People who are succesful did 99 mediocre side projects before they hit the jackpot. But it still took them tons of time and energy. Very often a overlooked by-product which was developed over night and benefitted from all prior experiences will be the cash cow while the main project which took 12 months still hasn't won any users.
Most stop at some point because it's just tough, especially the mental part.
This. Nobody tells you this part. I've read the blogs of several successful side-projectors and independently came to this conclusion a couple of years ago. Even Tom Preston-Werner had a bunch of side-projects that went nowhere (he wrote about it a while back) before GitHub. So also Dennis Crowley (FourSquare) wrote about his side-projects, incl. Dodgeball (college project?), which was a pre-cursor to FourSquare.
EDIT: Found an AMA that Tom did here on HN in 2010. Some interesting questions about doing side-projects while being employed full-time.
=> Ask Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder of GitHub, anything Today, Mon 18 Oct 2010. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804443
This x100000. This is fundamentally it; just like how we love to talk about 10,000 hours and targeted practice, so too can we extend this concept to startups. You just have to throw (and attempt) a bunch of ideas at the wall until one of them sticks, and learn along the way.
I used to get so bent out of shape that my side project wasn't a massive success or that I'm not a young prototypical YC founder straight out of college on the fast track to entrepreneurship. When I took a step back, realized that most founders (even outside of the tech bubble) are older than 35, and have tried (and failed) at a lot of different startups...you then embrace that it's just all about executing and learning from as many projects as possible. It takes out a lot of the stress and anxiety about succeeding, and instead using your side projects as practice to get you to that great idea in your future.
My personal examples:
Launched Selenium as an open source project in 2004. Founded Sauce Labs Inc ("Selenium in the cloud") in 2008. (Sauce makes roughly ~$25MM a year now. https://www.inc.com/profile/sauce-labs)
Launched Tapster (then called "Bitbeambot") as an open source project in 2011. Founded Tapster Robotics, Inc. in 2015. (Not disclosing revenue at the moment, but still going strong!)
To echo some other comments, I also have many other side-projects (some posted to GitHub, but even more unpublished) that never went anywhere. Success is a combination of luck, timing, ABC (Always Be Creating), stubbornness/persistence, and getting feedback from as many people as possible.
I find it fascinating how little love this part of software dev can get with respect to both developer time allocation and department budgeting (hence making free to use important for most users) so Sauce Labs revenue is all the more impressive. Tapster is very cool - working on something with a cool factor like that makes it easier to get attention as I'm discovering now with a new project I'm working on (unrelated to testing).
I've worked on tons of side projects before this (most unsuccessful, some with some success - busmapper.co.uk, donothingfor2minutes.com). My advice would definitely be to launch early and improve things over time.
ipinfo() {
curl ipinfo.io/$1
echo
} $ curl ipinfo.io
{
"ip": "73.222.35.113",
"hostname": "c-73-222-35-113.hsd1.ca.comcast.net",
"city": "Mountain View",
"region": "California",
"country": "US",
"loc": "37.3885,-122.0741",
"org": "AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC",
"postal": "94041"
}
Of course it's now evolved past that point. You can signup for an access token, we offer additional data sets (carrier detection, hosted domain details, ip type etc), and we've done a ton of work on infrastructure to handle over 300 million API req/day at very low latencies and without any stability issues, but simplicity and really focusing on developers is what I think helped with the initial growth.I call it the "Stackoverflow Effect" :) See => How to get client's IP address using JavaScript only https://stackoverflow.com/q/391979/325521
That question has over 1/2 MILLION views over an 8 year period, and is still very active almost every day.
Creator of ipinfo.io has posted his solution with link back somewhere in the middle / bottom, and still manages to get a lot of referrals from there. He wrote about it here at HN few weeks ago. Here's that thread : "How I Took an API Side Project to 250M Daily Requests (ipinfo.io)" => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14678473
I have since then managed to get some funding and have been working on it more seriously for the past 4 months (since may 2017). In two weeks I will have another closed alpha-demo that is then going to be used to produce a video for the landing page, and opened to the public if there is no big bashing from my zen target audience friends.
It does seem like a huge desert to cross. Motivation comes and goes. In the meantime I managed to kill my desire to feature creep it to death and learned a lot about the fine art of listening/ignoring the target audience requests. I know for sure that my approach for my next project is going to be completely different than my current one. But in the meantime the rent is due :)
The landing page: https://www.pixnit.com
My blog with some thoughts on the bootstrapping experience: http://www.hugodaniel.pt
Illustrator has a similar feature called shape builder. You can create new objects from intersections and such.
Illustrator is an amazing tool, I have seen a few use cases of that feature in logo drawing tutorials. My main differentiation points with Illustrator (and sketch) are:
* Web based
* Grid based (there is always a grid bellow that you can use to create patterns)
* Free (right now the export to svg is the only planned payed feature, I hope to make it enough to cover my cost of living, maybe I will add pro accounts to those that need to produce non CC0 stuff if there is audience for it, but I will need to pay a lawyer to help me with that feature if it comes to it)
Unfortunately my macbook is old and does not support WebGL.
