Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Big | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Side Projects Gone Big

229 pointsSomeoneAtHN155 comments

I've heard many of you love to create side projects for fun, but I also heard that few of them actually took off and grow into a profitable business. So feel free to list if you have any. Statistics will be welcomed as well!

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I started both Gravatar and GitHub as side projects. I sold Gravatar to Automattic after several years (though it was never profitable and became quite painful to run during the last year that I owned it). GitHub has been profitable since the day we started charging money (6 months after we started working on it) and we are now up to thirteen employees without having taken any funding.

In both cases it was the viral element of the idea that made it possible for me to turn what was once a side project into something more. If you can't spend all day every day working on it, you need something that will grow even when you're not watering it.

Just to establish the baseline and not to over-excite everyone - how many side projects you had that did not work out? :)

This is a hard question to answer. I work on a lot of side projects in the form of open source libraries and whatnot. It's possible that any of those could blossom into a business, but I've never really pursued many of them.

As for other business projects:

* I tried to resell knives and other camping gear on eBay once. I called it Wolfcastle Munitions. That was a disaster. I'm not built to do retail.

* I had an idea called Project Mothership that was going to be Rails hosting (before anyone was doing dedicated Rails hosting and much like what Planet Argon became) but I abandoned it after I realized that I'd lose my mind if my job became network operations management.

* I wanted to do a climbing sight called Microbomber that would list and categorize climbing routes across the world with photos and reviews and whatnot.

* I also thought about making custom gloves and coats for hardcore outdoor activities (wilderness hiking and skiing, etc). I have a near impossible time finding gloves that fit me well and are legitimately waterproof, and I've still never owned a winter coat that I've loved. I was also going to use the name Microbomber for this effort.

There are plenty more that I've long forgotten.

But, all of these ideas (except the first) I only spent very small effort on. I like to put small efforts towards a lot of ideas and then see what catches. That way I don't spend a lot of time and effort that is later wasted. Knowing when to abandon something and when to dive in is the hardest part, but it's essential. Call it what you want: intuition, savvy, or instinct. I just call it seeing the world objectively and not overvaluing every little idea you happen to have.

Do you feel like you truly tested any of these ideas? If so how?

I have built something that I think is good, but has not taken off. I don't think it is a bad idea, I think it is an untested idea. I would hate to drop it without anyone ever seeing it.

With a lot of effort I think they all could have been successful. But when you have to work your day job to make a living, you need something you can bootstrap on the side without investing huge amounts of unrewarded effort up front. That's why I like to start a lot of things and then see what happens. Sometimes I give up on an idea simply because it becomes uninteresting (e.g. retail). With both Gravatar and GitHub, it was almost immediately obvious that they were ideas worth pursuing. They got people excited, and I could easily gauge the interest by tracking signups. If you're not seeing signups, it means something is wrong and you'll have to decide how much effort you're willing to invest in order to fix that something. Without knowing the details it's hard for me to give any more insight.

Have you tried Oakley gloves? Some are fairly waterproof (and yet breathe), and they seem durable and well fitting, at least to me.

I've got 11 out of 12 that are failures. If you want to see them ask. And a few that have been winners. I'd build products whether they made me money or not--we're at a lucky time in history when the thing I (we?) like to do as fun and as a hobby is sometimes also really commercially viable.

Yeah, that's what makes the internet a great place to start business. You don't have the risk to lose tons of money if your business falis.

That was a great topic to discuss. I've created an extra HN thread, Side Projects Gone Dealpooled, for those of you who are interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772903

I really like this question! How many failures does it take before a success?

None. It is not necessary to fail to succeed.

If you think, the idea is good, give it a shot. See what's the response. If it works, continue else quit.

Key thing is to know when to quit.

That is the key thing. I think perseverance is important, but perseverance through iteration. How long would you give a new web startup to reach 1,000 users? 10,000 users? before you considered it a failure or necessary to quit.

Great to hear that! Just an extended question:

For both Gravatar and GitHub, did you put in any marketing efforts and money while they were still in the "side project" stage?

Not really. I didn't have much money to use for marketing so I just focussed on getting it in front of people that would be interested and spread the word. That meant sending emails to people I didn't know and introducing myself. Sometimes that's all it takes!

A bit off track but just curious to know if sending out emails, introducing yourself and your product, played major role in marketing.

