5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
kwcodes.com
kwcodes.com
We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands of dollars immediately. Those are exceedingly rare, and you might be able to pull it off when you have a massive audience. Jumping from project to project won’t net you that audience, so you end up spending time in circles… and earning $0.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
This chart is a good example of having no traction for years and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an overnight success.
Imagine this was money instead, where the final result was $1B and after the first 2 years it was only $1M.
$1M is only "no traction" in relation to $1B. In absolute terms it's pretty damn good.
I'm working on an app that will be released in the next few months (we don't have a definite ship date, yet).
It's based on two servers that I wrote. One, I wrote eleven or twelve years ago, and has become a world standard; but only in the last three years. Since it's a specialized demographic, the numbers are quite small, for "world standard."
The other server is one that I wrote, about four years ago. It took me seven months. It's a very good general-purpose application server. I wrote it for practice, but it's also ideal for the app I'm writing.
I've been working on the frontend app for over a year. It's really, really good. I deliberately took my time, because we went through a lot of "MVP" stuff, during its development.
The rest of the team seems to think it will take the world by storm, when it's released, but I don't think it will.
That's fine with me. I don't mind a slow burn. I've written software that lasts decades.
I think that the general Quality of the app will be phenomenal. I spend a great deal of time “polishing the fenders.” This is stuff like making sure that popovers are pixel-perfect, Dark Mode is supported, it’s localizable and accessible, and has various fast animations for “flourish,” etc.
We know the target demographic well, and all indications are, that it will be well-received.
But I don’t think it has much monetary potential, which I feel is fine. We’re a nonprofit, anyway. It will be funny, because a free app will have a level of refinement that leaves many money-making apps in a cloud of dust.
Time will tell. More will be revealed…
CONTACT US
[contact-form-7 id="67" title="Contact form 1"]
(Thanks. I’ll get on it. I may need to do a fairly significant site upgrade. I’ve been avoiding it.
Other websites have full lorem ipsum pages or have someones dubious web shop selling crystals running in a subfolder.
(Idea for webmasters: set up a few scheduled search for <words that should not be on your website> site:<yourwebsite.example>)
After they figured out it was their server, they never went back and renamed the directory.
Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator.
Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.
On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
Sure, people used to have side hustles back in the day, but maybe more like weeding your potato plants after a back-breaking day at the factory.
> On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
Was it from what I wrote or was it unrelated?
Does that mean that even if my success stagnates at “quite successful”, I make no money at all? That doesn’t make sense to me. How would that work?
He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal metronome and jobs website.
BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5 people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of non-existing product.
Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first place.
With jobs websites you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites.
Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for.
They are also extremely competitive.
The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing.
There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid.
High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.
You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your ideas)!
I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then file them away, however. Things can change.
Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't have any more to work.
Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that. Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate more capital to "do it right".
You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products because of high competition you won't likely match.
I have literally hundreds of ideas.
As an experiment I put them on a website for anyone to see and "steal": https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d815...
I'm not saying those are all great, profitable ideas.
I'm saying that they are doable by a competent programmer and unique enough. Certainly not "done a zillion times by others".
I guess the good ideas are expensive.
I don't agree that "good ideas are expensive".
The issue is: we don't know which ideas are good or bad.
The stats from Venture Capital markets are showing that clearly.
Before someone even gets a meeting with a good VC firm the idea is already filtered 100-1 if not 1000-1.
Of those who get the meeting, maybe 1 in 100 get an investment.
Of those that get an investment, out of 10 maybe 1 or 2 become the really great successes and the remaining 8 are somewhere between "mild return" and "complete failure".
Since even the best of the best cannot tell what idea is good and which one is bad, we value all ideas as bad ideas i.e. at zero.
I'm quite sure that in that list I've posted there are at least few good ideas i.e. ideas that, when well executed, would lead to a profitable, solo business.
I just don't know which ones are good.
I think this is part of the issue. Unlike the GP, I think the expectation is often both difficult and sometimes expensive. Often ideas seem bad only because they were executed poorly; good execution acts as a type of filter.
