Ask HN: What do I do with my side projects?

If we here knew of a surefire way to convert a fun side project into a few hundred dollars, a lot of folks here would be doing nothing but side projects. And, around here, folks know at least how to arrive at a working, usable, somewhat finished side project.

I think a trap for software creators is to think that making the software is the hard part about making a successful product that generates income. The hard part of any business is the part you do not like doing, have little experience with and don't really know how to approach. For Marketing majors, the hard part is creating an actual product. For CS folks, the hardest parts include marketing, client acquisition, sales.

I would say: either you give your products / efforts away (possibly in some hobbled form for upselling like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39492618), or you treat the "other side" as actual work and put in the effort to make it profitable. The latter also includes educating yourself on how to go about it, also using professional sources where necessary.

I don't know if there is a hard part. Marketing is easy when the product is marketable. Development is easy when the required features are very clear.

The critical mistake many devs make is making something that just isn't very marketable. It might solve the problem, but say, the screenshots don't look very appealing. The marketer has to sit the customer down for 40 minutes to explain it. If it needs a video to explain, it's probably poorly designed.

Say, you're making a Pomodoro Technique app. It looks like a tomato. Color theme is tomato-like. It makes a ticking sound and a bell sound. There's an indicator of time left. You don't even need words on a page to market this to the target audience.

You can have a Pomodoro app that looks like a spreadsheet and plays some music instead of having a visual indicator. This is both harder to develop and harder to sell. It might do the same thing, maybe better! But it's hard mode.

Abandon them and move on.

I tried both. Selling small apps is an uphill battle against Apple updates forcing you to buy and recompile. And even if people only paid $1, they will expect professional support. Nowadays, niche apps on iOS don't work financially.

And my experience with releasing useful tools as open source was that companies started linking to them in tutorials, and then their customers sent me unfriendly email and demanded that I provide support for the tool and solve their problems (for free). Most useful open source tools have companies paying the core crew.

For your CV, a video of the app working is probably just as valuable as actually releasing it. And then you can always link to a private copy of the source code in your CV.

EDIT: I focused too much on the negatives at first. What did work well for me was $10/month SaaS and $100+ professional desktop apps. But going there requires lots of polishing, marketing, and I hired support employees.

> and then their customers sent me unfriendly email and demanded that I provide support for the tool and solve their problems

Out of curiosity, what sort of tool were you offering? I’ve always heard about this but it’s never been my experience, so it really depends on the type of end user you have imo.

OP is currently trying to find a job and I think any attempt at open-sourcing his tooling (especially if it is useful) allows potential employers to review him in a better light. Abandoning it all seems wasteful when more and more companies try to find more reasons to filter out candidates.

Not the OP but, I can relate to this with a side-project I created many years ago that is an online tutorial for shell scripting. It's all open-source, requires minimal resources to run (small VM where I run a bunch of other stuff) and it is used most frequently by online schools to brush up on shell scripting. I get a lot of weird requests from random people which can be a bit annoying sometimes. This is for a site that gets around 100k visitors per month.

With that said I think there is some value in putting stuff out there without any marketing. Even if you don't have plan to monetize it can be rewarding in itself. The trick for me is to have a good way to minimize maintenance, which means use the same scripts and mgmt utils for several projects so you don't have any snowflakes that require special configuration.

The reality for the average person looking for a job is 1 out of 100 employers will ever look at an open source project you list on your resume.

Its better than nothing, better than others without projects, but it wont carry much weight unless its some widely used thing

Only exception is if your project matches the company's market or their products very closely. That may get you a meaningful advantage

a variety of backup scripts

For example, how to backup a running Linux server with rsync while using hard links to deduplicate files that didn't change.

I can relate, I used to have a small open source project (eventually transfered it to another maintainer). I often had quite rude and demanding Github issues from users.

You can forward support requests to an AI agent with infinite patience.

Not the parent, but can I ask why people are downvoting this?

