I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains | Hacker News Reader

I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains

368 pointscesargstn262 comments

I think I'm officially a side project collector.

I've had it all:

A SaaS for freelancers... that I never had time to finish because I'm a freelancer.

A revolutionary AI tool that I abandoned as soon as GPT-4 came out.

And the famous "anti-social media social network" (spoiler: it was just me).

I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.

My Google Domains look like a graveyard of unfinished dreams.

But honestly, I've never learned so much, nor enjoyed it so much.

And one day, I might release one that takes off. Or not. But I'll be ready.

Any other serial side-projectors here? Share your greatest fails/unlikely successes

View on HN

> I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.

At least you're actually doing the "I code for 3 all-nighters" step!

I've stopped too many projects at the "I buy a domain name" stage, and added an intermediate "I create a Trello board" step between that and starting to write code. No need to pull all-nighters, which are hard to do with family and a full-time job, if all I need to do is add a card to a feature wishlist. Maybe prototype a few key functions to see how they work, wireframe a unique piece of UI, or follow the tutorial to create "hello world" in a new framework, but it turns out that those steps are also optional.

The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it. I can give myself a similar cognitive reward for simply reading on HN about other people completing projects, and even (at my lowest) passively watching YouTube videos of other people building cool stuff. It's all the mental rewards of participating in a group project where the tribe accomplished something great, except I'm barely in a parasocial relationship with a dude on Patreon or Discord a thousand miles away who actually performed 100% of the work. Maybe he likes my comment "Nice work! I really liked how you did [thing], have you considered [alternative strategy]?". Maybe he even comments back. Bang! Neurotransmitter pump engaged, dopamine boost received.

It's a scary thing to realize that you're doing this, and very, very hard to train yourself out of those bad habits. I find it's important to write down and consciously review my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly goals, my productive and unproductive activity towards those goals, and my actual accomplishments. It's too easy to get addicted to fake reward loops, whether because they're engineered by social media companies who make money off my attention span or because brains are just vulnerable to low-effort high-reward stimuli. What did I do in July? X hours of Reddit, Y hours of HN, Z hours of Youtube... and a half dozen things I'm actually proud of.

(Note to self: Don't get too excited about upvotes or replies to this comment, acquiring HN or Reddit fake Internet points are not part of my actual goals and should not be considered real accomplishments.)

Upvoted, but just in a friendly "hello, I recognise myself in this comment" sort of way :)

I currently have a little stack of index cards with in-play projects scrawled on them and at the end of the year the plan is to weed those and shut down any resources that aren't required for the ones still in the list. Hmm, maybe I need a domain name for that though...

One thing I will add is that it's ok to recognise that one enjoys some of these behaviours. There's no moral element to being a starter-not-a-finisher of personal projects so long as you're paying appropriate attention to your important commitments (family, the day job, etc.)

It's hardly the worst hobby to have. Maybe one goes somewhere? That doesn't really happen if the alternative is working through the list of TV shows people have mentioned.

> whether because they're engineered by social media companies who make money off my attention span or because brains are just vulnerable to low-effort high-reward stimuli you couldnt be bothered, i wouldnt overthink it mate. youll end up diagnosing yourself with ADHD

i actually buy the domain name at the end. i am stingy. which means i do not buy domain names as i always loose interest after some allnighters. but the code base remains until the motivation returns

That's not stingy, that's sensible :-) After spending far too much money buying things to support some planned activity that I never actually carry out, I now try to follow the rule that I only buy the thing when I actually need to use it.

This is a good rule for saving money in other areas of life too.

Very well said! In this struggle, and as I'm in a new job, and I've tried to not get carried away by the common distractions in not logging in on the corporate laptop on hn, reddit, and a few others. As you can see I already failed, but what a great thought that I could not resist to agree with a longer comment saying the same that an upvote. :)

> The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it.

I get this same buzz from talking about my projects. So today, I do not talk about anything I'm working on because I know I can drain myself of all motivation with one excited conversation.

If I want daydream fuel I buy a Powerball ticket for $2. I get the same dopamine rush doing fictional estate planning as I did spending $10=$50 on a domain and fantasizing about the project succeeding. The Powerball ticket also doesn't circle back around next year asking for more money.

I've also found that having a small homelab that can support Dokku or similar is also very helpful when I want to be productive. Deployable from Day 1 and after every change is a game changer for me, and deploying to an internal host lets me be lazy in all the right ways, as long as I keep track of the sins I commit (you can go a long, long way on a project before you have to add the boring boilerplate that is proper auth, for instance).

I feel like even doing this is keeping yourself sharp enough for when someone else makes a tool that lets you bring your idea to life in a more realistically achievable and complete-able fashion, for some definition of complete.

Im the same way. I wish I was rich enough to hire like 10 developers and assign them to all the different projects I have in mind.

You are, it’s called Claude Code Max.

For the down-voters, this is literally what has allowed my to launch a few projects on the side of my main saas focus that I've had in my backlog for years, one of which is now earning enough money to cover Claude Code Max plus some.

This actually killed my motivation to do some of my side project ideas. I would spend a lot of time writing very good specifications, setting everything up for succes by really finetuning my prompting and context, but then the AI would output something that looks impresssive but is completely full of mistakes. And it would take SO many tries to make the AI fix it, but every time it creates more and more bloat, and introduce more and more issues. Until the point I decide to throw away everything the AI produced, and try it from scratch again with a different prompt.

Eventually I spent so much time trying to make it work, only to remain empty-handed.

I had that thought once, but immediately realized it is better to build stuff sequentially, so you can put more of your energy per calendar month into each, which makes it more likely that it can take off.

> I can give myself a similar cognitive reward for simply reading on HN about other people completing projects, and even (at my lowest) passively watching YouTube videos of other people building cool stuff.

I struggle with the same thing -- I'm resigned to the solution that even (or especially) when you're doing hobby projects, you might have to resort to blocking HN or other distractors for a bit.

I always buy a domain well after I've finished the MVP and have been using it myself for months. Am I doing it wrong?

Only if your goal is collecting unused domains!

But what if somebody else snatches it and steals the idea???

I'm actually having some success now with the

> I buy a domain name → I set up a bug tracker → I spec out a bunch of tasks → I let Claude Code do the coding

Seems more sustainable to me than working a full-time job coding, then adding another coding side project. Nice change of pace to just be describing what I want my app to do (during my work day), then letting Claude Code buzz away while I do my day job.

how are you managing keeping up to date wiht the tasks and update to tasks. What bug tracker do you use.. do you mean jira??

I use Linear - it integrates with GitHub so that when PRs go in the status moves to shipped. I spec the linear tasks out, copy the generated git branch name and make a branch on my computer (auto moves to in progress status); copy paste the contents as markdown to Claude code, have it do its thing, then push up the code to a PR and review it/run CI. If alls good merge it in and then the status moves to shipped automatically.

Since otherwise this is a solo side project I don’t need anything more complex than that, though I also use Linear for my day job and so I know you can automate it more if you need to.

Jira is working for me via atlassian MCP.

I feel like I'm looking into a mirror haha. The number of times I have spent a ton of time planning and then little to no doing over the years is something I try not to dwell on.

This is a downside?!

You can bed unlimited lovers, all in a moment's thought! You can win the lottery a thousandfold, all before eating breakfast! You can win arguments, all in your mind, even whilst loosing them!

Success!!

This is me. After I hit ~70 domains, I realized I needed to stop. Now, I have since pared that down considerably, and instead add all of the domains I like to a "wishlist" so I can come back to them (I never do).

Then for my project ideas, I find writing them out to really be what scatches most of the itch for me. I get to think through the problem, think about how I could implement it, maybe even do a little exploring of tech I could use to solve the problem.

For the vast majority of the ideas I don't circle back. For some ideas I will come back a few times and iterate on the plans and designs, but still never build it. And even fewer I actually build. Its all of the fun, without feeling like I can never finish a project. Instead I feel like I can't start them.

Do you just start to code once you have an idea, or do you carry out a market analysis?

I am in it for the thrill. Code first ask questions later.

It took me about 20 years of normal employee/contractor office work alongside creating a side project every few years, to eventually find the side project that would take off.

In the end it was a weekend hack to make something simpler that turned into an app release, which a year or so after that turned into a business.

Sometimes people have a great idea, build it and feel entitled to success with it, but it's largely about relevant eyeballs. If enough relevant eyeballs find your thing and use/buy it then it's a success. It's quite easy to launch something that gets lots of views on launch, but there has to be a reason to come back (sticky apps/content).

I've also built several things that could have been good but I lost interest and ironically the thing I work on now is arguably one of the most boring topics conceivable, but perhaps that's why few people do it well.

I have now reached the point where I won’t buy the domain name until I get a prototype ready.

I’ve only bought one domain name since then and got the project out!

I think the domain name is your reward for finishing your minimum viable product.

I think of this as the "garage band problem". Imagine a bunch of teens deciding to make a band. They come up with a name, make t-shirts, even get the cover for the bass drum -- but how much did they actually play?

Personally, I'll snag a domain if it's really good -- like one word or a proper combo of words, spellable, etc... I won't set it to renew, though.

I love this take

never bought a domain until i had the first production version ready

So pessimistic

> I won’t buy the domain name until I get a prototype ready.

Me too. I learnt it after 6 expired domains

I learned after 600. Or did I? :)

I worked with a guy like you. He had a seemingly pathological need to one-up someone even when it was just a blatant lie.