Let [customer group] do [pain point solved].
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your work on SumatraPDF. My favorite, hands down.
(Following the link you posted, I realized you're the author.)
perfect market = Market with a perfect allocation between demand and supply, because of no information deficiencies.
Sorry for the snark, but how is this actionable advice? It's just a fortune cookie anecdote of a situation that of course would be profitable.
High competition is also not a red flag by definition. It’s a strong indication that the market exists, and as a solo or bootstrapped founder, that’s a HUGE time & money saver.
Low value to users isn’t necessarily a issue on itself either - you start with something with low value, then value-add as you grow. There’s room in the world for vitamins and painkillers.
There’s room in the world for red sea strategies and blue ocean strategies. In none of these worlds is “not doing projects in the first place” a good idea though, no matter if they fail. The best way to never succeed is to keep dreaming and never try :)
I can't tell you how much this resonates with me having been slowly and methodically building a project in a competitive domain over the past two years. I have a handful of organic users who've continued to show up and inspire me to continue pushing forward, but in that time I've also had people close to me question what I'm doing and why it's taking so long (as if there is a finish line).
My experience so far is that building a software product is a hard and time-consuming process fraught with obstacles of all variety. There are many instances where abandoning it will sound like a good idea, so you just have to ask yourself how determined are you to bring it to life and push through when it gets difficult?
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
That would be a good argument if you mentioned which ones.
>>Nothing fancy or intrusive. We just needed a record of how much time a certain project took in a certain month, and how much we need to bill clients.
I think it’s good to see failure posts like this on HN. Helps balance out some of the toxic positivity you can run into. Not everyone will succeed, even the ones that work hard for years and are very talented (like these folks).
The whole thing reads like he had a vague idea that writing a basic piece of software would allow him to retire, but could only bring himself to make a very limited effort.
The rule is: if you want to get money from it, you have to be prepared to work hard, and on parts of it that you don't find interesting, with no guarantee of success. If you aren't motivated by money and ready to put a lot into it with a high chance of failure, just work on things you enjoy. You will get further and learn more.
In neither case will you get much from it if you just do the minimum and then abandon the project.
'Side projects' have become the new programmer blogs, as something which everyone feels they need to have in order to get a job. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO STUFF LIKE THIS. If you're not excited by it then just don't. Just getting good at your job and enjoying your spare time will get you much further in life than pursuing things which it will be clear to an employer you don't really care about. For every employer which looks for stuff like this, there is another who just wants someone who does a good job and doesn't waste their energy on side hustles.
If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5 projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few months on it. That is why software developers are not all entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff, we don't know what to do with it.
A couple of weeks of part time desk research is not a side hustle. It’s simply due diligence.
Disappointed that the game didn’t go ahead as it’s something I’d definitely play. Reminds me of x-battle.
His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses.
He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar.
The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons.
It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group.
So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.
Generally 'just making an app' does not produce a business, and has not for the past 10 years at least.
Games are a very special business, and there is no science as to what makes a game compelling: flappy bird was created in a weekend and made millions, some million dollar projects make nothing. I think that you have to be very passionate about games and have deep understanding of gameplay to even compete.
Like you say, there had been similar apps for several years. CouchSurf-style websites were common, and the transition to paid accommodation provided by normal people is obvious from there, but no one could get past the difficulty of getting people to pay for something that was commonly done for free, and getting this done without legal issues.
AirBnb, to my knowledge, was likely illegal in most places it worked, but similar to Uber, was on perhaps a gray area that allowed it to continue working until it was so big it cold lobby politicians to acommodate it within the law.
Only a handful of successes can happen this way, and I think all that could, have already happened.
You need to start with validating your idea instead of wasting days/months on coding.
"How I failed 5 side projects in 6 years"
It needs to become a habit so that he can release at greater velocity. Regulary thinking about new ideas and the writing code 1-2 hours everyday is ideal.
If people aren’t in pain they aren’t going to buy / use your stuff.