I mean, do people take it seriously? I usually mark it as spam. may be it's just me.

Did you use any other methods for marketing your product?

http://notarycrm.com and http://mailfinch.com are doing pretty well for me. Still side projects but they're both profitable and steadily growing.

My rule of thumb: if you see a business using spreadsheets to manage something, there might be an opportunity there

Awesome rule of thumb Paul.

Now that I think about it, I think you planted the seed about that idea through one of your blog posts last year. Thanks! :)

Ha, really? This post I'm assuming: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/microsoft-excel-is-the-wo...

TONS of Micro opportunities here.

Yep, this is definitely the post I was referring to.

FWIW, I fundamentally believe that smart people tackling brick-and-mortar-businesses-using-spreadsheets will make obscene amounts of money over the long term. (Not only are my products examples of this but, few people know this about me, I actually bought a gas station earlier this year to force myself to feel the pain.)

For anyone thinking about doing anything like this, feel free to reach out - I want to help you. :)

Paul, have you found any significant points in the gas station business you think could be improved by leveraging soft-tech?

Abso-f*cking-lutely. :)

CRM: who's buying from me, what are they buying and what should I market to them so that I can make more money.

Inventory Management: what's in stock, what do I need to re-order, are my employees stealing from me?

I can keep going... :)

interesting. i'd love to hear more about this.

I'm sending you an email.

I maintain an in-house developed 'enterprise database app'. When someone suggests new additions to this app, I tell him/her to use Excel to test their idea for a few weeks first, and then ask again. This gives a pretty good idea what they really want, because if people have to track stuff themselves they'll do only the barest minimum, and that's eventually what should go into the enterprise application.

That is exactly what I do and it has worked out pretty well. If they don't use the Excel sheet, then I know they wouldn't much care to use my ERP module either. Saves time and resources.

I’m very impressed by mailfinch, the idea that someone will upload a file and address let you print and mail it still blow my mind. Now you’re making money on it, Great job guys!

For MailFinch, does it take a lot of time to operate since you have to print the paper out and mail it?

Yeah, it can get tedious and time consuming. Though, at this stage, I've got a pretty cool process hacked together (think temps, cronjobs and sweat) so I've gotten a lot of my own time back to work on other things.

So, pretty much all businesses? That's quite a market..

Not sure if you're bring sarcastic, but I'll bite.

Yes, but you need to peel off a specific problem within a given vertical. I bootstrapped both of these ideas and, because of the limitations that come with bootstrapping, I targeted them specifically.

MailFinch is on demand direct mail for real estate agents. Over time, companies that send a lot of invoices started using it too.

NotaryCRM is for notaries - plain and simple. Over time, it became apparent that signing companies were also looking for a solution that solved their specific pains.

I was a little bit of both. Thanks for the extra info!

Paul -- would love to hear a summary of what you did to market these sites. SEO? Direct marketing? Word of mouth? Online ads? What was your approach, and what did you learn?

Edit: I suppose one could read this post: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/distribution-distribution...

Happy to share... I think I'll write an entire blog post on this.

MailFinch: Cold calls and asking for referrals. NotaryCRM: lots of SEO (notice the "find a notary" directory and the theme of almost all of the blog posts)

For both, there was a lot of call-to-action testing (in terms of verbal calls to action during my phone/in-person conversations) and rapid iteration (breaking features down into the smallest chunks and deploying often).

More recently (like, a week ago) I built a really basic site to force myself to learn a little more about consumer-focused community building.

As with all of my ideas, making money comes a close second behind the most important thing to me: learning something new.

http://stormpulse.com was completely nights & weekends for the first couple years, but is now supporting two full-timers and growing. For stats on hours invested, traffic, and revenues, see: http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/1215873671/bootstrapping-stor...

Oh my god, talk about relentless.

You know what would be interesting: a photo capturing your wife/girlfriend's mood at the time beside each milestone :-)

Very insightful comment.

That's an epic bootstrapping post. Even though it's a bit of a reality check, it's also quite inspiring. It shows how far pure determination and persistence can take you!

Well done.

Thanks! I should add, however, that my next post in that vein is going to explain how much was timing and circumstances we couldn't have imagined.

Fantastic post! Just read through it all...truly inspiring.

submit this post! This is HN front page material.

