Six Months of Tiny Projects
tinyprojects.dev
tinyprojects.dev
> Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the final product, I think its actually really cool. But building it.. it was just a bit boring. There were lots of bugs, and I started to get a bit burnt out thinking about the endless list of things required for a good online store builder.
https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store
This is a fascinating observation. In a couple of weeks he's both built something from scratch and figured out that the work of doing it wasn't enjoyable. It takes some people years to get to that point.
To figure out what you want to do, you often have to sift through a lot of fool's gold - junk that looks appealing as an idea but isn't appealing as a part of your life. The tiny projects idea offers a way to accelerate that process.
But the key here is to finish. To have an end point in mind and then reach it. 20% completion may get you 80% of the functionality. But by god, getting that last 20% could be the hardest, grinding work you will ever do. It's going to be very difficult to finish unless it's aligned in some fundamental way with your life.
If the author pushed One Item Store and said “I’m going to market it cause it’s cool now, I’ll add features when people ask for them” then he might enjoy it more and be surprised to find people who will use it and pay for it as is.
GP said nothing about customers. They said to align your work with your life. I'd re-phrase what you said as: align your work with the lives of your customers. That might be fool's gold for somebody, nevermind how many HN posts assume otherwise.
Yet even today I continue to refer back to these old projects because I need to use again something I've built before.
Not everything needs to be a hustle. Worth doesn't need to be in money terms
There is value in the experience gained when focusing on quantity instead of quality. Early in ones career it seems wise to spend some time on increasing quantity.
This isn't quite accurate. In that anecdote, those focused on quality did nothing but sit around and theorize. Had they spent their time evaluating their skills and improving them with an actual focus on quality, they would've no doubt had the better result.
IndieHackers seems close enough to me
Couldn't find the repo so added a feature request here: https://twitter.com/mixcocam/status/1329201542411538441?s=20
I get involved in "weekend projects" (sometimes they go a little longer than a weekend), and I find that without the pressure to deliver something useful it lets me explore whimsical ideas and learning opportunities I don't get in my day job.
This approach didn't block me from creating small programs/game clones in this period, which I'm keeping in my blog[0] as well, but seeing projects like yours motivates to push harder for bigger projects.
I wish you luck on keeping your pace as well!
One credit card fraud going through my system and i might in a big dept if i did this under a company format which doesn't protect me from personal liability.
While i like the idea very much of getting exercise in this way, i'm wondering what the main motivation is?
I would like to earn money through my own company but only with my product i like and find 'worthy'. Trying out small concepts over and over again, might not bring any fruit in finding the thing you are passionate about and then the question arrives if it wouldn't be much more beneficial to optimize your own career instead.
If you ask me if i want to work on x or y, i will tell you quite easy what i would prefer which i would relate to passion?
Wikipedia would agree on both ways of seeing passion: "Passion (Greek πάσχω "to suffer, to be acted on"[1] and Late Latin (chiefly Christian[2]) passio "passion; suffering" (from Latin pati "to suffer"; participle: passus)) is a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling desire for someone or something. "
But i think what makes it more interesting or more motivationg for me is that one thing might have something special in comparison to other things i wanna do.
Like if i work on a product which helps the world vs. a product which is 'just a normal product' i might see more reason to work on the first product.
I probably need to ask you what makes you invest in a project.
I've considered many ideas like that One Item Shop and turned away from them because I wasn't sure how to keep people from listing and selling things that will get me sued out of business or thrown in jail. And at £1.63 in revenue, I'm not hiring a lawyer.
I doubt that'll be an issue for some time, there are so many startups out there either trying to be the next big one or specifically to address the needs of a niche set of users.
Once the project hits a certain level of public awareness new social projects will be contacting the author to ask to be included, there will be no "looking for them" involved (though perhaps some due diligence checking to make sure the platform isn't in some way a project they'd rather not be associated with).
I think that would be great to make some project that has returns even a seemingly low sum of $200/mo. That's like a fifth of what I need to live a month, not bad.
Facebook ads for market interest check is an interesting thought albeit maybe expenisve.
edit: the other thing stories like these(pertaining to EarlyName) seem to gloss over is the legal aspect. It is easy to throw up a payment form but who is it paid to and say you're sued for whatever reason... does the few hundred a month justify an LLC sort of thing. That's the part that sucks/part of a business I guess. Some options like fastpring I think. Maybe general ToS/Privacy is enough
It is funny it's like a "solve that problem when you actually have it" sort of scenario. But I do wonder about creating some general LLC that can be an umbrella to random micro saas projects.
On the other hand, though, your sites look more like Craigslist ads than actual eCommerce sites. The font choice is ugly, and the lack of things like logos, contact/about pages don't exactly fill the user with trust.
If you polished it up a bit, I think you could have a real winner on your hands.
Very unethical. This should have never been automated.
> Very unethical. This should have never been automated.
Unethical or not, I am 100% sure that this operation has been automated hundreds of times by different programmers throughout the years.
I work 9 to 5, and want to have time for a lot of essential activities like: reading, jogging, be informed, visit family, hangout, play some games with friends online and sleep well (aka 8h).
I am starting to assume that it's impossible to cramp all these activities in 24 h so I should organize the activities in a week.
How do you guys do it?
This is a similar timeframe that Basecamp uses for internal initiatives. I've been pushing for us to switch from 2-week sprints to something closer to 6-week features. If you're building on existing product or a brand new one 1-2 weeks is just not enough time for meaningful progress.
While the article says one week is insufficient to make something meaningful, I've found personally that you can write useful software even in a single day, as long as your feature scope is finely targeted. Actual real life needs of real people are also more interesting to write software for.