On the one hand: yes, it's short and it's snarky

On the other hand: I feel like this is a legit use case for AI. ChatGPT is polite to the edge of obsequiousness and there has definitely been times when I wanted to say "No" but didn't want to lash out at the person - getting an AI to put together a first draft of a polite "No" is incredibly useful and a great starting point. If nothing it reduces the amount of time I spend agonizing over "Is this email ok? Is it at least reasonable?"

Probably because people here think that support requests are not always wrong. When I use a public open source project and I run into a bug, yes, I will request for a fix. I won't insult anyone for not doing it, though, I know I am not entitled to anything, when I did not pay for support, but I do not want my time to be wasted by talking to an AI. Just say no, if you don't want to fix bugs and maybe just make that plain on the project page. And those idiots who demand things can just be ignored/blacklisted (they often assume btw. that their company is paying for professional support, like they are for proprietary software).

You are also not entitled to a human response.

Only if that is made plain on the project/download page. The human social default and expectation is a human response. Also in OSS.

I do this for some code review comments where I want to say “what the actual fuck are you doing here. This makes absolutely no sense.” And I get a super nice output that needs very little tweaking.

What kind of apps do well these days if not niche ones? I am more of a web dev so curious if theres something inherent in app economics that makes it so.

App economics are just bad. Most of your competition will be free to download but then trick / bully people into a subscription. And maybe a few lootboxes?

CLV for a free game can easily be $5+ and that means when you market your niche app you compete for ad slots against people who are happy to pay $1-2 per install. But for a $1 app you can at most pay $0.7 per install after the store tax and then you're not making any revenue to pay for support, development, and the devices you need to buy for testing.

Consumer SaaS is booming on mobile, there's a lot of money to be made but it requires bigger teams and investments now than it did 5-10 years ago. OP is right in that it's harder to have a lifestyle business selling small apps.

> And my experience with releasing useful tools as open source was that companies started linking to them in tutorials, and then their customers sent me unfriendly email and demanded that I provide support for the tool and solve their problems (for free).

Which license did these tools have? AGPLv3 scares away most of the companies, especially stupid ones like those you described.

AGPL is the best license if you want to keep away stupid people. Our CTO spouted off that if we so much use anything with that license our valuation would plummet. People literally don’t understand the license and what it actually says. It’s hilarious.

- People will happily spend $5 for coffee but have an existential crisis when asked for a $1 app. If you’re looking to make money on these things, it’s an uphill battle.

- All software is derivative. Yours included. Putting it out there is like planting a seed for more to grow, even if it’s just an AI ingesting your work.

- The last two points aren’t mutually exclusive.

Put your work out there in the clear for free, as in freedom, but paid, as in you can get paid. Just don’t expect much.

> People will happily spend $5 for coffee but have an existential crisis when asked for a $1 app.

I think the key here, is that when you buy a coffee, you're reasonable sure of what you'll receive. You know coffee, you probably know the store, and although not all coffee shops are great, it's likely going to be good enough.

When you buy a random one dollar app, you spin the wheel, and the odds of that wheel landing on anything useful to you is extremely low. You have no way of telling if the app is the result of honest hard work, or the result of a cookie cutter build made from some user on fiverr.

So for me, it's not existential crisis, but an exhaustion from past annoyances.

Depending on your hourly rate $1 is only a couple of minutes of your time. Probably less than the time it takes to find the app, download, install, and try it out. I'm not going to sweat $1 versus free when it comes to apps.

The issue is the shady shit allowed. Like spend $1 to get the app, only to find out it requires a $5 a week subscription to actually run. I’ve actually run into that.

All of this and then subscriptions and other fees (visible up front or added later).

Apple really screwed up by not making subscriptions/fee apps visible up front until later in the same so the whole thing has a seediness to it.

> People will happily spend $5 for coffee but have an existential crisis when asked for a $1 app.

Well, coffee does literally contain an addictive substance that needs frequent replenishing. Perhaps this is why companies like FB and TikTok try so hard to make their products addictive too.