I did, and it was, just not for very long. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1743533

Cool post. I must have missed it when it was on the front page.

There are a lot of side projects listed here which made it HUGE, not just big :) To lighten it up a little: I started http://uwrobot.com which is a small niche app for finding course openings for students at UW. I started this 2 years ago, and now over 25% of the entire undergraduate population at UW uses it, and in one academic quarter registration period, it is able to pay my rent for the year.

Its definitely not big, nor huge, but its very profitable. Just some motivation for those of you out there who have little side projects that just want to make a small side income.

I'm no expert, but it seems unintuitive to have to click 'course notifier' and then 'getting started' to actually get signed up. There should be a 'Start watching courses now' link on the homepage... Most people that go to that sight probably already know what it does and are just looking to sign-up.

I hate your little slide show. I was genuinely trying to read what it said, and I couldn't come close to keep up, nor could I press 'stop'.

Dude, I'm Civ08 so I didn't get to use your app, but choosing courses was a nightmare. I'm sure my brother uses you guys. Congrats!

Just a note, I got really exited when I saw this. I go to the University of Wisconsin, which is also referred to as UW. It took me a while to find out which "UW" it is referring to. It seems the only place that mentions it is in the FAQ. Perhaps you could put "University of Washington" on your homepage?

This doesn't fit in the tech startup realm at all, but I started doing martial arts for fun, got pretty good at it, got chosen to do the motion capture moves for the Mortal Kombat video games. Did that for 10 years. So I got paid to do that. I also did performances like shows, theater performances and corporate events etc. I would say it was nice money but definitely quit your job FU money. I also taught martial arts on top of my day job which means I got paid to exercise, a rarity in our tech geek community.

Are you Subzero, per the Reddit AMA?

Subzero, Raiden, and a few others.

I know hn isn't the place , but I an so completely jealous, and I think you're awesome.

Instapaper is the (or at least, my) defacto example - http://instapaper.com/

Two of my iPhone apps, Color Stream and Dayta have turned into profitable businesses, even though they were just pet projects (and still are).

I love Instapaper and bought the Pro version for the iPhone the minute it came out as I wanted to give back. Just introduced my wife to it too (as I thought it might be too much hard work for her to learn yet another toy of mine), she loves it!

Awesome, I had no idea Dayta and Instapaper were the same developer.

They aren't.

I use Instapaper on the iPad every day.

Basecamp was a side project for us.

I didn't know basecamp and started looking at your site; I really love the presentation except for one thing: the bit about the basecamp competitor founder saying blabla basecamp is the best is the "who uses it" page. When I read the part between parenthesis the whole thing really sounded to me like a phony message, and made me have a more negative look on the page.

Just wanted to let you know.

Could the person who downvoted me tell me why ? I merely expressed my opinion, to me this quote looks like a flaw on an otherwise great presentation of his project. Or am I not supposed to criticize projects here (I'm new to hacker news) ?

He was probably outraged to discover that you don't know the legend that is Jason Fried (37 Signals).

You should get used to this attitude, too -- even though 37 Signals's founders and advice are highly overrated, there are a lot of people who idolize it and take criticism of the group pretty personally. There is a really weird dynamic going on with that, it's hard for me to understand.

I can see where you're coming from. For people that don't know the history of intranets.com it seems a little odd. FWIW, intranets.com pre-dates basecamp and was acquired by WebEx many years ago.

How long did it take for Basecamp to take off and become profitable?

Basecamp was profitable fast. We were doing about $5000/month after the first 6 weeks. We only had a few people at the company so our overhead was really low.

That was very impressive. Did you guys just spread the word through friends and do a lot of marketing at first?

I really like your product (being a customer). So, when are you going to host it in France :) ? Because the only problem with basecamp is the load time around here :) But congratulations for this product and wish you the best.

Isn't everything you ever made a byproduct of ruby on rails anyway?

Nope, RoR is a byproduct of building basecamp.

Carbonmade http://carbonmade.com was a side project of our design studio before gaining enough traction to work on full-time.

I built Upcoming.org on the side from my day job just for fun, and I didn't quit my day job until it was acquired by Yahoo two years later. It was never a big revenue generator before acquisition, but ads covered server expenses and then some.

Forrst (http://forrst.com/) was a side project I built out of frustration in January. It's now a community of around 15k developers and designers and gets a healthy amount of traffic. Not quite profitable yet, but slowly gaining ground every month.