I am using a lot of WebWorkers for the rendering. The code is using a mix of SVG and Canvas.
I don't know if I can explain it here in a comment. Roughly in the final passes I am preprocessing SVG paths into Path2D's[0] that then get rendered into an offscreen canvas. (they get cached)
The rendering code keeps 4 offscreen canvases, one for the layers bellow the current layer, one for the current layer, one for the layers above the current layer, and finally one for the HUD (the grid lines and zoom info).
These offscreen canvases are then rendered into many final canvases on the DOM in different ways (to do splitting animations, like row splitting or column splitting that happen to allow the UI to react to some specific user interactions like editing a grid element).
This way the rendering is smooth with simultaneous users on the same project on my old hardware.
I am planning to package this specific rendering part into npm and release it soon.
For my next project, I plan to build an alternative to Disqus which respects users' privacy. I removed Disqus from my blog a while due to the 2 MB junk it loads and sends tracking data to 10+ sites. I used to receive a few comments, so I thought I would build myself an alternative to Disqus and maybe turn it into a SaaS if there's demand for such a product. Any interest for a $10/month privacy respecting Disqus alternative + an open source code base?
I expect it to take me 2 to 3 weeks to build it. As you build more projects, you end up with a lot of reusable components, so it gets easier to build out the MVP. The real challenge for developers is to get users. This is something I don't have much experience with, so let's see how it goes.
My most successful side-project has been the one where I didn't start out by using design patterns or TDD or fancy fun new languages as we do at my full-time job.
Instead, I spewed code vomit on the virtual floor of a tiny VPS, wrote most of it via SSH, and felt shame when users started using it because holy hell if they only knew what was underneath all that.
But ... that MVP generates income. Not quit-my-job income. But it's steady, and doesn't require a lot of changes. I plan on rebuilding it soon, as I need a better code base to handle upcoming plans. However, that embarrassingly messy hodgepodge has been running for a year, making money.
Good luck!
I wanted to learn Django and wanted to start with something fairly easy. I don't really have any idea how and where to promote it, didn't get much attention in my `Show HN` thread and most subreddits remove it because of the affiliate links to amazon.
Other than that it was a fun experience and at least I can say that Django is a great framework to work with!
We had the interactive mind maps as JSON already however we needed to display them on the web in a nice interface so we made a react component to render the JSON to the screen.
https://github.com/learn-anything/react-mindmap
Overall it took about a month to do the whole thing and get a working prototype, the search engine improved a lot since then though.
Would it make sense for your app to also link topics to distance learning universities ?
I mean you could contact them first then talk about a commission fee, if someone joins their course they should pay you
The same thing could be done with coursera and edX.
The reality is that not every concept is going to get the low hanging fruit, and for many people real life gets in the way. Plus, for some people the journey of learning is just as important as launching the product.
It might be worth considering that you shouldn't stress out if it takes longer than the conventional advice might dictate.
It only took me a day or two to get https://www.dailylore.com up and running because of it.
Building a website is not the most painful part, promotion and getting traffic are the hardest, you have to be very determined. keep up the good work, don't give up.
anyone has any good advice on marketing?
For me, it was an e-book [0] that I wanted to write to teach others about React. The idea was to learn React while building an application that is more complex than a Todo Application.
So I took the first 3 months to write the initial draft - only 90 pages. I released it on Leanpub as an unfinished book, because it was painfully hard to keep going. Yet the community seemed to like it. It confirmed me being on the right track and my motivation went up again.
Since then I iterated 4 times to improve and enrich the learning experience and "released" it multiple times. I keep it updated to the recent library versions, best practices and new techniques with the help of the open source community. Now it has over 170 pages and over 11.000 downloads.
What helped in my case: Release early and improve/iterate based on the feedback.
Compare career levels across companies - http://www.levels.fyi
You cannot develop your way out of a marketing problem.
There will ALWAYS be technical problems to solve but it's all irrelevant if no one is using your product. Long development time also tends to create a familiarity with your product that users likely will not have, possibly ever.
I am a huge fan of Steve Blank's How to build a startup (which is free on udacity) https://www.udacity.com/course/how-to-build-a-startup--ep245
After the initial prototype, it generally takes another 3 to 4 months to build out a full fledged app that I can offer to the masses. It doesn't stop after that though. There is always more to develop and improve including a lot of re-factoring.
I currently have 4 SaaS products on the market and another one in the works.
Honestly, I don't really understand it when people say they have a hard time coming up with ideas. Ideas are all around you if you are willing to pay attention and look around. IMO ideas are easy, taking action is the hard part.
I tend to look outside of the tech sector and try to even stay away from things I am interested in. I have learned the hard and costly way that my interests don't make me money. I pay attention to un-sexy, niche markets or subsets of larger markets/products. A few markets I am currently tapped into are:
- Niche learning platform mainly advertised to homeschoolers
- Math tutoring
- Niche real estate product
- Roofers
I also run 2 ecommerce sites selling niche products. Products that are really not on anyone's radar because the volume isn't there and it isn't a huge market. I get 30 to 50 orders per month and net on average $200 per order, so it is a nice passive revenue stream.