I worked with a guy like that too, but even worse, you wouldn’t understand

I worked with a guy like that... oh wait, that guy is me

Yea that's safest, validating then building an idea should be a priority.

Good idea. Also - putting side projects on subdomains of your main domain / using cloudflare tunnel - Tailscale funnel to run services from your computer

Thanks, you should have told me this 13 years ago, before I lost 10k+ in domain names :-D

This is how I learned the lesson myself…

haha I like that

Release without a domain name, and wait until the product is popular before even spending the time to choose a name...

I am doing the same. I won't invest until I have a working MVP. Naturally, finishing it afterwards is challenging with little free time, but it can be slowly progressed.

My advice: It’s probably not that you’ve lost interest in your project — it’s more likely that you don’t know what to do next and you’re defaulting to your comfort zone: building the product.

Here’s an easy way to test this: imagine your product suddenly takes off — it gets picked up on Reddit or Hacker News, you start getting lots of users and feedback. Would you still feel uninterested? Or would you find yourself energized, working late into the night to improve it?

That thought experiment reveals something important: there’s a gap between building a product and getting people to use it. You haven’t figured out how to bridge that gap yet, so you stay in “builder mode” — because it feels safe and familiar.

IDK, you can stay in builder mode on the same idea. I’m getting old now and I wonder if there’s something in this whole persistence/keeping at it thing VCs love to talk. Not because you eventually figure _it_ out, but because sticking with an idea makes people see you believe in it and then they eventually think they should check think about it.

Thanks for sharing this ChatGPT message with us

Advice invalidated. Em dash detected!

Man I built an app a while back called Kanji Plus. The idea was to build a small side project to generate an income, then use that to fund my magnum opus, Phrasing [1]

I built the prototype in a weekend. I spent the next 8 months turning it into a product people cared about. As soon as people started using it, I realized I was going to spend the next 10 years beating around the bush on a product with a very low ceiling.

I eventually decided to build Phrasing [1]… and kanji plus just kind of disappeared. Dependencies updated, subscriptions expired, service providers went offline. I feel bad because I sold some lifetime memberships - genuinely expecting to just leave it on the internet forever - but man, apparently websites don’t do that out of the box anymore.

Luckily the entire product of kanji plus will fit nicely as a feature in Phrasing, and it’s written with the same front end tech so it should be a very simple copy paste. 2 weeks of work max (famous last words).

Still, I feel really bad that people paid me money and the service just went offline. I didn’t know I was being so naive just expecting things to work for more than 6 months unattended.

If any old kanji plus subscribers are reading this, please feel free to get in touch. I’m planning to give all my old supporters a free lifetime membership to phrasing once it’s ready to go! (a membership tier that will not be available to the general public)

[1]: https://phrasing.app/

I would not subscribe to your new app that is not yet finished when you have a previous product that was cancelled without fanfare.

I think that’s fair! The question was greatest fails though, I would say that is par for the course.

Check back in 10 years though, Phrasing will still be running, and it will have had all the features of kanji plus for 9 years and then some :-)

See you in 10 years!

https://archive.is/gnhIi

That’s why I’m writing pure html and css in 2025. These sites can last a very long time. I just wrote about this a couple weeks ago:

https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...

Heh yeah kanji plus was closer to a video game than it was to a word document. It’s less to do with JavaScript and more to do with all the surrounding tech. Supabase, netlify, npm packages, etc

These days I do everything with elixir or dependency free (cl)js + react . Learned my lesson the hard way

12 years into my graveyard of side projects and making a modest income, nothing has ever "taken off", but I have survived. I yearn to be "pulled" by the market inextricably, but that is unlikely. The reality is almost every business (and I mean almost every one) is "pushed" up the hill, interminably, like Sisyphus. Even my most successful clients never feel "ahead". Something always breaks in the business model, given enough time.

> I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.

That's ADHD for you.

A former coworker of mine lamented this - "I start so many projects or hobbies, but just when I feel like I've learned a lot I lose interest". I had to point out to him that his hobby isn't - whatever, sheep shearing or book bindery or underwater basket weaving - but rather his hobby is learning things. That's a common thing for ADHD people, absorbing all you can in a rapid amount of time, devoting every minute of thought to something, and then suddenly completely forgetting it exists until you get the domain renewal notice.

At least you (seem to) have (some degree of) acceptance of the circumstance and recognize the benefits of this behavior rather than just focusing on the drawbacks; too many people have this behavior and think it's a personal failing, when really they just have a different hobby than they think they have.

I don't think it has to be ADHD. I don't have ADHD, and none of my friends have it that I know of. We all start things we don't finish, though. I was going to post some of the more ridiculous domain names I've purchased for personal projects, before I realized I'd be doxxing myself. Too bad, there are some good ones.

I think in many cases, we fail to finish projects because it's so much easier to start than it is to finish. The first 90% is easy, as the saying goes, but the second 90% is much harder.

And I use the word 'fail' advisedly. I think it's fine to not finish everything you start, but it's not good to never finish anything, ever. Not if your intention was to finish it anyway. I think finishing things is a crucial skill, and we need to practice it in order to get good at it, and we won't do that if we tell ourselves it's about as good to give up as it is to keep going.

ADHD is a real diagnosis, but I'm hesitant to pathologize not finishing projects, since that will end up being an excuse rather than an explanation for a lot of people.

However, as it can be a valid indicator for ADHD, it is fine to do a test, like[1] offers. It's difficult to diagnose adults, but I was surprised to see a quite high rate of matches in the test. I share the same "problems" as OP: I quit projects because I was able to solve the problem at hand.

[1]: https://www.adxs.org/en/

I didn’t think I had ADHD. Then I saw some video on autism that hit a little too close to home. I went and got tested, and just had them test for everything while I was at it, which included testing for ADHD. Turns out I do have ADHD. The more I learn about it, and autism, the more my entire life comes into focus.

I have mixed feelings about finding this out late in life (early 40s). I do think there was a lot of value in not having it as an excuse when I was younger, to force myself to figure things out and get to where I am today. On the other hand, I spent a good 20 years looking everywhere to try and figure out what is wrong with me. Lots of time and money down the drain… and the YouTube algorithm is what ultimately pointed me in the right direction.

I used to think that these psychiatrists were just trying to diagnose the human condition, as so many of the things I heard just seemed like normal life for me. But I guess I now know why that seemed normal for me, but maybe aren’t normal for everyone.

Aspb ‘83 baby, that’s 80s parenting for you. Boomers saying “Oh he’s just hyper” or “Oh he’s shy” or “Oh she’s just in her own world” and brushing it under the rug. Combine that with processed food additives of the 90s and I look exactly the same as I did in high school only with grey hair instead of brown!

I actually remember telling my dad in the late 80s or early 90s that I thought I had ADD after I first heard about it. He simply said, “no son of mine has ADD,” without even breaking stride. That was that. I was never a problem in school, so no one had any reason to question it and I moved on.

Funny enough, when I told my dad about the diagnosis, within 90 seconds he said, “I think I might have that too.” Then he went off and did a bunch of research. He doesn’t feel it’s worth getting a diagnosis in his 70s, but is pretty sure he has it as well after the research. Funny how life works out. This actually helped me forgive some of the harder parts of my childhood, as I could better understand where he was coming from.

I felt the same when I discovered I was a Gemini. Come on - someone has created a category which describes a group of people in a fairly self-consistent way. Of course a large number of people will spot it and say: "Finally! The agency lies outside of me! My struggles are no longer my fault!"

But they never were in the first place, and being in a category doesn't change your responsibility to do the best with what you've got.

At least star signs don't medicalise you.

There are plenty of other ways of characterising this - Ayurvedic medicine or the Humours - in fact, those are so effective that they've been taken by business coaches and turned into "colour personality types". And they describe the same thing.

You have a deficiency of phlegm and black bile. Ask ChatGPT about how to treat it, and it'll essentially suggest a permanent dopamine fast.

Where did I say I was absolved of responsibility to do my best? In real life, I’d told fewer than 6 people about the diagnosis. I haven’t told my bosses and have no plans to. I’m not looking to game the system to lower the bar for myself. I was simply looking to understand myself better. I even said it was probably good I didn’t know when I was younger, as it forced me to not use it as an excuse.

I ran into situations countless times where I have things that had a big negative experience on my life and when talking to others, people just looked at me weird; they couldn’t relate. My sister was the only one who ever got it (her doctor has suggested she get tested, but she hasn’t done it yet). When I stumbled across people talking about their experiences with AuDHD, for the first time in 40 years I heard other people saying the same stuff I was trying to say, when others just looked at my like a weirdo. It’s not about looking for what to blame, it was about finding out I wasn’t the only one dealing with some of this stuff, which is how it felt for the vast majority of my life.

Also worth pointing out that ADHD is one of the most well understood diorders out there, and one of the most easily testable and medicated.

I can't count how many people I know or have heard from who have struggled with "motivation" all their lives, and then they took one ritalin one day and, instead of getting hyper and bouncing off the walls like their friends do, they were suddenly able to just sit down and focus on something in a way they'd never experienced before, without any of the struggles that they've suffered their whole lives, and been blamed for by the ignorant parent poster above.