I saw you've got a good amount of advertisers on the site already (as well as the cabin). Is it because the cost of hosting & S3 that makes it still not profitable?

It's mainly my (meager) salary + the cost of a full time moderator that's standing in the way at present. S3 and hosting are pretty affordable in comparison.

Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) started out as a side project. It was literally just something fun for me to fill my time with until a handful of people encouraged me to actually try to build a business out of it. Within about 18 months of launching it was able to support me full-time.

During that 18 months, there were times where it was rather stressful to work full to part-time on another job and manage a web application that's supposed to be up 24x7.

However, I would definitely say that if anybody else is in that tough spot before your side project can support you full-time, it's definitely worth fighting through it.

Beautiful design! Nice work.

Mixpanel was some kind of side project.

When I left Slide, I was initially going to build a gaming company 6 months before gaming blew up. Unfortunately, I couldn't find myself building games because I wasn't staying up till 3-4 AM excited.

One night I scrapped it and started building Mixpanel strictly to learn how to scale systems since that was interesting to me. What better project to learn about it fastest then doing analytics?

Ever since then I've consistently been up past 1 AM =). Still excited. Still learning.

This was all still being in school so I couldn't focus on it full-time.

I made a WordPress plugin to add a feature to one of my own sites, and threw it up on my blog as a free download. After hundreds of downloads and comments asking for support, I rewrote it and packaged it up as a commercial product. In the next 1.5 years I made about $180,000 in profit selling that plugin, then sold the rights to the plugin on Flippa for another $90,000.

Wow. That is impressive. Few questions:

1. How long did it take to write the plugin? 2. How did you find your paid customers? From what I heard, most WordPress users don't want to pay for themes or plugins. 3. And why did you decide to sell it for that kind of high price? Were there troubles at the beginning because it was a free download before?

Thanks!

1. A few hours 2. Forums, blog sponsorships, PPC ads and holding #1 organic rank on all the relevant search terms 3. Sales were slowing and I lost interest in putting more into it, so I sold it while it was still valuable

http://flippa.com/blog/case-studies/dan-grossman-on-selling-...

Good questions! Awaiting answers myself!

Is WP Review Site the plugin in question?

http://www.wpreviewsite.com/

Yes

Wow. What did it do?

My MMO Guild Hosting site started as my own personal WoW guild website, which itself was a fork of the code powering my personal LAN Party website. After deciding in late 2005 to try to make a business out of it, I launched in May 2006 and was profitable since day one, enough so that I abandoned consulting by Jan 2007.

It's been my sole income-source since then.

It took 6 years from initial creation: the first version of that original LAN Party site was written in old ASP in 2000, and then rewritten in PHP in 2001 or 2002, and then forked in 2004 for WoW.

Hopefully some of my new side-projects turn into something useful, almost all written in Erlang with the Nitrogen Web Framework (absolutely love it).

I built a url shortening service called vb.ly because my girlfriend, Violet Blue, was using url shorteners all the time for her blog.

She's an author and adds to her book income by linking people to her 30+ books on Amazon using her affiliate code. I was concerned that the various url shorteners she was using might swap out her affiliate code for theirs as a revenue mechanism, so I wanted to take it "in house".

I discovered that this .ly domain registry had "vb.ly" available (her initials) and thought it might be cool engineering challenge to get that going for her and open it up for others to use.

500k+ shortened urls later, the rest is history. Literally

Wait. Didn't your domain name get taken away by the the Libyan .ly registrar or was that another shortener service?

Edit: Nevermind, found the discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772071

Bitbucket was a side project for me, and it was just acquired. I ran it for 2.5 years under my own wing.

Technorati was a side project for me.

How long did you work on it before making it a full time project? And how long until you got funding/hired your first employee?

http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/04/vv_show_32_david_sifry_o...

BCC was supposed to eventually grow to $200 a month in revenue so that I could buy videogames without delaying student loan repayment. Eventually the tail started to wag the dog. As for stats, well, right now is the start of the busy season and I predict a very happy Halloween indeed.

http://www.fantasymonster.com/ Fantasy sports app for the iphone. Launched 4 months ago. I still have a full time job but the app is pulling in 20K+ per month in sales and ad revenue. Not sure if that qualifies as "big" but it's more than enough for me =)

oops meant http://www.fantasymonsterapp.com

As far as I'm concerned, $20k+/month on a side-project definitely qualifies as big, especially 4 month after launch.

godaddy parked domain?

bluehost. web site doesn't actually get much traffic, 99% of sales are purely on the device. I only keep it up to maintain some semblance of web presence.