Selling human beings!!! really?
It's a blessing to see that there are people who can just build things instead of whining around like: ohh it's not a business... ohh it won't make any money... ohh it's not so simple to build a product... mkay
Also a meta-site on 'minimal way to do X' on all the random tech you've had to setup and assemble would be useful.
I guess that's 2 more tiny projects. Hmm, I guess they'd be tiny meta projects.
I'd love to work on a side hustle like that but my ideas percolate over a long time.
Pure initiative and positivity.
I love it!
"A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing".
Here are some tips to help with this:
1) Explore more "steady" acquisition channels. Yes, PH/HN are "spike-y" channels and they're often not enough to have a business generating sustainable income. Read "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg (I'm also doing some research on this topic [1]).
2) Maybe flip the script and do the opposite? Choose 1 or 2 promising projects, and do "six months of exploring user acquisition". Test SEO, FB/Google Ads, partnerships, affiliates, appstores and so on.
Good luck!
Best of luck on your future projects, great on you to make awesome stuff and grow as a person!
I can definitely see the excitement of creating something small but semi-viral on the internet
A silly idea in the beginning may turn out to not be so silly in the end.
I also think the negativity may be reflective of the mood of society overall. This has been a very tough year for so many people. When people are having a tough time I think they can latch on to one of their pet peeves and use it to blow off some steam. We just need to be careful as a community that we don’t allow the discussion to devolve into a toxic flame war. Our tireless moderator dang has been tremendous at that thus far.
This is the contrarian dynamic at work: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The first posts in a thread are usually negative because negative reactions are the easiest to feel and fastest to write. Also, most internet comments are objections to something, and when the thread is blank, the only thing there to object to is the article.
After that, other comments show up to object to the objections. These tend to get upvoted, and that explains the paradox of why so often the top comment says something like "I don't understand why everyone here is so negative".
The main thing to understand is that this has nothing to do with the topic! It's a generic effect of the forum mechanism and group psychology.
I just went and opened 10 random Reddit threads on the front page to read the top comments, and found only 2 where this was true, and 8 where this was totally false, most notably [1].
The main reason for negative comments here on HN (IMO) is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People have learned that usually the #1 comment is a negative one, so you have a bunch of people "competing" to be #1 by trying to nitpick whatever is wrong with the original article (even if there is none) in hope to win the popularity contest.
This is why I've seen some friends recently leave HN (their exact words: "couldn't hand the toxicity"). I hope that you, as a Head of Growth, can actively work to break this cycle.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/jw8xbe/if_w...
Regarding OneItemShop:
I think you should provide an optional way to specify a proper imprint (legal requirement in germany) instead of only a contact email.
These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.
While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business. I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
They were tiny like the projects listed here, so it's possible it could work out for the author, and I'm still sticking to the same approach now.
Launch something quick with little self-criticism, then double down on anything that seems to have traction.
But well, it's a perfectly fine ratio here.
Just because you are a good engineer, does not mean you are a good entrepreneur. Most engineers think it's just about building a good product. This is not true.
This is the best approach starting out to see what the audience responds to, but the next critical step is to stick with what works for at least 5 full years doing all the things you've mentioned plus SEO (which is a big big).
When you repeatedly make sales and profit, you’re past the hurdle of not losing money on the operation. It’s a nice milestone on the entrepreneurship journey and worthy of a bit of celebration.
The IRS has an opinion [1], and its a really good list! Make a copy of it and put a recurring appointment in your calendar to revisit it, think about it, and write down your comments.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/faqs/small-business-self-employed-other-...
Rob Walling has some good stuff on building micro-SaaS businesses https://robwalling.com/
The narrative would change and it wouldn't be getting called a "micro-bet" anymore if it did though, no? ;-) We used to just call these "side projects" which I prefer as a term for any sort of cheap experiment you throw at the wall to see if it sticks. I've had several, had two acquired for non-negligible amounts, and another has been my full time business for 10 years now.
The most projects mentions involved at least a few of hese things, and the last one, Earlyname[0], had them all and has been more profitable than many many "businesses" in SV right now...
That's the whole point of micro-bets. You acknowledge the fact that a small % of them will generate any meaningful $, so you deliberately minimize your losses by making the bets small.
Incorrect. The word business is defined simply as "the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce." or "a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade."
A kid with a lemonade stand has a business. My dad ran a plumbing business that did zero marketing or advertising and had no regular lawyer. According to your definition neither of these are businesses.
Gee, you know come to think of it - Knowing who your customers are is marketing, talking/blogging about your business (however small it is) is advertising, accepting cash and knowing what's in your bank account is cash flow management and avoiding breaking any laws is legal. So, whichever way you look at it - you're wrong.
> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses, and then sticking with the ones that become successful.
The full quote changes the context. From what I understand, he sees it as a way to validate business ideas with small amount of effort.
If you scroll down just a few paragraphs from the sentence fragment you quoted, the author says:
> "My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects.
A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing. There's this whole other level afterwards called "sales & marketing" that I want to master."
The author is extremely explicit throughout the piece that these are not built to become large businesses—hence the constant use modifiers like "tiny" and "micro." He also makes it clear that he treats this as a training routine for getting better at idea generation, shipping products, etc.
I applaud this initiative, instead. It's commendable that someone decided to build not just one, but several things; for fun, and perhaps some profit.
Then, if one of those ideas turns out to be very promising, the rest of the "business" can be quite trivial to setup, at least initially.
I disagree. There is no point in setting up legal and marketing and advertising if the business is not functional. This is a perfectly suitable path to a successful web business. Obviously he would need to expand on those areas you mentioned if he wanted to make one of these his career but this is the first step on that path.