And yeah, you don't have to medicate; it's definitely not for everyone, and I know someone personally who very clearly has ADHD (and a diagnosis) but cannot tolerate any of the available medications. Instead, she just has to find a way to work her life such that the downsides of ADHD don't affect her as much and she can lean on the benefits of ADHD to get through it. Still, just hearing "you're not a fuck-up, it's just how your brain works" can be extremely healing.

What a bunch of nonsense

"This thing that medical professionals say is real isn't real, and you can tell that because astrology isn't real either".

The reality is that, for a lot of people, their struggles aren't "their fault". People with visual disabilities aren't as good at playing darts, people who have issues with gross motor skills aren't as good at baseball. That's all accepted, but as soon as you get into invisible disabilities everyone leaps to say "I can't see it so it doesn't exist". It's a load of BS, and it's why so many people who do have these issues struggle - because they're being told, by people who don't care to understand what they're going through, that it's all their fault because they're just shitty people who need to try harder.

One of the things that people spouting nonsense like yours seem to miss is that these issues that people with ADHD have aren't just laziness; it's not just "I don't want to do work". People will find it impossible to do anything, even things they enjoy. It's not just slacking off from chores and playing video games instead, it's not being able to bring yourself to do chores but also not being able to bring yourself to play video games, or read a book, or go get groceries. It's a fundamental inability for you to direct your executive function, and until people like you stop spouting uneducated nonsense and start actually listening to people's experience it's going to continue to be an uphill struggle for people who have to go through what you're dismissing.

What kind of tests are these that can identify such disorders? In the culture and country I'm from, everyone I know with a similar diagnosis has had to go through a path of "decide what you have, battle the gatekeepers until they relent". This isn't just cynicism and shopping for desired results but the result of a medical system where professionals are guardians of insurance spend rather than fonts of advice.

The idea that there's a valid diagnostic test available sounds quite interesting.

Pulling up my results, these are some of the named tests that were administered, with a short summary of what it's for (after asking Chat-GPT what they're all for.

- WAIS-IV (full scale IQ)

- WRAML-3 (memory)

- CPT-3 (ADHD - selective attention, impulsivity, and vigilance)

- BDEFS-SR (ADHD - executive functioning deficits in daily life activities, including self-management to time, self-organization, self-restraint, self-motivation, and emotional self-regulation)

- DKEFS (higher-level cognitive functions related to executive functioning)

- ADOS-2 (Module 4) (ASD - diagnostic tool for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in adults)

- SRS-2 (ASD - social impairment)

- PAI (inventory that assesses personality traits and psychopathology - self-report)

- Beck Depression Inventory (depression - self-report)

- Beck Anxiety Inventory (anxiety - self-report)

I think there was more than this, but I wasn't counting. It was about 4 hours of test after test after test. I was told it would take 4-6 hours; I think I finished slightly under 4 hours, taking no breaks.

During the test when I asked what various things were for, they wouldn't tell me, so I don't know which test was for what. There was one that was pretty clearly for ADHD, it was on the computer and to hit space bar or something each time something came up on the screen at random intervals. That was the worst one. I sucked at it.

When getting the results, I spent most of the time asking if I could have gamed it, or if they were just a mill for handing these things out to anyone who seemed like they wanted it. I was told that since it is a mix of quantitative vs qualitative testing, with multiple tests that all have to align for a diagnosis, it would be nearly impossible to do that.

Some testing centers have online screening test, which are going to be better than the Buzzfeed style quizzes. But they are largely self-reports. For me, they were pretty accurate. For my dad, they seemed less accurate, as he has a lifetime of skills built up to help manage things and was taking all those into account. During testing some of those things came up, where they'd ask if I had an issue with X, and the answer was no, but it was because I did Y to make sure that didn't happen, which they said would be a coping mechanism or something.

I have heard some of the things you have about it being hard to get tested. For me, in the US, it was pretty easy. It did still take about 6 months, and cost me about $3k (I think) out of pocket. Insurance didn't cover it. But cost and waiting aside, there weren't any roadblocks standing in my way.

> During the test when I asked what various things were for, they wouldn't tell me, so I don't know which test was for what.

In a lot of cases they can't tell you because, either consciously or subconsciously, you will adjust your behavior and skew the test results. If you're told "this test is to evaluate your capacity for empathy" then your brain is going to start skewing your answers towards more empathetic ones because now that's the thing that's top of mind.

Yeah, I understood why she wouldn't tell me, but I couldn't help myself from asking. I'm also glad she didn't tell me, as that was one of my big fears with the testing, that I wouldn't be able to trust it due to my own skewing of the results. When I first thought this might be my issue, I went deep down the rabbit hole, but once I scheduled testing I purposefully stopped reading and watching content about it, because I wanted to make sure I was answering for myself and not related to stuff I watched/saw.

This may be why I haven't done much since the diagnosis. It was initially all I wanted to do, but once several months passed while waiting, my interests shifted to other things, and going back to that topic has a lot less novelty to it, so I already did the early deep dive.

What kind of testing for ADHD was given to you? Or more specifically, from what you've learned, what helped you diagnose it best? Even more importantly, what has helped you manage it better afterwards?

I talk about the testing a bit here[0].

YouTube was actually the most helpful thing in getting me to the point where I felt testing for a diagnosis would be a good idea. There are a lot of channels out there from people who have this stuff who talk about their experiences. I found this much more helpful than reading the diagnostic criteria. While I did read the section of the DSM on ASD, I had to pair that with ChatGPT to ask for example of how this stuff presents in actual life. People on YouTube were a good source of seeing what people deal with and getting these real world examples of how things present, and I saw a lot of alignment to what they were talking about in my own life.

I'm scored pretty high in masking (hiding what's going on), so it's not something others usually pick up on me. Having ASD and ADHD, they can kind of help compensate for each other, so that can also lead to things hiding a bit to the outside world. I talked to a therapist for 2 years before this was even on my radar. I mentioned the possibility to him, and he was like... I don't see it, and then didn't seem to want to talk about it anymore. He was big into just blaming my dad for nearly everything. However, during several of our sessions over those 2 years we'd have a disagreement, where I'd try to explain what I'm feeling and he'd be like, "no, it's this." I'd tell him he wasn't understanding and try to explain further, and he just wouldn't get it. Back and forth for 30+ minutes. It was infuriating. Then as I was watching some of these videos that talked about neurotypical introverts vs autistic people, they basically said the introverts thought the way the therapist did, while people with autism tend to think the way I was arguing. So that's why he wasn't understanding me; he had the wrong framework for understanding the problem. There were many such examples like this in talking to him, but also throughout my whole life.

In terms of management, I haven't done much yet. I think I'm still in the period of processing it and finding it nice to take a break from searching for what the problem is after decades of looking. I feel like when I look at the typical advice, it's a lot of stuff I've already tried over the years from reading various books or taking various courses. I have a theory that the entire self-help genre is being fueled by people with undiagnosed ASD and ADHD. I quit therapy with the person I was seeing the day before getting my results. If I had it, he didn't seem like he could help me with it after brushing it aside for 6 months while I waiting for testing. If I didn't have it, I didn't feel like I was getting any value out of the sessions at all, so it was pointless. The places that did the testing said they had therapists, who would probably be better, but when I emailed the person she didn't reply back. I never followed up, so that's probably on me.

I haven't tried any meds for the ADHD, I'd have to talk to doctors about that. I'm on the fence on the whole idea. I've made it this far without them. I've also worked with people while they were trying to get their meds dialed in, and it was a nightmare. There are some valid arguments on both sides.

For the ASD there are no meds, as far as I understand. I probably need to force myself to go out into the world more. The pandemic really gave me an excuse to be alone all the time and 5 years later I haven't really stopped. I feel like it's making it worse, because I'm more out of practice of how to be around people.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745215

> I haven't tried any meds for the ADHD, I'd have to talk to doctors about that. I'm on the fence on the whole idea. I've made it this far without them.

One of the nice things about medication for ADHD, and I've mentioned this to a few people who are new to having (or supporting people who have) ADHD, is that the medication is very straightforward and you get roughly instant feedback.

That is to say that, if you compare to something like SSRIs for treating depression, you get a medication and a dose picked out, you start on the medication, you get awful side effects for weeks, and then maybe after a few weeks you start to see some benefits. Then again, maybe you don't, so you spend a few weeks tapering off so that you can try some other medicine, etc and see if that has any benefit.

With ADHD medicines just being (mostly) short-acting stimulants, in a lot of cases people can get a prescription, take one dose, and find out within an hour or two if it's making a difference. There can definitely be side effects and getting the right medication and dosage can be a lot of work, but being able to take a medication at 8 AM and be feeling the effects before noon is amazing - and having them wear off by the evening is also amazing. You don't have to struggle with juggling your brain chemistry for weeks just to see if anything happens, and you don't have to spend weeks undoing that to be clear of it; you can start and stop in a day.

> For the ASD there are no meds, as far as I understand.

Well, because ASD isn't a disease or a condition, it's a difference in how (and how much) you perceive the world.

> I probably need to force myself to go out into the world more. The pandemic really gave me an excuse to be alone all the time and 5 years later I haven't really stopped. I feel like it's making it worse, because I'm more out of practice of how to be around people.

This is true for me as well, to some extent, but I've also gotten to the point where I don't really care that much about masking or fitting in any more than necessary. I'm open about being neurodivergent, I'm not afraid to discuss it, and thankfully I'm in an industry where a lot of people are the same way - diagnosed or not - and at least kind of get it to some degree. Still important to not just be "outright weird" as some autistic people can be, so I'm not going to start telling our lead marketing strategist about the human leather and organ trading outpost I set up in Rimworld, but being open about it has made it a lot more relaxing to be around other people.