I literally have pages of ideas jotted down that as time permits I will dig into more. Lots of ideas end up getting removed from the list after I do more research and see the market isn't right or that it will take too much time or money getting it going.
That's the rub right there. "Ideas" are easy. Viable ideas you can't shoot down in 5 minutes of thinking about the problem are very, very difficult to find. Then again, it can be hard to tell if an idea is unviable or if you're just rationalizing your way into binge watching netflix for the umpteenth night in a row.
As one man show I try to scope small and grow slow within my capacity.
Also i have tons of prior experience in software development. Not want to make it sound like I just did that and whoosh
Make sure you have some form of analytics from the start so you can see what pages people are going to
Nobody uses it but it was a good learning experience.
Shameless plug, if you or anyone you know enjoys The Bachelor series then this product is for them.
I did everything myself. I have a number of great features in the works but for now I purposely want to keep the scope very focused around a core set of functionality so I don't mentally overload myself.
At some point I hope to afford to engage with a visual designer because I really think that having a great visual brand can make a real difference in whether or not potential customers landing on your home decide the signup or not.
When an application sends transactional messages, software teams often integrate with some transactional email service (SendGrid, Mailgun, etc). However, these services primarily solve an infrastructure problem, i.e. the problem of not having to setup and look after your own SMTP server. These services typically don't solve a content problem. Many applications these days send both email and SMS (and if there is mobile app, also mobile push). Somehow we're totally OK with using any of the MailChimps of this world for promotional messages (email templates) but when it comes to our transactional messaging we're fine to just stick message text in our source code.
When a team grows, product people will want to have easy access to the message text, not just for marketing/promotional email, because they will want to tweak it constantly. In a way you can think of Postways as a message management system.
Onboarding users has been slow. One of the main problems I have run into is that when software guys look at this they say something like "Uh, I can build this is a weekend" (typical developer under-estimation) and business owners find it to technical and refer judgement to their lead dev.
From the users I do have it actually took a while for them to "get it", I had to spend quite a bit of time helping them to onboard but once they were in, the feedback was mostly along the lines of; of course, this makes total sense..
One last thing, I'm not competing with any of the existing transactional services. To use Postways you need to BYO your own infrastructure. Reasons, It wasn't a problem I wanted to solve and I figured most people already use some service for their transactional messaging, making it easier to onboard them. E.g. Postways fully supports SMTP integration, so if you're already using Mandrill, or what ever, you can just keep using that.
Start your blogging and social media ASAP, because it takes some time for SEO to kick in. Get collecting emails so you can launch to an audience. Don't leave it until after launch, you will regret it.
Our SaaS is at http://blogenhancement.com and the blog is at http://blogenhancement.com/blog/ if you want to take a look at what we've been up to.
Cheers, and good luck in your journey!
It is (unsurprising if you know us) a unreal front end with the back end hosting on Google cloud, we're using gke, datastore and cloudsql , with gae web front ends. We're coding in js, c++, Python and Java.
plug: http://fracturedveil.com/?m=hn
And yes, sometimes it feels glacial and I wish I could clone myself and move things forward much faster. But I actually like my day job, so...yeah.
I'll echo the rest of the folks in here: Launch early, and add features as you go. I'd rather launch at 85% than never launch at 100%
Also, there is a fine line between an initial launch which is missing a few fancy features, and an embarrassing clusterfuck. So make sure that the site/app is totally functional, and as bug free as you can be. Then you can get to work on adding all the bells and whistles which are buzzing around your head!
I'd argue it wouldn't have taken the full 6 months if this had been my sole effort, but with a full-time job, a young family to support, and finishing another site-project for a friend, I think 6 months isn't bad.
Now going on two years of development (just me) and loving every minute of it. Yes, it's painfully slow at times. Finding users is really freakin' hard. But the satisfaction of people using something I made makes it all worth it.
Marketing is like pulling teeth for me. I need to get better at it.
Latency at. You know, as latency at this location. And of course latency wasn't available on more prominent domains.
As someone who is thinking about attempting to monetize some side projects, should I incorporate a company before I begin? Or is it ok to just publish things on my own?
I only incorporated my last project (Tapster) when a major European car company ordered 10 of my robots. Until that point, for two years, it was just a hobby/side-project and revenue was included in my taxes as a sole proprietorship. But a real order from a big company made me take sales/support/development/liability issues more seriously, so that's when I incorporated. Incorporation will probably also be required if you take angel/pre-seed/seed/accelerator funding. But again, bigger issue is making a product and finding customers. Don't get bogged down in paperwork issues until you've found a customer willing to pay.
That was back in June or so. Since then, have made many many changes based on user feedback so the current iteration is more like the cumulative work of 6 months.
I built a site to teach people to code by building projects: https://enlight.ml
Maybe about 1-2 weeks actual development time.