Take the product job board. At first I thought it was product manager jobs, but doesn’t that already exist? Then after seeing accounts payable and other stuff I realized you meant tech, which also exists already. So why would people use yours?
Your startup HAS to solve something better than existing solutions. For example -Uber was a taxi, but cheaper and much better -Facebook was MySpace but geared toward your in person friends / clean interface. Turns out people preferred not having to customize their page -TikTok was vine but done way better. Its learning algorithm is unbelievable, it leans into Adding music which makes everything more fun, etc. it’s a markedly better way for people to express themselves
The one project you build for yourself, the metronome, already had a solution you discovered after you started building
So I’d really spend some time on the problem first. Read the lean startup. Talk to customers. And figure out if a project is actually a smart bet. Your product has to be markedly better for some group of customers - if it’s just a little better, people aren’t going to switch
I know we programmers want some Googly names that is not currently in the dictionary but no one will EVER find it and it's very hard to grow organically.
If you're not making any money it doesn't mean your product is bad. It mostly means people can't find it. It's highly possible to make at least +$100 more just by using a name that a normal human would search for. Do anything so that people will can find it easily.
But it is a waste of time trying to tell people that discoverability is the key to success. Everyone who owns an iPhone thinks they are an app expert and the first thing they do with a new idea is to come up with an unsearchable, undiscoverable name.
I think the dead horse has been beaten already in this thread, with what the author "should have done" in terms of market research, A/B testing, MVP, etc. No need for me to pile on further there.
But what strikes me is that the author really seems to draw no distinction between personal side projects, done for the purpose of developing new skills that you aren't learning at your day job (e.g. iOS development, Ruby on Rails, etc)... versus entrepreneurial side hustles that you pursue for the dream of financial independence.
I think the the lesson here is, "Pick one". If you're trying to get rich, then that's not the time dive into some completely unfamiliar tech whose learning curve will slow down your velocity. You should be leveraging whatever boring tech you already know and are already most productive in, so you can focus on the marketing research and business side of things. Conversely, if you're trying to dive into an educational side project to learn new skills, then it's rather naive to expect that to be a path to riches. It won't be, and that's okay!
However, as a tech guy trying to build stuff too, I need continuous motivation for this. I need to stay in a "flow" state. And a good fuel to this is to learn new cool things during the journey.
To put it differently, I think you need to find the right balance between fun and efficiency, even if your goal is to earn money in the end. Trying to always look for the maximum efficiency could be a short term vision that quickly lead to boringness.
That sounds like a work focused side project to me. Things I've made that are personal side projects - iot blind controls (because I wanted it), magic mirror (because I wamted it), triathlon result parser (because me and my so wanted to settle some race stats debates), groupable containerised desktop apps (because I wanted it) etc.
None of my personal side projects set out to develop new skills, they set out to make me or a loved one happy. Often they do develop new skills. My partner is currently stripping and repainting an old bike - shes learning loads, but thats not the intent. The intent is to make it match her other gear because that makes her happy.
These days hosting costs are cheap enough that even if it takes you several years to turn something into a business, that doesn't really cost you that much. We've seen several examples of this happening already, and it's only getting more prevalent.
this is a blatant plug, sorry, but here's my newfound superpower: I built forkfreshness.com so that, whenever I find an abandoned repo that would otherwise be perfect for whatever I'm working on, I can find out exactly what downstream forks exist, who's keeping those forks alive, and how much ongoing work is happening.
this was, as you say, absolutely not about getting rich. but while I did learn a bunch doing it, it wasn't about learning, either. I stuck mostly to familiar tech. instead, it was about creating something that I had wanted many times over the years.
I have a repo[0] where I would like to check how active any of the forks are, just to see what they have done with the project, and/or speak with them about contributing upstream. I noticed that just adjusting the URL[1] did not work, however since running this website is costing your money, I don't feel comfortable asking you to add it.