Maybe part of that is getting rid of the "what if they think I'm weird?" worry after realizing that eventually they're going to think I'm weird regardless and I just have to be sure to come across as "harmless weird" and not come across as "stranger danger weird".

Thanks for the insights on the meds. I heard from some people that they can also just be taken as needed. So I could potentially go without them most days, but if I need/want to get something done, or am having a particularly hard time getting moving on something, that can be a tool in my tool belt.

The biggest hurdle to trying right now is the act of finding and setting up an appointment with someone. I've been putting it off until "later" for probably 8 months.

> I don't really care that much about masking

I don't even know who I am. I had to mask just to be in my family growing up, so when people talk about unmasking... I have no idea how to do that. It's so engrained into me. I'm typically pretty quiet when I meet new people, around people I don't know well, or don't see often. I thought this was just me, but have come to realize it's me putting on a blank mask until I can figure out how to act around these new or less familiar people. When I've tried to rush this process in the past it's been awkward.

Thanks to both of you above, both commentators, for the detailed responses. Digesting them right now before replying further. I was asking specifically because, well, at my age after years of extreme difficulties with focus, I think it's time to dig a bit deeper into remedies and possible causes.

> I don't think it has to be ADHD.

It definitely doesn't have to be ADHD, but that loop of "new interest" -> "hyperfixation for a period of time" -> "no interest" is classic ADHD, and in almost all of the people I know who do have ADHD this was the first major sign for them.

There is definitely a difference between starting projects that don't turn out to be interesting or useful and not bothering, but the way OP described their experiences is textbook and should definitely not be minimized as it is definitely not the typical case for neurotypical people.

> I don't have ADHD, and none of my friends have it that I know of. We all start things we don't finish, though.

One of the other things I've noticed about people with ADHD or autism, even undiagnosed, is that they tend to congregate together - neurodivergent people tend to cluster together through similar interests and thought patterns. This leads to the logic of "I don't think I have ADHD because everyone is like this", but that's a selection bias that hides the distinction that people could otherwise make.

> think finishing things is a crucial skill, and we need to practice it in order to get good at it, and we won't do that if we tell ourselves it's about as good to give up as it is to keep going.

Again, this sort of phrasing can minimize the impact of the executive dysfunction inherent with ADHD; again, not saying that you or the OP definitely do have ADHD, but this idea that "finishing things is just something you need to practice at" is the ADHD equivalent of "have you tried not being sad?" For many ADHD people, it just does not, and cannot, work that way, or at least not without interventions like medication and conscious coping strategies.

> since that will end up being an excuse rather than an explanation for a lot of people

I dislike this line of thinking, because it sort of inherently (if subconsciously) implies that, without a real diagnosis from a professional (which can cost thousands of dollars that people don't have), it's probably just an excuse people are making for... what? being lazy? being incompetent? ...and that we shouldn't take those explanations seriously. If we want to destigmatize neurodivergence then we need to be willing to take people at their word and support them.

If someone says "I can't finish projects because I'm so ADHD lol", then you can either say "that's just an excuse unless a psychologist has said otherwise" or you can say "If that's the case, how can we support you, and what are you working on to support yourself?" and, if those supports don't work, then you look for alternate explanations.

> "I start so many projects or hobbies, but just when I feel like I've learned a lot I lose interest".

Similar problem for me.

Every project I've wanted to do, there's usually some technical hurdle I need to achieve, and once I've achieved it, I lose interest and have something that's not even enough to be considered a proof-of-concept, let alone an MVP.

For example, there's an arcade game called Killer Queen that I loved, and thought it was a travesty that there wasn't a PC version, since it's a 10-player game that's played on 2 cabinets, and who has that many friends going to the arcade at the same time? It needed to be online!

So I decided I was going to create a clone of it. The big hurdle I needed to figure out was how to make a realtime multiplayer platforming game that kept clients in sync while also compensating for latency. My implementation worked by having both client and server keeping copies of the last 60 frames of game state, and the client would merely send their inputs and a time stamp (Really a frame number) to the server, which would then go back to the frame state for that number and re-simulate the game with that input. It would also stream the current state (It was only ~300 bytes) to other players with their inputs, which would also do a similar re-simulation.

I even made it mostly cheat-proof. There's no hidden information (All players see the exact same screen), but I figured a modded client could simply see what other players have done, then send inputs with time stamps in the past to put themselves into an advantageous position, but I prevent that by making the server reject inputs older than 250 ms.

But...after getting all that working, and basic platforming working...I got bored. Never touched the project again.

EDIT: I've got another game I worked on and actually got to the MVP part, but it needs a heavy refactor and I just haven't bothered. Mainly because I hate writing and testing front-end code, and I feel like I've already written it once and don't want to write it again. I haven't bought a domain for it yet, thankfully. I'm going to insist on a .game domain for it, which is like $400/year.

This is a good way to look at it. My issue is that I hate acquiring all the stuff to learn something when I know there is a high likelihood of losing interest after a few days or weeks. I’ve done this far too many times and got really sick of it. It feels so wasteful.

Maybe this is where a lot of my stress comes from. I need that outlet, but I suppress it to avoid collecting future trash or losing money selling a bunch of like-new stuff (and having to deal with the process of selling things all the time).

That's definitely a real thing. It's beneficial to try to steer the ship rather than stop it - instead of buying like-new stuff, restrict yourself to getting second-hand stuff from FB marketplace or Craigslist, or to sales. This can serve the dual purposes of saving you money on your initial investment and also reining in your overall collection of more gunk to clutter up your home over time.

Living in the city I sometimes wonder if this isn't what garage sales were amazing for; gather up all your stuff that you don't touch anymore, lay it out on the driveway, and people come to you to take it away rather than you having to hunt them down.

Maybe there's benefit in some kind of "temporary hobbyist" FB group or similar, where people who are excited to start a hobby they know they won't continue with can pick up an entire batch of like-new equipment from people who started a hobby they didn't continue with.

Maybe I need to get more comfortable with that. I tend to subscribe to the buy-once, cry-once way of buying things. There have been various times in the past when I wanted thing X, but bought thing Y to save a few bucks. I didn't like it and ultimately ended up with thing X. This costs be more money, time, and frustration than just buying the good thing from the start. But when dealing hobbies I may or may not like, it's a problem.

> Maybe there's benefit in some kind of "temporary hobbyist" FB group or similar

Many libraries have a bunch of stuff like this now. They call it the Library of Things. Looking at my local library, they have things like a record player, gardening tools, a ukulele, steel drum, knitting stuff, some electronics kits, etc. That could be a good "free" resource for things like this. I looked at it before, but should probably actually give it a try.

I’d call it impulse coding.

I do like learning things, but I wish I could retain better. Abandoning hobbies has set me back in that way, making it harder to pick up more advanced interests. It feels like lost time. I have needed to restart instruments and various maths several times. Perhaps a proper system based on spaced repetition could help, but organization is a hurdle

This is not really ADHD but simply the fun part of new projects. The exciting start vs. the grind. Is the difference between 17 abandoned side projects and an overnight success ten years (or more) in the making.

You've just described ADHD perfectly, I'm sorry to say.

People who don't have this sort of ADHD level of executive dysfunction are capable of completing projects. The "exciting start" vs "abandoning them as soon as they're not exciting" thing is a core criteria for ADHD in my experience.

Neurotypical people don't have this same experience; they don't start something new because they're excited about it and then bail out halfway through and never go back. I can't understand what that kind of life would be like, but they do it. Meanwhile, people with ADHD, especially undiagnosed, are constantly starting projects because they're excited, hyperfocussing on them for some length of time, and then bailing out never to return.

In my experience, comments like yours usually tend to come from people who have undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe that's not the case, but from what I've seen it often is.

What compells neurotypicals to start projects, then?

I called this Opportunity FOMO for myself. I always wish to jump on the bandwagon with the next idea/project instead of sticking to the one I currently work on.

I wrote a short blog post on this a few weeks ago: https://baduiux.de/posts/opportunity-fear-of-missing-out/

No, I think it's just that actually shipping projects is harder than one imagines it, and the glow wears off relatively quickly.

Is that why my wife keeps telling me I need to get a diagnosis?

It could be one of many!

I was diagnosed ages ago, relatively speaking, but my wife didn't get diagnosed until after our first child was born. We'd go for walks with him and he'd try to talk to her or ask her something and she wouldn't have any idea. I'd have to get her attention, let her know he was talking to her, and she'd ask him to repeat. Thirty seconds later, she's off in her own world again. After a diagnosis and a pretty low dose of medication, she's far better at being present in the moment, and she gets more out of life as a result.

When she was on her way to the doctor to discuss things, she asked me for a list of the things that made me suspect she had ADHD; I sent her a small list of my suspicions and she said afterwards that it was a really difficult thing to read about herself - strange to me, because, at least from my perspective, those are all 'normal' things for someone with ADHD to have and obviously not her fault.

It's worth mentioning that medication doesn't make you not have ADHD, though; she's still the same person with the same thought processes and habits, starting new projects all the time, and leaving stuff until the last minute unless she's put it in her calendar immediately. The difference is that it's easier to be conscious about how and why those behaviors affect your life differently than other people might expect, and to compensate for them if they're affecting you or others negatively.