Is that before or after Apple's cut?

after apple's cut before taxes

ThatHigh.com - started in February as a joke, now it pays my rent in SF.

I like the christian treatment center ads that run on the side.

haha yeah....I could actually use some pointers on how to better handle adsense in this respect. is it possible to require approval for any ad shown? is it possible in an automated way?

before we got kicked off adbrite (for our content, or something), it was possible to do this, but it was very tedious...

I think you can only stop others from serving but looks tedious.

And, like the FMyLife/VieDeMerde kind of sites, I imagine you could easily spun it off to other subjects if some come to mind.

I'm curious: How much time per week does it take to maintain + edit the site?

i haven't touched the site in at least a month. Sure, there are bugs, sometimes registration fails, but for the most part it's completely hands-off.

I just gave that a quick look -- where does the money come from? Ad sales? Something else?

yeah, adsense and direct advertisers. i sell stickers, too, but that hardly generates any revenue

http://www.olark.com was a side project: http://www.hab.la for a few years.

I started http://blogo.it as a side project. It's now the third media property in italy with 11 ml/uniques month. Before Blogo I started another company as a side project, it was a web agency I later sold to a pre ipo company. Starting a project in this way is a really good way to start slowly, think about it a lot and to have no pressure at the beginning.

I started Barhopolis (look at barsannapolis.com) as a hobby because we never knew what was going on until after it happened. We reach over 40,000 people a month now not including mobile, and we are growing fast. Last night we went around town with the Mast-Jägermeister executives filming, including the CEO of the company that imports Jägermeister into the US. In July we had a huge event (1700 people at it's peak), and the governor showed up and performed with the band, pretty cool. We aren't where we need to be yet, but we are profitable and growing.

Hey be sure to put http:// in your url's so people can click them :) here it is : http://www.barsannapolis.com

I'm pretty sure that's the site I used to find a bar for New Year's Eve, which was the first time I'd been to the Sly Fox, which I am in love with.

I owe you a drink!

Must have been, we had an event at Sly Fox on New Years last year. We have an event coming up there on Saturday the 30th for Halloween, probably worth checking out if you're a fan.

http://www.feedbackarmy.com really surprised me. I came up with the idea from a HN user asking for a service like it. It was on the front page of delicious the week I launched it (it was a slow news week, given). Since then it's served as a source of extra income.

This is a topic dear to my heart, there's not much I love talking about more than side-projects.

http://mocksup.com is my current side-project, and while it's yet to "go big", it's profitable and growing.

The site looks great! Just curious, how did you find your initial paid customers? Is it just through word-of-mouth or did you do anything more specific?

Thanks. Once we got the marketing pages/admin features to a place we thought were worth paying for, I posted a link on HN and from that we got covered by Mashable and several others. That got us profitable.

Now we're working on getting to that next level where one of us can stop freelancing and get a check from Mocksup every month.

WeatherLoop° http://weatherloop.com is a side project of mine. Amazing how scratching your own itch can benefit someone else.

Hey, that's very nice! Easy monetization opportunity: Signup to be a Groupon (etc) affiliate & include a little string of text with that day's deal for the user's locale along with a shortened link.

Thanks btucker! That is a great idea.

That's a brilliant and simple idea! Can I ask how you send out texts? Do you use a third party API like Mobile Messenger?

Thank you. I'm doing AB testing on a few sms APIs, when I settle on one, I'll leave another comment here.

Tag for the comment.. I want to know as well.

I started TwitterCounter.com as a fun weekend coding project after my partner said he wouldn't have time to start on it until he had finished some other stuff. I couldn't let it go so started coding right away. We launched 6 days later. Not it is hugely profitable and has 2 full-time employees.

More importantly: I think almost every major internet success was started as a side-project. Yahoo, Google, Apple, the list goes on and on...

