find somebody to talk it through with, iterate towards a happier spot. There's always ways to test your curiosities without sacrificing everything, if you get clever with it. :)
I've been through a number of startups and there are jobs that I really really dislike down to my core.
My 2nd startup I did the CEO role and i hated every day of it -- I really respect those who can spend day after day in investor meetings, sales calls, marketing catch-ups; that person isn't me.
My 3rd startup I decided to stick to technology - with a heavy dose of management - and partner with someone who could do the above.
Startups are already barely tolerable as it is, you can at least help yourself a little by being able to focus on the areas that bring a little joy into your life.
Can you recall any specific thing you did that brought you success?
The other person literally said they tried like 50 things and you two haven't launched any yet.
You have no idea and irregardless of evidence that you have gathered if something will work or not. Based on this, it would be very bad to work on something for a year without knowing or getting frequent feedback (cash sent to your bank account by customers).
So the only way is to treat this like poker. You place several bets over a period of time (max 1 month). This way you launch 12 projects in a year and have a better success chance of hitting something that actually works. You have to place bets until the card is right, then you can go all-in.
In general I believe the idea of "work on what you love" to be awful advice; I have found that I get deep satisfaction out of working on something that someone is willing to pay for, even if that means that sometimes it is a headache and I hate doing some of the things that need to be done. Once you accept that those things will continue to exist and continue to need to be done, and it's not going to be bliss, those things seem to matter less.
Choosing good idea worthy of implementation and finding enough inspiration to finish it is another matter.
Unfortunately, from what I've experienced, this doesn't align with the typical US lifestyle minimum?
Thanks!
My amateurish approach is to jot down every idea in a single line of a text file, then walk away. If the same idea or topic strikes me again, I give it a separate text file and write some copy that might go on the product page, together with links to related stuff, screenshots, etc. Then, after another few weeks and only if I still believe in the idea I come up with more details, perhaps do some light coding, brand ideas, register domains, etc. Then (You guessed it), I wait another few weeks or even months and if it passes my still-relevant check I start working on it on the side of my existing, well, side project. The challenge these days is when to pull the plug or go all-in since the market, interests and attention shifts so quickly that it's tough to adapt without losing temper. Doesn't get easier as you get I older.
I feel like I often hang up on if something should be done or if it is something that will be "successful". So it's cool to hear stories where the goal isn't the financial success of X project -- the goal is the journey and it's a bonus if it's financially beneficial.
Thanks again, know that it helped me to read this comment!
But let me tell you, if my current project works out, I'll never have to work a W2 job again!
I suppose I naturally gravitate to problem domains with little market potential. I don't know why.
I go into more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221
For example, I am currently working on a project to send personalized slack messages in bulk. But I then became really interested in the idea of automatic podcast transcription using GPT-3. So I ended up just one night banging out a prototype on jupyter notebook and it turns out the auto transcription was pretty bad and expensive, but at least I know now. So now I don't feel as bad and I can focus on the boring aspects of building this slack plugin, like accepting payments.
The book "Refuse to choose" was really enlightening to me, it talks about "scanners", people that have this attribute. I felt very seen and it taught me that this style of working can be an incredible strength.
https://www.amazon.ca/Refuse-Choose-Interests-Passions-Hobbi...
He said great artists have one thing in common, they finish projects. It's OK to have a workshop full of experiments, but you must finish projects.
I've always taken it to mean that forcing your self to do that last 20% of a project is the only way to learn how to make something great.
But, it's a CC TLD, in fact it's .kz who I still carry a scar or two from when they issued some domains starting with "-": you know what happens when you "dig -yo.tld"? OWASP applies to domain names.
However, the RFCs for the actual _protocol_ declare a label can contain "any octet", so you can use and abuse this in FQDNs under your control and the internet police won't come to get you. "poop".example.com would be fine if you control example.com (either as a quoted string or as an emoji), so would "rm -rf *.example.com".
> One other weird downside is that .. I sometimes catch myself thinking "should I build something just for the upvotes".
Is the author saying the attention from social media sites like Hacker News sometimes seems like motivation enough to build the next project?
Deploy to a VPS on DO or Linode