I honestly think that this sort of diagnosis should just be a normal thing that they evaluate kids for in school. Let the parents do with it what they will, ignore it or look further, but I think a lot of people would be a lot better off if they understood from childhood why the gulf between society's expectations of behavior and their own were so different, rather than finding out after feeling like a failure or a screw-up for 10-20 years.

Dan Okrent (fascinating guy [0]) has a great line:

"My wife calls me a serial obsessionist"

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Okrent

> his hobby is learning things.

I've rarely felt so seen.

That's basically my lifelong addiction.

I have dozens of projects that I will obsess over for a few weeks. When I was younger I would convince myself that what I was doing would change the world and I was going to make billions of dollars, but eventually I became more honest with myself: I do these projects because I want to learn about <<subject X>>.

I built a Icecast server recently because I wanted to learn more about audio encoding and streaming protocols. I built a clone of fzf because I wanted to learn more about Rust and diffing algorithms. I wrote a custom async scheduling framework for my Swaybar because I wanted to learn more about how async scheduling works. I started trying to prove the Collatz conjecture because I wanted to learn more about Isabelle.

I am ok with this being part of my life; I like learning new bits of math and technology, and the easiest way to actually learn a new concept (instead of nodding along in a book) is to try and do something with that knowledge. I think "learning for fun" is far from the worst hobbies one could have.

Stop medicalising everything. These people don't have sufficient motivation to finish the things they've started. Yes, their hobby might be learning things. That's actually a pretty good hobby. Are they kidding themselves sometimes, do they lack self-knowledge, yep. This is just a slice of humanity, and giving it a label that helps people to sell amphetamines doesn't really do anyone any good. Teaching morals and self-discipline does.

It would be great if you spent any time at all educating yourself about the science and actual experiences behind it, rather than spouting off about what you assume to be true based off of nothing.

Your willful ignorance of objective fact does nothing to improve the discussion, and just shows you as being unwilling to engage intellectually.

Put aside your preconceived notions and do some actual research and you might learn some really interesting things.

Thanks for this comment. I love this - it is a very kind and self caring way of thinking about it especially on dreaded annual domain renewal day

Remind yourself when that dreaded e-mail comes around that these are not markers of failed projects but trophies of new skills learned!

...but don't necessarily renew them.

> absorbing all you can in a rapid amount of time, devoting every minute of thought to something, and then suddenly completely forgetting it exists until you get the domain renewal notice

This could be my bio. And yes, I do have ADHD (it hyperactive).

The trick is just buying 1 domain and putting every project on a different subdomain.

Apart from this I see myself represented in this post.

Yes! Build a "platform". I learned that as well. Also saves your from having to come up with snazzy names for your "new product" as you can just name it after its function, notes.mydomain.com

You can do that for the odd small tool, but you can't launch GreatNewThing™ without having it's own full domain!

Except it never gets any users.

I suppose the plus side to spending months rather than days on projects that never go anywhere is I have fewer domains. Only 7 here. Sigh.

PuTTY is hosted from a user home directory[0]. Maybe having a fancy URL isn’t everything.

[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

I like to remind myself that Wordle, when it went crazy viral, had a domain that was very unmemorable

https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Not having the "right" domain is never the blocker

I do that, but I’m never satisfied.

I ended up using one of my more generic domains (https://www.modulecollective.com/) and then launching things as <product>.modulecollective.com. It's a little wordy but it's free and creates kind of a natural place to catalog things. I figure if any of them take off then I can go buy a better name later and move it over, having the old one redirect. That would be a good problem to have :-)

That particular domain was going to be like a Netflix DVD style subscription product for Eurorack modules but I never even ended up trying to build that after buying the domain.

I think this is perfectly valid. Why waste the resources until you've proven it out?

Yeah - I think early users are going to click on a link too and don’t really care. If you were really advertising or something with traction you’d want a nice domain but I don’t think it would hurt early adoption of little saas tools.

https://munin.watch

It offers searching in transcriptions of all Norwegian podcasts in (roughly) real-time. Also offers subscribing to alerts, for example if anyone mentions your business name. Launched some days ago

great work

Thanks!

I had side projects that died because the market shifted. When I was in middle school, I managed a small website for tabletop RPGs on a very limited market (a small European country), and the community was extremely toxic and kept copying my work and replacing the name in it, so after like 6-8 years of battling, I decided to close it. Now, after more than a decade, I plan to reopen it, uploading again my old stuff there as archives. I still have the domains.

tangential question for the HN side-project crowd:

i have lots of ideas for fun little side projects that would never be revenue generating.

i'll go on a tear and start building it, but when it comes time to figure out how much it'd cost each month for domains/cloud services/etc I talk myself out of it. I'm not talking about big LLM bills here, just things like $25/month for the database, $10-50/year for a domain, etc.

I don't think it's just that I'm being cheap, it's that I don't like the idea of having to pay for something in perpetuity. Because that leads to me thinking about how long I plan to keep it active and when I'll sunset it. And once you start thinking about that before you've even launched, it's pretty easy to conclude it's not worth the time to build it given its limited shelf life. If I could just do a one-time upfront payment I'd probably go through with it.

The solutions to this are either buying a server and self-hosting (no thanks) OR making peace with having a recurring 'goofy computer stuff' monthly bill.

So... how much do yall spend each month on your side-projects? Having some numbers would help me contextualize and justify this

I have had a single cheapest ec2 server at 5$ per month and hosted both db and server in it. Sqlite for db so easy to back up. It didn't contain any important data though.

I ran many projects in it

I have an old Mac mini in a closet that runs Ubuntu and serves as a Dokku [1] host. My side projects run for free and are accessible inside my network or if I'm on VPN. If the project gets enough love eventually it'll graduate to public hosting and the transition is easy because the app is already built with deployment in mind.

I have saved so much money over the years just not having to pay $20/mo * IDEA_QTY. The Mac mini doesn't take much power and is dead silent.

[1] https://dokku.com

What's wrong with a single domain and a $5/m VPS that keeps both DB and application on it?

I ran a paid business app on a $5/m VPS. No complaints.

If your $5/m VPS cannot handle some load, then that's when you upgrade it. And, TBH, at the point that your $5/m VPS is at 80% load on a paid product, you're already getting a few thousands of dollars of revenue from it anyway.

if i were just using a dataset to store user settings, i could get by with something tiny.

but my problem is that my fun project ideas are usually some variant of "theres a huge dataset, lets build some fun dataviz on it". which is a problem because a) i need a big db to store that giant dataset and b) the db size doesn't scale with usage, so i can't just put it off until later

Okay, just how much data are we talking?

$5/m droplet + $10/m storage gets you 100GB of storage that you can put a PostgreSQL (or other) DB onto.

The storage situation is not quite as expensive as it used to be.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/block-storage

You can rent a dedicated server with 1tb disk space, and 12-16 full cores for <50 bucks per month. I'm confident you can host as many projects as you'd like on there for quite awhile.

I found fly.io to be very generous and pretty easy to get started with. There's also free tiers from AWS, GCS, or maybe even Vercel depending on your needs. So get free hosting, build things out, they pay for a domain which seems to be the only thing you can't cheat or steal :)

Cloudflare can be free for a long time without much usage. Assuming serverless is enough.

You could be spending far less on proof-of-concept websites. I maximize Azure free tier services, and only projects that create revenue earn their own domain name.

My side projects cost me about $15 a month, and the biggest cost there is LLC registration.

I once owned both cakefax.com, and faxcake.com. I was going to corner the market.

Is this happy-birthdaying a fax machine or what? haha

I didn't think very deeply into this, but it would involved these steps:

1. You send me a pdf 2. I print it out on white sheet cake and deliver it. 3. Profit?

The corners have the most frosting!

I want a fax on my birthday! Sign me up.

I only "finished" 2 projects yet.

Before that, i only started them and lost motivation after ~2 weeks. The projects a wanted to do were cyclic though, so i often came back to restart things i had left unfinished.

It took me time to change that, but the main thing i did was starting with extremely limited projects, that i knew i could finish in 2 weeks. I did very basic things at the beginning, like hosting a pure html website (but it was by first website i hosted, with nginx and certbot). Sometimes i would get back to it and improve something, like styling, text, SEO,...

I say "finished" because the bottleneck is finding users, not the code. So i still work on these projects, but not at the same speed.

We should start a club with the amount of us in the same boat... what should our domain be?

foreverwip.com

ghostridingthewip.ai

underconstruction.com

www.awebsiteyouwillnevergoto.org

Matchmaking service for swapping unused domains with other side project hobbyists.

lol, that might actually work!

projectgraveyard.org seems to be available

I'm a person just like you, I have dozens of side-projects around. The difference is that I've never went "far" enough to buy domains for any of those.

But I have a decent half-baked AI based investment portfolio manager, one month of hard work (nights/weekends) dreaming of selling it for a bank. Projects of such complexity are impossible for people stuck in the ordinary life (job/family). PS: I'm not complaining - I love my family. But it demands energy.

sounds like you just discovered a product niche: build an AI to do all your family stuff

Ha, I wrote this the other day:

> I think it’s part of the procrastination cycle; buying a domain name feels like progress towards the goal, but is incredibly low effort, and thus feeling like I’m making progress I wander off and get attracted to the next shiny thing.

So, yup, except that it sounds like you typically make more progress than me!