Is there any chance you would feel comfortable open sourcing the code? (It can even be under some kind of fair-code license)
> Just tweet the GitHub URL to @ForkFreshness on Twitter.
as instructed on the front page? It seems like he's inviting people to use it.
but the good news is that I could maybe change its recency rules, and the other good news is that it costs me money whether people use it or not, and I want people to use it, so please feel absolutely free. it's intended as a kind of public service.
In that world, the presentation of your idea/product is everything, and the idea/product only plays a minor role, because you have to impress rich people that often don't know anything about it. Once you succeed you can pump so much money into it that even the worst idea is able to create some success.
Back to the post: It feels like this kind of sentiment is what spawned the feeling behind it. The projects very much seem straight out of a "new app to change the world" presentations aimed towards investors.
I do not doubt that they could generate profit, but I doubt that they have all that much value.
Add to that the startup sentiment of "if it's not an immediate huge success it's basically a failure" that the post radiates.
Even the conclusion of the post gives me the vibes that the takeaway should be to churn out more, any projects faster, until something eventually sticks.
> I started developing scrapers gathering data. I spent maybe 2 weeks on it when I realized the level of complexity. This was too much work for just one person.
When the complexity was in the technical domain he was able to (relatively) quickly understand the scope and effort required and cut his losses.
For the other projects he's been able to constrain the technical complexity and thus "finish" the projects. But has been blind to non-technical complexity, whether that is game design, art design, marketing, or sales.
One silly little example that stood out to me was the iOS game, which has the evocative name of "Planetoid". I can imagine a space themed game where planets battle to the death. But the video shows a white screen with minimalist graphics. Isn't this a space game? What a missed opportunity to sell the game with interesting visuals.
Or alternatively, keep it as an abstract (Go-like? Not the language!) game and just change the name.
My second project was a software development framework which I tried to sell it as a SaaS platform. The platform was a commercial failure but the open source framework became popular and I was able to convince the founders of a popular blockchain project to use it as part of their P2P layer.
Although that project was a technical success, because I didn't own any meaningful stake in that blockchain project, I wasn't able to capitalize on this opportunity so it was a commercial failure for me.
So then we (me and some open source community members who joined along the way) used that blockchain as a base to build a Decentralized Exchange and 2 new blockchain projects. Although these projects have not yet succeeded commercially (still working on it), I managed to secure passive income as a blockchain validator on the base blockchain. Securing this passive income was my first hint of commercial success after 10 years of trying. Anyway, it's an ongoing story but if my current 3 active projects don't succeed commercially, I have already planned for the next projects to build on top...
The goal is to just keep building stuff on top of this blockchain ecosystem, welcoming new contributors along the way and keeping everything open source.
If I count ideas I had that I never seriously started on, I've failed hundreds of projects.
If you want to make money (any money at all), stop focusing on consumer products, build a small B2B product instead.
Enough has been said about the projects in general already which mostly mimics the game (not solving a real user problem, late-entry, competing with existing solutions, no marketing)
At a glance, it looks like OP is just building stuff, throwing it at a wall and seeing what sticks. Of course, that is bound to fail. You are, essentially, playing the lottery.
Nowhere in that blog did I see any mention of figuring out what a customer is looking for in a game or a product.
What is the niche you are trying to fill or pain-point you are trying to solve? It would be much better to build something _after_ you know people want it, not before.
Re: Planetoid my immediate first impression was "I don't understand what's going on here". With that one it seems like maybe the author should have vetted the basic idea with friends and family first and see if they get it.
Re: Minfinity it seems useful and is actually right up my alley! I feel like the strategy here would be to keep it in maintenance mode and wait and see if it ever picks up popularity (such as in a thread like this).
My big takeaway from reading the author's post is that it seems to drive home the importance of marketing/advertising/selling/etc. Those stories about the Collison brothers pitching their product to developers and then doing the somewhat socially awkward thing of pressuring them try it out right there on the spot is burned in my memory.