There’s an opportunity here to transmit wisdom from now (age 36) to when I was 20-something (you). Normally I don’t explicitly mention age; I hated when people did that to me when I was younger, and maybe it’s a rite of passage that you only "get it" when you’re older.

Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.

Both parts are important. Step one means that you won’t take it personally if you fail. You won’t be disappointed because you weren’t hoping for anything to begin with. Step two means you’ll actually put in effort where it counts, by analyzing the situation dispassionately. Do those things that people say are important. Market your work. The best marketing I’ve found is to make entertaining HN and Twitter posts (seriously; 100% of whatever small amount of notoriety I have stems from these two sources). More importantly, design your apps to be gathering money. That means doing something that most people would call "a dick move". Perfect example: I just tried a 3d scanner app called prodAR. There was no tutorial, some of the interface was broken, it didn’t support screen rotation, and it demanded $30/yr before it allowed me to save my scan. I paid the $30. Why? Because it yields the best scans of any app I tried. It delivers quality where it counts, and wastes zero time anywhere else. This is the essence of being effective.

Personally, I’m terrible at step two. I can’t bring myself mentally to be ok with shipping a 3d scanner that doesn’t e.g. support screen rotation. That’s also why I haven’t shipped anything that generates passive income, and why I’m trying to steer you the other direction. It’s really ok to ship crap, as long as it’s crap in areas that aren’t the core value proposition of your product. It’s arguably necessary to ship crap if you ever intend to make money. Even pg would admit his initial v0 of startup news was (very) slightly crappy in areas that didn’t get in the way of the essence of what became Hacker News.

That’s the best I’ve got. Good luck, and I hope you make a nice passive income stream for yourself. Don’t underestimate the effects of growth; even $30/mo should impress you, not disappoint you, as long as you focus on exactly one thing: make that number go up over time, superlinearly. https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html

By the way, I was always pretty good about step one. The reason I’m decent at raising money for various causes is because I never have my hopes up to begin with. It always astonishes me that people are willing to, and I end up feeling grateful and take the responsibility seriously. This turns out to have protected me from the worst effects of seeking money: when people end up feeling entitled because you worked so hard and therefore you deserve it. I’ve seen this firsthand in various people in my life (especially one particular extended family member) and they ended up feeling crushed when their hopes didn’t work out. Don’t do that either.

"a 3d scammer app" this one sounds like the real money maker :p

Thank you! I ducking hate iPad autocorrect. Lately it feels like you fight it more than it gets it right. LLMs can’t come too soon to crash this party.

LLMs tend to come with ducking content filters, though.

I used to ask people if they’d be ok with a keyboard manufacturer restricting what you were allowed to type, in hopes of illustrating how absurd safety filters can be. Now I’m bracing for keyboards actually doing this once LLMs get involved with helping us type less, aka completing our thoughts. It’s a tossup whether they’ll just not show the offensive completions, or whether they’ll go out of their way to remove offensive language as you type it.

Imagine fighting with a keyboard AI to let you sling a fuck-you when you feel it’s warranted. Yet it’s easy to imagine the whole paragraph getting reworded by the AI to remove the whole basis for you saying fuck-you in the first place. I don’t know whether to feel grateful it toned me down, or upset that it’ll get in the way of what I originally wanted to say, bad idea or not.

Sorry for the tangent. It’s just interesting to imagine the weird world we’ll be in ten years from now. It takes about a decade for huge effects to become apparent, and the battle for language itself is one that I don’t think many people realize is coming. Being prevented from swearing vs prevented from voicing improper thoughts is too close for comfort.

But, market forces will prevail in the end. I still have faith that we’ll see a pushback from people fed up with safety filters, and that a startup can capitalize on this as an initial target market. Grok was the first of hopefully many.

>Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.

Like the Stockdale paradox:

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/Stockdale-Concept.html

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”

You make it sound like:

a. Open sourced software is immediately found and used

b. Getting money from software is as easy as placing it online

Neither one is true, nobody will give you money without you putting it some effort, whether it’s through advertising or if you already have a sizable following ready to buy your products. If you’re neither, feel free to open source it and expect zero user and zero income, just have it as a showcase if you’d like.