Edit: Context is https://paperstack.com/hntags/

I recently went and killed off ~10 domains :). Current project: something like eww[1], only using lua and a UI idea that I think may actually be ergonomic in Rust (immediate/imgui style and actors). Maybe I'll finish it this time.

One the other hand, I have a great idea for CI and it's an itch I am currently suffering...

[1]: https://github.com/elkowar/eww

My most recent one was a social network: https://socii.network

Stopped working on it because Mastodon is good enough for me.

I had a Handshake domain registry/registrar: https://neuenet.com

Stopped working on it because Andrew Lee tried to take over the blockchain.

An analytics tool: https://chew.sh

Gauges shut down and I enjoyed that service. My previous domain is now owned by someone who's last name is Chew, which is cool.

Forgot I just let https://design2code.me expire because I didn't put in the work to get my name/services out there.

---

I'm currently working on https://nickel.video and think I'll stick with it for awhile. I also registered https://neue.host a few weeks ago, with the idea that a lot of the side projects I had in the past would actually work as a collection of services.

Of course. I had like 50 domains at one point. There's nothing worse than an auto-renewal hitting your bank account on a project you gave up on.

In 2025, with new vibe-coding projects being pushed every second, I think it's not even worth the time unless you have $$$ upfront for marketing (and/or a massive audience). Otherwise, you're wasting your time.

I buy a domain name but struggled to find the time to work on it, so I put it up for sale as a holding page. I have accumulated a collection of... https://www.bankaccountstatements.com https://www.customerdatavalidation.com https://www.customerdatavalidation.co.uk https://www.confirmationofpayee.co.uk https://m.emori.es https://www.bankaccountchecker.com Grab yourself a bargain if you are interested to complete the project.

Does it work?

I’ve considered using this strategy after my 3-day bender (like op) and then three months of trying to gain traction. Instead of just letting the domain rot and expire, I could put up a for sale sign, like you did.

I totally understand how the author feels. I'm currently working on a project myself, and most of my spare time has been devoted to it. Honestly, there were times when I wanted to give up, but I just couldn’t — maybe it's the sunk cost, or maybe it's just stubbornness. The deeper I got, the harder it was to let go. But in the end, I stuck with it and finally launched it recently on Product Hunt. If you have a moment, feel free to check it out — I hope it can offer you some motivation to keep going too.

Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/icorner-2/icorner-2/lau...

Welcomet to https://icorner.net/

I've started and abandoned loads of projects! I started to notice that, often, ONLY after putting in considerable effort would I discover competitors or other projects doing the same thing.

Sometimes this would get me down. Other times it would motivate me. Either way I got sick of at least not knowing from the beginning.

Naturally I started a project to scratch this itch, which aims to help me quickly know in advance if my dumb saas idea is already* out there, so I can then go focus on building, customers etc.

* https://already.dev

There's one Peter Levels, and I don't even think he's actually Peter Levels. I think he's a dude who went viral, so now anything he does gets traffic.

ALWAYS, it comes down to one thing. If you built the best thing in the world, and no one visits it, then it's a "failure" at least in terms of earning anything.

It's not so much about what you build, but about the "secret sauce"/marketing that most people who actually succeed big time will never reveal.

Haha this hits home.

Just renewed a 10-year domain to build a tiny website screenshot tool for my non-tech friends. No login, no tracking, just “paste URL → get image.” https://websitescreenshot.online, Will anyone use it? Probably not. But I love it anyway.

Most of my side projects end up as ghost towns too, but each one leaves a trail of git commits, lessons, and a bit of joy.

Keep building. We’re all in the same club.

Used to be like you, now I focus on creating high conversion landing pages if I'm trying to build a project for profit, and only build the full idea if I get enough sign ups.

Another thing I do more, which I find hard as a developer but somewhat more rewarding, is talking to potential users. Sometimes it makes you realise your ideas are crap haha.

But it's a different thing to build for fun, which I tend to do less these days and want to do more.

And agreed on the learning side. Building full-on projects is the best way to learn. I've picked up so many skills that have landed me new amazing jobs, i.e. that's basically how I transitioned from a native iOS developer to a full-stack React/React-Native developer.

Keep building! and don't forget the user side :)

I'm similar but my ratio of prototypes to launching is higher. I find it helps to pace yourself, it increases the chance of finishing exponentially. But the most important things is good scoping and resisting gesture creep. After 35+ years I'm now really good at both. My list of projects is at https://www.gingerbeardman.com and details of my 2023, the year one of my projects got Game Of The Year, are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39636937

You built emojipedia? I’m impressed.

By the way the link is broken on your website.

No, I built a standardised macOS Dictionary of emoji affiliated with Emojipedia, with permission. Link (to majorly outdated GitHub repo) fixed, thanks for reporting :)

I build all kinds of “useless” stuff. Recently I did a LoungeBuddy clone[0]. Prior to that I made a bunch of other things you can see at [1]. I toss things on domains I happen to own if it makes sense. Sometimes they live on a path of an existing domain. If I don’t need the thing anymore I recycle the domain for something else. I’m fortunate enough that I can afford to pay this tax on my entertainment.

[0] https://www.tacavo.com/ [1] https://abrega.com

I suggest you don't code at all. Do a very detailed mind map of the project. It will include, the users you are targeting, what's the goal -- why are they better off with your project, how will you get customers, and there is so much before you start to code.

As a learning project, copy a successful project and mind map it, program it and find customers. You will learn so much that you can apply to whatever project you come up with. You'll get frustrated because you will need to go out and learn a lot but power thru it. You'll be better off for the hard work. Good luck!

L.A.M.E.[1] !!!! 99.9999999999% of the fun is the code.

[1] Lacking Any Major Excitement

IMO building a side project with the goal that it will take off (and to hopefully get rich) is not the right motivation. Spoiler: it probably won't take off and you probably won't get rich. Minor survivorship bias.

Work on a side project because it's interesting (e.g. you want to learn the tech) or because it's useful to you (i.e. you want to use it). Not because it may make you rich.

In the former case, you may lose interest, but that's okay: you've learned in the process. In the latter, if you get to a point where you can use it, it's really rewarding.

My most successful side project to date is one that has “always-free, no-ads” as a motto, so it will always be a money sink.

Sometimes I spend a week refactoring core stuff, sometimes it stays forgotten for months on end. I still come back to it when I want to test some ideas, mostly because it has a decent chunk of data to feel I’m “solving problems at scale”.

My advice, make a time machine and travel back 20 years and take your side projects with you. I made a thing 18 years ago that has been making money ever since. If I made it now I would be like an apple in a barrel of apples.

If it's a business you are looking to build then learn to do business. This was my problem and why I made a 6 figure sum over 18 years and not 7.

> And the famous "anti-social media social network" (spoiler: it was just me).

Haha we are building one too!

Got any advice for us?

Here's the waitlist page with all the features: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev

Email is in profile if you want to connect.

Thanks in advance!

I myself have left 6 domains expired over the last 4 years so you are not alone! 3 are from this year alone

Now a days I don't buy the domain until I have actually set up the server with the codebase. Project might get dropped just before that. It has happened

Edit: I feel validated after reading the replies. I am not alone!

At least you've got the building + pivoting down!

Looking back, how do you think you did on the marketing/sales front? I don't mean the results of the efforts but I mean the input front.

Curious if those pivots were caused because the problem addressed wasn't painful enough, the solutions didn't address that pain well enough, or if it was simply distribution.

If the former two, I imagine it's only a matter of time until you strike gold. But if it's the final third, there's a chance one of the 17 could have worked out well.

I was going down the same path and that's why i bought a domain to use as the base for all side projects, Pieter Levels style. If it takes off, i can then find a separate domain for it.

My approach is usually: start building the thing -> 'hmm a DSL would really make this easier' -> 'hmm I think it needs a custom parser' -> project dead

Hello brother from a different mother. Luckily, I sold some of high-priced domains a while back. So far, in my 15+ years of the cost of buying domains have yet to cross the amount that I sold them for. That keeps me going and I feel happy. Of course, I have also let domains expire just to realize that the registrar is re-selling them for high single-digit thousands of dollars.

And, I bought my last domain less than 10-days back. Built a landing but left it to research further and talk to customers. :-)

It's kind of my addiction. This is the latest project: https://www.proteinmath.app/

And this is a couple weekends ago: https://www.danesh.app/

Let's be friends! I've hacked couple websites with other people before and honestly the learning itself is worth the time even if the project doesn't take off.

I am in a similar boat. My problem is that once I lose momentum on a project I have no interest in every revisiting the work I have done. Sometimes it is a full day of coding, sometimes it is a couple continuous days coding. Once I break away from the computer and start living life it feels like to much work to load all of the project back into my brain. I would finish more projects if I didn't have friends, family, a house, or a life and sometimes I wish for that.

I think that the problem is not that you lose momentum but rather that you start with momentum. I prefer having a clear mind and no need to rush (this happens when I’m excited about the project / have the initial momentum). This helps me a lot at deciding what I want/need/should/must do and what not. It also helps me to prioritize the project over/below family, friends, and house.

It helped me a lot that every time a have a new idea or want to start a new side-project that I wait at least two days before I dig deeper and get really started. Only then I really know if I really want this or if it’s just the initial hype/momentum.

Currently working on a python package: agro.

It helps devs build parallel agents from the cli. (think claude code, gemini, aider)

And simplifies the git workflow for testing and accepting the best solution.

