Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on side projects for about 7 years now. All my side projects are open source. I wouldn't advise going into open source to make money but it's a great way to build connections. Considering the failure rate of for-profit side-projects among people I know, I think that maybe open source isn't such a bad idea from a career point of view.

My first open source project was a failure; I worked on it for 3 years for maybe 20 hours per week. At around the same time, a number of hot SV startups started building very similar products 'as a service' - I felt that I could not compete with that kind of VC money so I gave up (I felt that open source did not stand a chance in that industry against the 'as-a-service' model). It was my first project so I wasn't too disappointed; it was mostly a learning experience. It was good to know that I could at least come up with the right ideas but that I had to improve execution. Also, picking an area/industry where open source software can thrive is important. Open source is not easy; it still has to compete with big advertising dollars and VC money.

I've been working on my second open source project for almost 4 years now. It's quite well known in its area (it got traction pretty soon after launch and kept growing steadily).

Looking back, it does feel like I could have spent my time on more lucrative things; but the problem with money is that everyone wants it; so things get very competitive and marketing-oriented. So maybe from a career/networking point of view, my open source work wasn't a bad ROI after all... For a side hustle.

Why don't you try marketing your opensource experience or software? It seems like you have a product that has traction.

I did get some consulting contracts from companies over the past year. Also, very recently, I accepted a sponsorship deal from a very interesting company which is using my project.

I feel that it's just starting to settle into a niche which might have commercial potential but I don't want to rush anything. Commercial stuff is secondary for me.

I think what OP may have been hinting at (although I may be wrong) was a book/course/blog on what it's like working on a OS project and teaching other people how they can do the same while avoiding common mistakes.

No, I wasn't but those are good ideas!

Out of interest, what was your first open source project and what's your current?

First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/

I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them.

Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others.

I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow.

My current project is http://socketcluster.io/

There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix).

Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion.

There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.

Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.

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