>Beeminder API

Hey, I recognize that name. https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/anki-zero

Put yourself in the shoes of a person looking to recruit someone for a job. What is more important to you: Getting the best possible talent you can, or getting talent that won't fuck things up? Most of us need to hire for the latter.

>I would be a little upset with myself if I give them away and get nothing when there is a chance to make some income.

Putting well-developed projects on Github creates a hard to fake signal that you at least kind of know what you're doing. You are aware not only of how to program, but of several of the other things around how people build modern software nowadays. If you get some stars or whatnot, even better - that shows you know how to create software other people are actually interested in using.

In other words, if your projects end up being even 10% of the reason you manage to land a job in the industry, then they will have been worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your life. That's how I have always seen it, at least.

“I have invested a lot of time into them and am hoping to make at least a little revenue from them.”

There’s your problem. You see the side project as sunken cost. Something you need to recoup. And yet, it’s already given you more than you asked for.

Hundreds of thousands of hours can go into something and be open source and free. Because the value gained is far greater.

have an open source project, but company’s take home interview projects suffice for this, specifically when you are writing it from scratch based off of instructions. I open source every one I don’t get an offer from and it looks like I just loooove coding in my free time

I don’t know if junior devs have a different experience but I don't find projects help you stand out at all. Third party recruiters are going to find you, via linked in if you have the right keywords in your profile, and they will get you interviews.

Getting a “call back” may be a champagne popping moment in other professions, but not in software engineering, getting interviews isn't the problem its passing the random af broken af technical interview, system design, behavioral/culture interview.

but everything youre optimizing for is the “call back”, which your projects wont help with

speaking of junior dev, that really just means lack of validation from a company for several years. so all you gotta do is form a company say you worked for them and point to their product. literally just do a wyoming llc for $120 online, make a website about the product, say you worked for that now real company. congratulations you're a senior engineer now, you’ve already done the software work just transpose it on the dumb uncalibrated ways employers try to identify competence

If you do create your own company please don’t pretend to be an employee. It’s fine to be the founder engineer of a micro startup that didn’t find product market fit. If that’s what you do then you should probably focus on just one product. Most hiring managers aren’t idiots and many companies HR will verify employment so you might end up in a morally tricky situation down this path.

I’ve hired a bunch of people and any whiff of dishonesty or things not quite adding up is one of the biggest red flags you exude

or most likely you land jobs without a comprehensive HR department or they don't care, and that launders your reputation into actual experience you use for the next employer within 6 months, who you do a 1-2 year stint with so you don’t look like a mercenary, and then upgrade again from there, unless one of the FAANG offers come through and you just drop the short stints off your resume assuming you ever even need to be on the job market again

Concentrate on getting the better job. Mention your projects to potential employers - open-source the code on GitHub or GitLab.

It's great that you have written the projects, but: realize that there are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of similar apps out there. Unless you actively enjoy marketing, don't try to sell your apps.

Strongly agree that you should put them on GitHub with a decent README and try to get a job in the industry. Most applications seem to ask for a GitHub link. To be frank it’s hard to imagine the utilities to be worth any money if you have 0 professional experience. Maybe I’m wrong but compare them to some coding boot camp graduates GitHubs. They always have a very similar set of toy projects

I would guess the highest leverage thing you could do is open source some of your work on Github as samples to show potential employers. If you are just getting by your top priority should probably be to find better employment ASAP. Making money off little utilities like this is almost certainly going to be tough going.

Have you gotten any feedback from people on these projects? If you get feedback from people that might give you a hit as to whether they might be willing to pay money for such things.

When you put a lot of time into something and are understandably pleased with the result it can be hard to look at it objectively and you are likely to overvalue your work relative to someone who isn't invested in it. Maybe just look at them as a stepping stone learning experiences to bigger and better things.

Put them on github. The benefit for you in this equation is having your name on some code that a prospective employer can see. That will have a lot more monetary value to you, than you would ever be likely to make from selling the software (which is very little).