Check it out: https://github.com/sutt/agro

I keep a little text file pr.txt and try to link my project to HN / X / other aggregators once a day...

This way I spend a few hours each day coding, and a few minutes each day promoting and refining me message.

This is timely, as I've got a domain expiring in the next week. It's a .bingo TLD, so at $50+, I'm going to just let it expire.

"Vibe coding" has actually been a boon for me on this front. Fewer than 10% of my side projects are serious and 95% of it are static pages, so there's no big security concerns to worry about. Most of them are joke pages anyway, which I've started calling "Sht Coding," as in Vibe Coding + Sht Posting.

For me its when I have to knuckle down and fix up my CSS lol Enjoy my side project unfinished beauties: https://www.adfreetube.com/ https://qmaps.io/ https://propertytracker.net.au/

There were 6 domains that were bought by me in the last 12 years.

side project, business partnership, personal music streaming site, serverless blog.

It's hard to do if you have a regular 9 to 5 and also some other hobby(I'm into motorcycles :D).

Only remaining domain is of my name pusparaj.com (but it's in auction mode)

I have also lost ownership 2 times or more i think, because i tend to rotate registrars and forgot to renew it.

now 3 domains are remaining, will let them expire.

Ever thinked on automating this process of creating this side projects? i think that more and more future feels like a lot of ones having really big swarms of "agents" that can like research about ideas on the internet (like finding problems on twitter, reddit, ... that a saas can solve it) and a team implementing and deploying since from code to marketing in a frenetic rhythm

I dont know about research but I am building a production grade python and express application generator. For express, it would create an empty project with a README, setup typescript, setup path aliases, setup ts-node, setup linters and formatters with all required scripts, setup testing libraries, setup multiple environments aka dev, staging, production and testing and then setup logging that works differently on each environment, creates docker containers for each environment that works differently again, sets up integration tests for redis and postgres, sets up github templates for feature requests, issues, pull requests and adds github actions and gonna set up instant deployments to AWS at the minimum and see how that goes. Once this tool is fully ready, it would take you about 30 seconds to generate a full blown production grade application that works with the latest dependency versions. Everything is run inside docker and verified that it actually works. Gonna make SaaS a real breeze after i integrate ORMs and payment gateways with email providers to this

Started creating a library of retro game clones built with PyGame for people to use as a learning resource (I was learning too). I built a crummy clone of Pong and a near pixel perfect clone of Frogger...and then lost interest.

But, I'll likely come back to build another some day when the mood strikes me.

https://retroclones.com/

I only once finished the development and deployment of one product. It was complete down to landing page, pricing, signup, automatic provisioning, and billing.

Then it came down to producing customers not artifacts and I ran out of steam. I posted on Product Hunt and a few other places but never took it further. I'm glad I did it once as a solo dev, but now I know how far I'll go on my own.

Yep https://dare.fail/ but also at least finish the things

I typically get stuck on the marketing stage.

Far too often I build a project, only to get ready to deploy it, then struggle to think of a name/domain for it.

Then coupled with the thought of struggling to market the project, I end up fizzling out at that stage.

If I already have users of the project, then I'll deploy it as a subdomain and forget about it until a user complains.

This feels way too real.

I’ve done the same , bought many domain names, got super hyped, coded for a few nights… then lost interest. Now I’ve got a bunch of random projects that never saw the light of day.

But honestly, I learned a lot from each one. Even if they didn’t go anywhere, I got better at building stuff. And who knows, maybe one of them will work out someday.

Glad I’m not the only one doing this.

I've got ADHD and that has been my whole life - an endless list of side projects and hobbies that were hyperfixated on in the beginning, drained of all dopamine and then abandoned once it actually became "work"

Thankfully I got domain-sober before the 2012 gTLD round, otherwise I’d have gone bankrupt from renewal fees.

A tip to everyone: subdomains are free, and you can set up a 301 redirect once the project gets some traction. As others have mentioned, I only buy a domain once there is some traction, or when I start getting organic/indirectly referred traffic.

I am the same, the most recent side project is [Flags.gg](https://flags.gg) A feature flag system, that has a ton of agents for various languages on [Github](https://github.com/flags-gg)

We've all been there. I lost track of the domains I registered for a great business idea and then let them expire.

Anything you want to do differently next time? Like find a representative user and build until you solve that problem?

Been there too. I have not count of them anymore! :D A Search Engine, a CMS, an OS, a webserver.. :) Currently my hobby is a CRM system on github under the name CaRMen (larsmw) Keep on exploring. Suddenly you hit a nerve that others will follow.

I have tons of projects partly made or finished but small in scope on my personal site:

https://www.mallardgames.com/

Maybe some of them could make money, with more polish and marketing. Who knows! I have never tried.

I just make whatever I feel like.

Starting so many projects can feel like an endless loop of unfinished ideas. You might want to try using MailsAI to automate follow-ups if you ever decide to launch a cold email campaign for one of them. It helped me keep things moving without getting overwhelmed.

> I’m rich in expired domains

Haha. Thanks this made me laugh. I also know the feeling of being rich in expired domains.

Sometime it's funny to look at the packages list of your domain provider and realize for example, that at some point in the past I was indeed convinced "thewienerway.com" would one day be the go to merch shop for everything around wiener dogs :-).

Okay, there were some beers involved...

I have been doing this for the past 15 years. Countless domains have been bought and expired worthless after I lose interest.

Vibe coding actually helped me get a few projects out of the door finally! But even now I can't resist the urge to buy a domain when I get an idea for a new side project.

That's why I put all my projects as subdomains of the only one I've bought, this way they just hang in there. So even though rumengol.net has nothing (procrastination, yay), there are 5 (soon 6) subdomains with active or dead side projects in them.

I also keep quite a few domains around because I tell (lie) to myself that someday I'm going to do something really cool with them. I greatly reduced this by repeating to myself, like a mantra: "If you ever make it, a domain will be available".

The best way to phrase this would be, information seeking as a form of procrastination itself.

I first remember reading this phrasing here on HN and I've been using it for years to explain to others that what I am doing is not "work", its just a hobby.

It’s impossible for you to have a Google Domains graveyard. As of 10 July 2024, all domains were migrated to squarespace. https://domains.google/

I created a rule almost ten years ago that I won't buy the domain until I actually have something to host, and it's done me reasonably well.

I however have a similar but more expensive problem, I develop side projects to an MVP and leave them up for literal decades with no one but myself using them, paying for the domain and hosting. I can't let things go.

I rewrote a number of things in Go recently so they could scale down to zero on Fly.io and save me some money.

For example though I have been developing a note keeping SaaS for fifteen years. It fits my own needs perfectly and I use it every day, but everyone I have ever had try it has bounced in a couple minutes. I literally removed the sign up after GDPR scared me in 2018 and never put it back. I should put it back, everything is client side encrypted and I don't keep any PII.

I have an ad free emojipedia-esq tool, a tool for making API controlled README badges, a tool for converting MIDIs into print outs of colored sheet music for children's keyboards, a joke API, so much more.

I did accidentally let the domain expire for my Wordle knockoff where you guess the soup based on the ingredients. It never worked very well anyway.

if i search for a domain and it's available, i feel unreasonable pressure to buy it IMMEDIATELY.

I'm paranoid that some squatter can tell which domains i'm searching for and they'll swoop in and get it as soon as they know there's one interested party

> I'm paranoid that some squatter can tell which domains i'm searching

Don't search on GoDaddy. I read somewhere GoDaddy raises the prices of high value domains by choosing them from searches

I do the same.

And FWIW, your (our) paranoia is justifiable. As mentioned in another comment, GoDaddy is historically-notorious for front-running domain searches. ICANN tried to make that a bit less practical, but I just assume that they (and other sketchy registrars) still do it.

If you search directly through whois (i.e. from the command line), you should be OK. That's been my strategy, and I think it works.

I decided for myself that there’s no need to buy a domain up front. I don’t even let myself look for potential domain names or start asking ChatGPT to provide me with some naming ideas. Most of the time, the project don’t even reach MVP state. During development and research I also learn more about my project and similar products thus helping me decide on a good name.

I agree that there's no need, and that yours is the reasonable approach.

That said, I often have project/product ideas at times when I cannot work on them. In fact, always. But I enjoy noodling on names and branding, and if I come up with a really good name that's available in .com, I register it.

I have revived project ideas 15-20 years later, and have been happy to have a great domain for it which would absolutely not have been available "now".

Of course I have many more domains that are patiently awaiting their prioritization.

The registration fees add up (and I do feel bad about reserving them for myself, although I've given a few away to persuasive requesters, and I've sold a few which, in aggregate, more than cover all of the registration fees).

As many pointed out: you could simply use subdomains for all the services that you use for yourself only.

I mean the goal though is always for the service to be popular

I have similar problem, but even more expensive. I have developed products that have lots of users so I cannot (and don't want to) abandon it, but monetization will require lots of investment -- actually setting up a different business altogether because the monetization I would like to buy as a service does not exist.

I am domain investor since early 2000's who has plenty of domains to start those side-projects that'll never finish in this lifetime. Nice to meet you bud! ;-)

I launched about 7 most requiring about 2 years of relatively intense night and weekend work. About half are still going but none making money atm. Only one made me actual passive income for about 3 years.