I don't have any myself. but here is a talk by Mitch Altman from this years H.O.P.E. conference about the origin of tv-b-gone

http://c2047862.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/tnha16.mp3

My first major side project was http://gambolio.com - a browser based iTunes-style app for online games. Despite getting featured on the New York Times's website, the app struggled to attract many visitors.

So my wife and I set up a blog - http://casualgirlgamer.com - in an attempt to promote it. The blog has become quite popular - more than 100,000 uniques a month - and we're now focusing completely on the blog rather than the app we originally set it up to promote.

We're not yet making enough to give up our jobs but we're having fun and have high hopes.

Does Twitter count?

Only if you made it.

As much as Facebook does.

Yes. It was a side project by members of the Odeo staff, correct?

I started my side project, BatteryBar (http://osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar) after my boss made a comment about how he couldn't figure out how much time was left on his battery. After about 6 months I went to a Freemium model and started selling a Pro version. Sales have been consistent over the last two years, not growing consistently like I'd like, and not enough to quit my job, but a nice side business.

iTeleport http://www.iteleportmobile.com started out as a side project while one of our founders was getting a PhD.

just watched the CMU lecture by the PHD guy yesterday. Pretty inspiring.

My motivation for working on side projects is not just about chasing the dream of riches or fame. I try to keep my ambitions inside the 9-5 (or whatever weird hours I find myself working on the 9-5). My motivation for working on side projects is they are fun and provide variety. Working in a team has a necessary evil - you can't just do what you want. Working on side projects provides me with this freedom.

StartupDigest is a great example of this. They started with an internal listserv of 12 people and have, over the last year or so, grown to a global audience of over 68,000 people.

It seems that side projects give us the ability to stretch our creativity where our '9 to 5' lives don't allow us. My advice would be to have fun and pursue your side projects and make the leap to full-time once you have some traction and cashflow.

I created www.socialadmanager.com as a side project. It has not gone "big" yet but it is profitable which i think is pretty cool.

I've tried a lot of side projects but none of them panned out, because I couldn't focus on them long enough to get them to a state where I can leave my day job to fully work on them. Doing successful side projects requires taking small steps and a good amount of focus over long stretches of time, even if the rewards don't initially come.

http://www.difrwear.com was a success I've had about 20 fails. Here they are http://www.artofcyberwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/mike...

I started collecting photos from sold houses on real estate sites as interior design inspiration. One day I put them online, categorised them (bathroom, bedroom, etc) and added in a few ads. I've left it largely untouched for 2-3 years since and it pays my mortgage.

the site address?

http://www.spaced.com.au/

The rub is that "fun" is a subjective term. If all you want to do is program you may be right. If you enjoy problem solving and you do it in a way that is usable by others I don't see why not. [Currently pursuing the dream] ;)

Ship Mate for the iPhone (Android coming some time in the future) is a side project, hopefully transitioning into a full time thing. It is now making me a livable wage and I haven't even started the big ideas for it yet.

http://absurdlycool.com and http://recreationparks.net pay rent - they are both side projects for me.

How many weekly hours of labor are you guys able to put into a side project?

Just created a related discussion: Side Projects Gone Deadpooled http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772903

Side projects are where it's at, because they're typically low cost up front. You're just doing it for yourself. If no one likes it then you can ditch it or just use it for yourself for whatever purpose. No big loss. But if it turns out you're building something that people are passionate about, then you can turn it into a business without all the risk of going into it like a business from the very beginning.

http://getclicky.com started as an internal project for another company I worked for a few years ago. It was profitable 4 months after launch, and revenues are doubling ever year. 2010 will be about $1M. We are happy with that.

I love GetClicky

in beta testing http://www.getjoined.com should sign up and get a beta login

The donate button seems kinda alien to me, why would you be asking for money at the same time your are asking someone to signup to know more about what you are doing? I think people donate money when they see something and are impressed about it.

thank you for the feeback,

I don't think you can create a side project for fun and have it turn into a profitable business. You can, however, create something on the side with a mind to sell it, and become successful.

It's okay, you can downvote me. I understand wanting to believe that it works that way, but it almost never does. You will simply make different decisions based on whether a project is for fun or for profit.

Can we at least agree that projects with no business model and no funding should be called apps rather than startups?

I'm guessing people didn't like your first comment because it was trivial to disprove due to your word choice. If you say that something "can't" be done, you're usually wrong. Statements of probability usually work better, which was the case for your second, more successful comment.

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