While I don't know the scope and possible impact of the projects, I'd tend to agree. Maybe wait a bit before making up your mind, see how much time and energy you actually still have when working a full time job. Letting your side projects rot to death sounds like the saddest choice, if you cant find a way to monetize them on the side.

If it helps you rationalize the choice to open source, or "give away for free" as you put it, maybe go through the list of open source software you daily drive, or that has repeatedly helped you out, and consider this "giving back". I did this a few years ago with a dozen mostly unfinished, smaller projects. Nothing blew up. The most successful one has 8 stars. Zero comments or issues. Still, maybe someone found some part of it useful, copied a class or two, something along these lines. I know that it has happened to me before that some weirdo on GitHub somewhere solved a problem I had and I just sneakily copied a couple functions and bent them into shape for whatever I was doing at the time.

If you sell it you'll have to commit to maintaining it.

Typically the marginal value of a better job in software dwarfs the revenue you could make from selling software.

"Applied Computing Technology" is not something I've ever heard of, however. It's a bit hard to give advice, because I can't tell what kinds of jobs you might be likely to get; going 4 years between degree and job suggests that your options might be somewhat limited. Having evidence of successful open source projects might make you stand out.

- Release as open source if that was your intent or you want it (feel like) to be open sourced

- If you strictly made it to make money, then release it as a paid product but assume it might not make any money at all or that it will take time to make money. I believe that there's a general advice to shut down a project that doesn't make money in a very short time but some projects take awhile to gain traction. You can also use this as a learning experience in marketing/sales. Play around with the pricing over time (starting with much lower rates than you'd planned for) and see what works. You'll learn from it.

- Another option is to shut down the project entirely. You still have your code and they might come in handy when you work on other projects in the future (this has happened to me with multiple side projects)

If you want to sell software, essentially you did it backwards: you made some stuff for yourself that solves a problem you have or completes a task. Now you hope to sell some of the better stuff for a few bucks.

But to sell software to someone else, you need to know that the benefit you’re offering to potential customers is something that they actually want or need.

For example, the tool to learn keyboard shortcuts. How many customers want that? How many customers have a pain point with being unable to learn keyboard shortcuts? Of those people, how much are they willing to pay for the solution? How will you find those prospects and convert them into paying customers?

Your ideas haven’t really been validated by anyone (unless they actually have users and you haven’t mentioned it)

The other part of this equation is that having a business with customers is way often far more work than the time spent building the technical solution.

You say that these solutions are basically done but that’s the easy part. If the goal was to make these projects into a business you might as well have pitched the ideas before you even built them…because if prospective customers showed you their disinterest you could have spared yourself the time and effort actually building them in the first place.

If you have a thousand people who gave you their email for a waiting list for beta access to a product you haven’t even started building that’s way better than having a finished product with no interested parties.

All of that said, my advice would be to put those projects in your portfolio for your resume for your industry job. They can be the projects you talk about when interviewers ask you about your experience (but you also need to convince employers that you can work well on a team team others).

If you want a job in the industry you need to focus more on the quality of your resume and your job application process than any of your actual coding work. The task of getting a tech job is almost entirely detached from everything you’ve done to this point. You are working a numbers game where less than 10% interview rate is normal and expected, so your job now is to be as efficient and effective as possible, putting on the best show for prospective employers.

I would get more eyes on my resume to hone it and make sure it is one that will get you a high interview percentage. I wouldn’t waste my time on the side project stuff unless one or more of them was something I was confident in enough to dedicate a significant effort into making selling and supporting that product.

I think that a lot of good software was/is created because someone was annoyed at what was (not) available and decided to create it. Chances are someone else is annoyed at the same thing and will welcome a solution.

Abandon them, and relicense to something strongly copyleft.

The latter step means if someone is willing to provide any improvements then they must publish it, which allows you to point at it as being the one now up to date.

I choose AGPL for mine.

Enjoy them!

