We are creating a simple marketplace for developers to sell and buy side projects.
Currently, we are finalizing the last minute details and we will be launching quite soon.
We would love to have you signed up for the early access to get feedback.
Link is here
http://www.sideprojectors.com/project/hello
Thank you.
If you place stock in the notion that ideas are worthless without execution, paying money to inherit someone else's unsuccessful idea that they lost interest in will only appeal to software developers that have no ideas or inspirations of their own.
You'd have a hard time convincing me that buying someone else's codebase of unknowable quality is going to be (or feel) any definition of "better" than designing and building your own MVP. At least your code will be familiar and not constrained by another dev's [aborted] vision.
Actually, paying $x to acquire someone else's product, try your hand at marketing it, and failing fast for yourself could be an absolute god-send for non-technical founders who waste months/years trying to outsource development or find technical cofounders to execute on a mediocre idea that has been done 100 times before. Now that I think of it, just having this marketplace and being able to see what's been attempted before will hopefully increase the quality of startups that make it to the product stage in the first place. That will be welcome: a lot of talent / energy today is wasted building things that are doomed to fail from the get-go.
We kill most of our ideas when they should be killed: as ideas. Paying $20-1000 to buy a packaged product that lets us test some of our hypotheses immediately is a nice option to have. Thumbs up from me for this reason.
I could also see brilliant developers who love building things using this as a means to connect with brilliant hustlers looking for things to sell/market. Maybe it will be a long time before any individual side project bought from here gets to itself be a major product (and maybe not!), but there's an entire spectrum in between that still adds value to the ecosystem: this could be a very interesting way for cofounders to serendipitously connect based on mutual interest, and of course it's a gold-mine for potential employers and head-hunters.
Edit: I think it's disingenuous to suggest that a side project is a "baby" and should not be abandoned, or if it is it should necessarily be open sourced. A product may be of commercial value but someone doesn't want to pursue because they have no ability to market it, or their interests changed, or they stumbled upon an even more profitable idea that is taking up all their attention, or they got a job at Google, etc etc.
I'll just add an anecdote - in the past I've bought a friend's unsuccessful business and promptly made a decent profit from it. Sometimes a different skillset is just what a project needs.
Have you seen how much people want to sell their sites/projects for though? I've seen todo-lists being offered in the past for $1000+. Which is just scary.
Not sure I see that, mostly because not all side projects by developers will be pure code/apps. Quite a few developers seem to be creating e-mail newsletters but then are failing to monetize them or run them regularly long-term. I'd buy those on the right topics at the right price even if I could rip off the idea myself because there's still value there.
Potential buyers include MBA's who can't code, or don't have time to, and all of those many people who tell you "I have an idea I just need you to build it and we will split everything 50/50". If the grand vision was presented to them properly, they just might shell out a few thousand for it.
> SideProjectors is a special community for the creative types, just like yourself, where you can find someone who can potentially take over your projects.
> Alternatively, if you are looking for interesting projects that others have paused on, SideProjectors would be a great place to discover them.
While Flippa.com is marketed to non-tech buyers.
Also, http://flippa.com is only for websites while this looks to be for any side-project, opening the door to more interesting projects.
I think your market for that side is actually the people on google searching for "technical cofounder". They want something they can't do for themselves. It's more tangential but I think you would need to spin it in that direction.
Tech people like to build products. That's why we have side projects that we want to sell in the first place. We're probably unlikely to buy more. You need to get marketing people in there to buy them. The difficulty with that is that these people will need a functionally complete application.
Either that, or you need to explain the business better on your landing page.
What the heck IS a "side project"? And, furthermore, why on earth would I want to buy one?
Is a "side project" the half-cocked proof-of-concept game code I wrote over the weekend?
Is a "side project" a successful open-source project?
Is a "side project" an app?
What are we talking about here?
I'm not trying to rag on you, but I think you need to be more specific, because right now I learn nothing on your homepage that would cause me to want to sign up.