I know someone who runs a successful enterprise consulting business for example. He's a relentless worker, and has earned it, but he'd be delusional to not admit that there's luck involved at every point in the delivery chain; starting of course with being lucky to never run into any problems on his first few steps into the job world where he developed connections he could later sell to. If you're a relentless worker, you have probably never been given a reason to question the merit of hard work, because it's always paid off for you somehow.
Doesn't even matter whether it's tech related or not. If you're on your way to being a successful mountain climber, you're going to need be lucky to not develop debilitating foot problems.
Back to your example, there's a certain amount of luck involved in finding out about the apparent enterprise playbook in a time and place where you can put it to use, and of course in finding a market. I don't know a thing about enterprise sales or business because my dad conveniently doesn't run one and I was never hired at IBM in the 90s.
I have been interested in a similar project for sometime, but don’t know the best place to get started. My background is in Math, so I’d really like to understand the “why” and “how” of these types of algorithms rather than just plugging in some parameters and getting a nice picture.
Plus, I don't think the projects were duds. They were instead simply buds - still too immature. Exactly how you execute an idea is often far more important than the actual idea. This isn't some catchy phrase, its how people take failing businesses and rework them to massive profits.
I agree that more iteration was required. Focusing on a particular set of real customers is also a useful activity. Real people have real needs. Developers often have no clue what people want because people in general have problems and your shiny thing is weird and wonderful and they don't (yet) understand it.
eg That time tracker... omg. Plenty of people use worse. Plenty are better. Its minimal, but a start. If this had been pushed in front of a large enough group of real people and left to grow with multiple iterations from feedback it could have ended up in all sorts of useful directions.
I have two Android apps. Neither bring in money. One I intentionally did not monetize. The other I tried to. I targeted the wrong audience and my UI could have been more flashy.
I've had ideas for other projects, but they're usually already patented or they're too niche to really make money (involves some hardware).
1. People like making money when they shouldn't be; we live under the pretense that the only way to earn money is via your day job. A side-hustle makes things exciting. It's like finding treasure.
2. Pair the above with the rise of social media and the lifestyles people portray on there: success, money, etc.
3. Perhaps there is an actual movement away from "normal" jobs, leading to a mentality shift in which people simply want to be financially independent.
Not earning money is not a failure. Wasting time on non-free software the purpose of which is making money - now that's unfortunate.
My advice to that guy would be:
* Write software you need personally. You will at least have one happy user - and if you write something you like, other people will probably want to use it too.
* Think of the software needs of people you know - in your family, physical community, or online communities - and see whether you can't help implement it or adapt/improve existing software for that purpose.
Most software that's capable of improving lives is capable of making money, isn't it?
> non-free software
I really doubt that throwing it up as open source would fix anything.
And if you remove those two factors then all that's left is "that's unfortunate".
You're probably right. What I'm saying is that the cause for embarking on a software project should be different. If you write software to address needs and desires, then you're more likely to succeed in doing that. And maybe you'll make money off it somehow, or maybe not.
This sounds very ideological. It looks like a personal trap that you might fall in the future. Be careful.
I have about 30 pet projects from the past 10 years or so, not released to the public and I treat them as utterly private. A few of them have gotten me through job interviews when I would have failed otherwise. I think some of them exist as a form of therapy. I can probably "productize" 2 or 3 of them but then the world will be the judge of my work. The code I write at home is much different from what I do at work, where we supposedly follow best practices and at home.. I just express myself. I'm so utterly pleased with some of the things I've come up with that would make development easier (not a new framework, don't worry) but I cannot take it to work since it would mean blasphemy and it would most likely make our architect have another meltdown.
My favourite project of the bunch is a code/platform generator. After that one it is probably the small storage engine I've built cause I got frustrated with sql + object mapping - it works so nicely but the entire community/industry will take a dump on it, as relational/sql db's are supposedly god.
I maybe want to share some of my work with the world, not as side-projects to earn money, but perhaps just for the fun of it and to contribute yet another shape of doing something - even if it is to educate how not to do something, that is fine too.
- The store not accepting your app because there are too many of the same topic (horoscopes, memes, sound boards, whatever-craft names, etc.)
- Spending lots of money on Google/FB ads.
