Show HN: Trade your abandoned side projects on Borderline.biz | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Trade your abandoned side projects on Borderline.biz

borderline.biz

187 pointskhet36 comments

Congrats on shipping! This is a great idea. I know that a lot of peeps here on HN (myself included) have a bunch of side projects languishing in various stages of completion. Best to trim it down and focus on 1 or 2, and let go of the rest.

Is it possible to show the technology stack in the listings? I see you collect it in the Project submission form. Doing so would help prospective buyers / barters better identify projects that they would want to acquire, based on the technology stack that they are familiar with.

It's nice to sell off a project and move on to whatever really interests you.

Regarding the tech stack, it slipped my mind but I will be adding that to the listings so you can buy projects with code written in a language you're comfortable with.

Update: Added the tech stack! It's nice seeing what languages people are building with.

Love the inclusion of the stack. It makes it easy to see if there are any projects I want to pick up as a feature addition to our product.

OP here. Really surprised at the quality of listings. I love how organic these projects are. A few hidden gems:

1) https://www.youraudiotour.com/

2) https://www.tenantupdate.com/

3) https://fauxbuy.com/

4) https://geoquizbot.com/

5) https://getbetterluck.com/

6) https://codeinperson.com/

Nice project, good work!

What is Barter? Why is it not described on the site?

It would be useful to list the number of users each project has.

It would be useful if you (eventually) split the list by price.

I don't have any money but I'd be interested to look at the new offers up to 1000 usd others might limit their interest to things over 100 k.

I will probably forget to visit your site. You should have a box where one can get an email with new projects from X to Y usd.

And an rss feed or json api that can be configured similarly.

http://borderline.biz/rss/0-1000

http://borderline.biz/json/10000-100000 etc

Have endless auctions, take 1% deposits for bids, let the thing run until the developer accepts a bid.

Have a widget with the highest bid for the project for the developer to embed in his project, linked to bl.

Give each project its own page/permalink on the website.

Good luck

Great idea! As someone that will be checking in periodically for projects to buy (instead of listing my own), I have a small suggestion: if you could provide topics or categories to projects (or let submitters define them), I would _love_ to be able to subscribe to just some subset of projects. For example, I'm only really looking to adopt projects in a super niche space (helping writers write) and would be way more likely to buy one if I see it, which seems less likely if I get a blanket email of all projects submitted.

Good luck!

Probably should add a contact form. so people's emails aren't exposed.

Second this. Can you do this? Looks like email addresses were already harvested.

Not sure why anyone would buy abandoned projects that are finished. Unless I guess you have a client looking for the same thing.

To me, "abandoned" spells "confirmed failure". Or "solutions in search of problems".

It takes marketing and sales to make a product successful unless you are very, very lucky. Many developers aren't particularly passionate about marketing, they are passionate about development.

If a business / idea / promotion / marketing type person is looking for a product, this would be the target demographic I would assume.

Well, this seems like it could be quite useful in future. Certainly like the concept of selling or trading side projects you don't want to run any more, and heck, given how heavily tied success is to marketing skill and what not, I think we may see quite a few successful startups formed by buying projects here.

I'll definitely keep looking to see what interesting stuff comes up here.

Great initiative. Would've gone for a .com rather than this horrible .biz though.

.biz .com .blah, why does it matter? You just click on a link and it takes you there.

I think pricing a project could be pretty tough and taking a quick look at your site I didn't see any guides or advice on pricing, it might be worth offering some direction to potential sellers.

This would be interesting for academic science. I have a number of unfinished or nearly finished projects that have never been published.

Tinder-like app for finding coauthors?

I'm actually working on something like this for finding creative partners of all sorts. :)

Does anything like this for open source projects exist? I'm interested in finding unfinished, abandoned open source projects in the technology of my choice that I can take over and steer in the direction that I want. And of course without changing the license.

Just in case you aren't aware, another competitor in this space is flippa:

https://flippa.com/

It's probably a good idea to learn from what worked for them/what they iterated to as well

Flippa is filled with MFA sites and I find really hard to filter signal from noise there.

What's "MFA" here? Many furry animals? Multi factor auth?

I believe it stands for Marketing Funnel Automation. Basically sites that suck people in and point them to an affiliate link to earn a little bit. Could be wrong.

Made for Adsense

https://www.onlinewritingjobs.com/links/what-is-an-mfa-site-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scraper_site

EDIT: Added wikipedia link

As joeriel pointed out, MFA stands for "Made For AdSense".

To elaborate just a bit, these are web sites whose sole purpose for existing is to display ads. Instead of the "traditional route" where site owners decide to show ads on their existing sites to generate a few bucks of revenue, somebody sat down and started coming up with a list of ideas or topics for web sites to create just to display ads. Think "we need some ads on the site" versus "we need some content to wrap around the ads".

If you've ever gotten a phone call from an unknown number and typed it into Google in an attempt to find out who was calling, well, you almost certainly found several examples of these sites right there on the first page of the results.

These sites are usually low-quality and light on the content -- which is very often just some existing data they've found (e.g., gathered from public datasets or scraped from somewhere else) and dumped into an SQL database in order to generate 100s or 1000s of "dynamic" pages. Many times they're based on some "long tail" search terms/keywords.

There are exceptions, of course, but I think you get the point. Personally, I hate these types of web sites; there's enough "shit" on the Internet already.

I wouldn't label Flippa a competitor. Flippa is filled with nothing but scammers. Who want to downvote me go right ahead. I stand by what I said.

Never bought anything, but I've sold sites and domains there with no problems.

Same.

Cool! I've been also running something similar for a few years.

https://www.sideprojectors.com

The Link http://www.nolink.yet.com/ under xilften doesn't work :)

I like the concept! Small suggestion: you should hide the emails of the owners and use a contact form.

This looks like a fine idea, I'll certainly check in periodically for a few months at least to browse. Good luck!

Congrats on shipping! I've bookmarked this site for the next time I'm looking for a sideproject.

Kind of reminds me of offload.io

Definitely plenty of supply for this anyways :)

Congrats on shipping.

big up! lots of us with obscure projects will be happy to have a place to give them life, even if it becomes someone else' baby.

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