I’ve fallen into the trap where I was building a side project with a glimmer of hope that it will turn into a viable venture. I really enjoyed building them, but did not appreciate how much I enjoyed it at the time. I now try to be more aware of how much I really enjoy them while I work on them.

While we are on this subject, I am curious to know what people with hiring knowledge think of seeing side project mentions on cvs

I am tempted to completely not mention them in mine, even though I have hundreds of thousands of users

Why? Because they distract from the "clean track record" of working for big corp, and perhaps the hiring manager will think less of me because of them ("not devoted to big corp enough"). Worse, they might think I will quit my job as soon as I am able to make a living from them, which isn't true but not entirely false either

Startup CTO here, so can't talk about corporate hiring politics. But for me, side projects show that the interviewee actually gives a crap about coding and they demonstrate, that they can finish a project. They're less likely to be lazy codemonkeys and more likely passionate people that care about the project, have an understanding of the processes and why we sometimes choose business over tech.

Just a thought: if someone (like myself!) has a long list of repos of unfinished projects, this could an accrued realization that one has no time to do side projects; they have to choose business (as in having a life outside of coding) over tech. :D

And that's totally fine! It's not a hard criteria, I just love to see the style of code, how people organize themselves and stuff like that. It's actually a very good reason!

Put then open on GitHub if you want any benefit from them. But I’m pretty sure they will just die. It’s not that you invented something groundbreaking or the like …

I'll be blunt.

1. Take all of the side projects that are too niche and/or unsellable and polish up the code then open source it (add it to your portfolio/resume).

2. Take the projects that are sellable and publish them in places people can find them (app store, on the web, etc) then put it on your portfolio/resume.

3. With your beefier resume/portfolio in hand, find a job.

well, for a little revenue, make them foss and ask for donations. i've made a few thousand quid doing this, you generate some goodwill, and you can put it on your cv for prospective employers to look at.

it's unlikely you will be able to live on the income from your side project, particularly in what seems to be very niche.

Put them on GitHub. If there were some interesting things you learned from the experience, write a few blog posts.

Having made actual useful things would put you above at least two-thirds of the grad candidates I've interviewed (though that is in a South African context).

Related current discussion:

It's OK to abandon your side-project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500386

Put them up on github with an Open Source license.

I was successful with a side project, but it was to solve a problem my employer had. I kept it closed source and provided it on my own site for free, and it was clear it was mine, not theirs. Having dealt with problems and additional requirements, when I left I launched it separately as a paid Service with a free tier. Proved to be an earner over many years.

If you are employed it might be a path to consider?

It sounds like if you don't do anything with these, it'll be a thorn in your side for a while. I've been in the same place.

My advice: pick one, try and release it as a paid product. You'll face what people mean when they say "marketing is hard" and "distribution is everything".

There is a very large probability that your product is going to fail. And it's ok. The learning is worth it. What you need to be aware of is that you shouldn't sink a ton of time into them.

So make a front page, a demo, a signup form, whatever you feel is better, but release the thing as soon as possible. Then, when you do your "show hn" and people respond with "meh" or "yay", you'll know. Don't push too hard if people don't "get it".

Don't do open source, it won't help in your job search (if anything, people will scrutinize your projects, and find they wouldn't have done it the same way).

It's hard to give good advice without more numbers.

You might try selling the Beeminder app to Beeminder.

You can do both. Release it under dual licenses.

I'm baffled by the ongoing lack of common sense these "making a breakthrough with my side projects" threads keep showing on Hacker News. Most of the times it's also some junior barely out of some dubious college, hardly presenting any work experience and certainly not the "FANNG" type.

Literally, this is Big Bang's Theory Penny trying to "make it" into big-star actress with no education and while working a waitressing job.

It would be amusing if it wouldn't be sad. And it's sad coze any attempt (like this one) of talking some sense into the wanna be superstar with little education, experience and effort (although they think working these side projects is effort, it doesn't compare with hard work in a demanding job) ... any such effort is met with furious downvoting from the seemingly smarter than average HN crowd. Only it seems there's plenty of Pennys out there and cancel culture works best for them.