I sank three years of side-project time into a project that was doomed to fail if I would've faced reality and thought about distribution more. Better to stop after three days than three years ;)

Finishing the last 10-20% to release a project and then getting enough eyeballs on it are infinitely harder than creating the app, and I'm finally experiencing it first hand

Why not create one umbrella domain and host your projects on that? That is my approach. Or rather, it would have been if I actually launched anything.

> My Google Domains look like a graveyard of unfinished dreams.

So does my github or the 5 rack servers in my homelab lol. At least the servers aren't running and consuming power 24/7

I made the mistake of buying a 10 years for the last one I bought. I used it for maybe a few weeks. Now I have to wait the better part of a decade for it to expire.

Somebody should do a website for the graveyard of incomplete projects, so that if somebody wants to work on a certain idea, they can find a potential partner.

I'll say as long as you’re not repeating the same mistakes and each project teaches you something, you’re getting closer to the exit of the maze.

Honestly I doubt this. You can learn endlessly and never get any closer to succeeding in something. It’s like the developer equivalent of people who keep reading business books and case studies and going to network events because they want to start a business.

After 1 or 2 failed side projects, you should have learned roughly 80% of what you need to know. A few more might get you the next 20%, but 17 failed projects is likely not teaching you anything you couldn’t have learned before, you’re just wasting time at that point.

The optimal amount of failures before a successful project is probably about 3. After that, you need to seriously consider that maybe you just don’t have what it takes and move on. Otherwise you spend your whole life chasing something that will probably never happen, and avoiding better opportunities.

I think whether your take on this is correct depends on why people are doing side projects. Personally I do them for fun, there's some tool I kind of want to use, or a new programming language I want an excuse to play with. The side project is just a vehicle for that rather than something I expect to become a source of income.

I've got way more than 17 failed projects, and that's fine, because the project was never the point.

> Otherwise you spend your whole life chasing something that will probably never happen, and avoiding better opportunities.

I'm also have a decent graveyard of domains. I've all but accepted that I'll never create anything of value in my life or even anything awesome.

But the dark side of that is now there's no point to being alive, so I'm planning to die. What are these better opportunities you referenced? Anything that will make a life of mediocrity bearable?

This is brutally honest. In all seriousness, consider that external metrics are not the only way to value life. Economics looks from the outside and judges value. Art looks from the inside and expresses experience. Also, check out Internal Family Systems therapists. I'm learning a lot, and believe this is a very valuable line of inquiry into self & getting unstuck.

A life is still worth living even if you never make anything of value or awesome. Find something you don’t understand at all, and feels impossible, and try to understand it. Repeat until you die or find something else you want to do.

This is mostly what I do, and it's how I got into and continue to progress in tech from an unrelated degree. But I realize that it's unlikely I'll ever outpace the competition as a late 30s father, so my career progression and earnings seem somewhat terminal.

A life without side projects seems pointless, but at the same time the projects are probably ultimately pointless or of too slow progression to merit career leverage.

I seem to have found a path too late in life. Catchup or die seems to be transforming solely into die.

Even if a side project were successful, in time it would also be pointless.

As are all things in time. But I estimate the impact of creating something successful would allow me to feel successful from success until natural end of life vs. feeling like a failure from now until end of life. Plus it will generate higher quality of life for my offspring, and my genetic code likes that.

The question is then reduced to the expected value of success achieved at some point, discounted by how close it is to my stastical life expectancy. Is it positive? Seemingly not. Then I ask what's the point of a life with negative expected value?

It seems like lots of people believe that life itself is a positive, so even a mean existence is worthy. This isn't something I'm able to accept for whatever reason, as I consider life to be EV+ only when it is one, if not two, standard deviations above the mean.

You may never create a successful web business but that’s a long way from never creating anything of value.

By definition most people lead mediocre lives — few doing anything extraordinary. What makes it ‘bearable’ are the simple things: family, friends, work, hobbies, helping other people, contributing to society, etc.

Planning to end it because life seems pointless is depression. Please get professional help.

> What makes it ‘bearable’ are the simple things: family, friends, work, hobbies, helping other people, contributing to society, etc.

I've heard these things and have thought about them previously, but then I think, "How can I meaningfully contribute to society?" And then I get stuck in a loop realizing my contributions will not be anything of merit. And then I think, what would cause a lasting impact and be achievable? And then I realize how mass shooters are born.

Paul Chappell considered becoming a shooter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvqwrcdx9bg

is anyone else here tired of building products for which there is little to no demand?

What if we started with a product idea for which we know there is demand for: things people are already paying money for. For example: apples, or tires, or etc. something you know people are paying money for. and then try and either build that product or another product that makes building the product easier.

I just build things for myself, so I know the demand. I call it me-ware. Works for me, and once or twice it also worked for others, but if it doesn't, that's fine, too. Of course I don't charge anything, I just release it as FOSS.

The thing is that figuring out how to realize an idea is the fun part. Making it into a polished product that others can easily use with proper documentation is as important as it is tedious and exhausting.

i love the term "me-ware". I've done that many times too! my interests are too weird so no one's interested in the projs i'd do.

That’s called product-market fit (PMF), and once any product reaches that stage (in other words: it’s proven that people will spend money in such solution), it’s a race to the bottom in terms of costs/building it cheap.

Unless your market is location-dependent, most of the time the incumbents have waaay more experience, so the only advantage you can bring to the market is a lower price, as the first expansion any incumbent will do is to higher the price band with better quality offerings.

Think about stuff like an Air Fryer. Convection ovens had been in the market for several decades. Someone (Philips? I’m not sure they were the first) proved there is a market for a smaller counter-top convection oven and all of the sudden there are Air Fryers from literally any supermarket brand out there.

I purchased multiple domain names a few months ago, but I’ve only recently launched my first website.

I've been attacked by name. Yes, very ADHD.

what I have found out works -- have a domain you're particularly interested in & go deep into that domain like it's the only domain that exists. forget everything else.

the whole too-many side projects is for indie-hacker influencers like levels who make money on notoriety. for the rest of us -- going deep helps.

Its almost like impulse buying so I call it impulse coding. I have done it before I am sure will do it again.

I was the same page 2 years and half ago. Now I am full on my 2D engine (besides the paid work of course)

I’m also curious: Is there a side project that can be created from being “rich in domains?”

Sending spam seems to be what most end up doing. Given this issue[1], one solution is to value domains based on age, that would create a new economic dynamic around domain squatting, favoring older players. One can dream…

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44656115

I developed more than 10 websites, but each domain name was not renewed after 1 year.

I also launched 11 projects and harvested 11domain names that no one visited.

I tried to start a hot air balloon business, but it never really took off.

i feel this when i get porkbun emails w expirations nearly every month.

i have a lot of cool ones i tried to give away or at least start the conversation w a few relevant sites but i guess that seems weird to randomly get

I have one 4-letter domain to which all my side projects are subdomains :)

similar thing, but I don't have as much money as you. the result? one domain with a /test/ folder with 25 different files, one for each project.

Why buy a domain at all these days? Can't you simply use github?

github.com is taken, but github.mx is available!

How did you figure out that was available? Searching just for, "github" on domain searches didn't pop that up but you were correct. I scooped that up because I could :)

Haha, I just looked on a domain registrar. Maybe Microsoft will buy it from you :)

We'll see what happens!

no.

I have lots of abandoned side projects at 1-5% and one at 80%.

RIP

I have my own graveyard here moralestapia.com

It's a hobby, like any other.

Do you have ADHD? You're not alone.

tldr: looking for a partner

i know how to start. i know how to ship. i don’t know how to pick what’s worth staying with.

and i still don’t know what my next thing is.

i’ve shipped real SaaS apps.

– https://truereviews.co // OAuth-based verified customer reviews.

– https://refersend.com // Referral tracking via email for non-digital industries.

– https://postpov.com AI-powered content machine for professionals with AI content simulation.

if you’re also in that “smart but tired” phase, DM me or reply. maybe we can get out of it together.

here’s the pattern: i sprint hard. i get it live. i stall.

not because I’m lazy. b/c promotion/selling burns me out way more than building.

i’m not some weekend hacker. i’ve been a Chief of Staff, a founder, a fixer, a builder. i’ve managed up, down, and sideways in a real company. i’ve coached teams. i’ve been coached. it’s helped friends escape the corporate treadmill.

i still don’t know what my next thing is.

i’m not writing this for pity. i’m writing it because i see myself in this post, and maybe someone else sees themselves in mine.

niklasbabel.com

> i sprint hard. i get it live. i stall. > b/c promotion/selling burns me out way more than building

Describes me perfectly. Engineer with 7 years exp and can build anything. Let me know if you'd want to chat.

My most recent project: deepswe.io

I register my side project domain names on Namecheap now... partly because they have a marketplace for selling the domain when I decide to scratch the launch.

(Most recent example: I made an unreleased browser extension for HN, the MVP feature of which is to let you block annoying users, such that any of their comments are replaced with poop emoji. But since I can't put an AI spin on that, to attract funding or job offers, I'm better off selling the domain names, and not spending any more time on it.)

We ve all been through this

We are on the same boat

>But honestly, I've never learned so much, nor enjoyed it so much.

that's all that matters. it's important to enjoy the process of making things.

Are you ENTJ ?

Keep pushing.

Adderall?

yeah, totally me as well.

Meh. This is why I own a couple of throwaway domains: I just put new projects on subdomains.

test test

been there

Is it just me, or did this sorta read like poetry?

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