- Spending lots of money on AWS.
- Burning out yourself and your friends.
But yeah if the goal of OP is the guy he quoted at the end "Had a business idea that I think could build in 24 hours and get to $5,000 MRR in 30 days". Keep trying, survivor bias is still alive
I've met my personal goals with side projects with the following criteria: - I really really want something - It doesn't exist
I've got 2 iOS apps that I built with the above formula - one is free and gets about 100 downloads a week, the other is paid and makes about $80/week. It helps that I'm working in a niche I know well, and where people spend money.
Don't try to make something generic. Even if nobody else ends up using it at least you've made something interesting.
2. the time tracker could have worked! Not "I'm gonna be rich" worked but still could have been something.
3,4. he didn't do them
5. tried to compete against linkedin/facebook?!
IMHO we are always too oriented to "make money, NOW"... Doing free stuff is ok. It's not that "if it's free then scrape the whole project, what's the point anyway"!
The opensource/free stuff you make ends up in your CV, and could be a game changer
Yes, you can jump straight into coding for your side projects, but not if your primary goal is to earn a steady side income (it may work but unlikely so).
But good to see negative outcome reports to counter-balance the extreme survivor bias on here.
Would you consider adding them to the Project Cemetery[0]? Then others could learn from them too!
First of all, when deciding about the next project, I need to choose the smallest idea possible that can be developed by one person. Cut the scope as much as possible."
These two paragraphs resonate very well to everyone in his shoes.
Honestly, even listing in an app store is a pretty big barrier (bureaucracy-wise) these days for a side-project - on one project I probably spent more time jumping through these hoops than on developing a MVP.
1. An add-on for a cryptocurrency trading bot. I developed a MVP, impressed the founding team, got into a partnership where they promoted my project to their customers. After 1.5 years they acquired my product and I signed a 3 years royalty.
2. A Wordpress security plugin. Started with a free version, focused on ranking the plugin in the plugin directory. Once I saw 3,000 websites using it. I doubled down on it. At the peak it was being used by 50,000 customers, out of which 3000 were paid customers. Sold it to a private investor for mid 6 figures.
3. Dropshipping - It was more if a test to learn everything about FaceBook, Instagram Ads but the website went onto generating ~$800,000 in revenue.
How? Did you go looking for a buyer or were you approached?
A few months ago I was thinking about my failed projects too and made a blog post with a few conclusions - "How to fail a project" - https://cornerbit.tech/how-to-fail-a-project/ ;)
Btw, your story is not alone. There are thoundsand of products are built everyday and just a few of them get to the top of product hunt (yet still out of business).
So, instead of being dependent on your employee, you are seeking to be dependent on a bunch of random people who you don't know anything about a.k.a. users. What could possibly go wrong,right.
Lincoln
* a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean FIRE".)
* being married to someone who had the understanding to support me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)
I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.
Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service. That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances. (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)
I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope! Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some combination of:
* lucky,
* very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or
* blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility that doesn't exist yet.
OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try. It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times, and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.
Both will not work, if you have other things to do beside your side projects.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump now is worth more than twice the valuation of the NY Times and it only took a few days.
All kinds of money out there looking to fund an idea that can be loosely rationalized by a slide deck.
Choosing Roby on Rails in 2020 as a "new framework" for web development ... sheesh.
Asp.net core with ReactJS for web, and React Native for Windows for any serious projects with SLA’s or multiple developers.
*sigh*
Building things that people will not pay for is called a hobby.
You're not entited to an income from your hobbies.
> This is a story about me dreaming
Yup
> 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0 (kwcodes.com)
You didn't even try to finish 2 of the 5 projects You didn't even do anything in 2 of the 6 years.
Your title is clickbait. Seems like you want attention more than you want money.
By comparison, looking at my github, I started over 50 projects in last year and finished a dozen of them. Hobbies all of them and I didn't expect to make a dime. If you want a reality check, head over to https://itch.io/jams. You'll find 10,000 hobbies projects not making any money.