Ten Years of Worthless Side Projects | Hacker News Reader

Ten Years of Worthless Side Projects

medium.com

353 points_sbxe143 comments

This resonates strongly with me.

Let me offer a possible coping mechanism: realize that you are an artist. You are a true hacker.

For people like us, having ideas and making them real is the purpose of life. Since the 90s, there has been an immense pressure on our community put everything we do in get-rich-quick terms, which as been super destructive the psyches of many hackers. Be mindful of this, then cast it aside.

No matter what, keep having ideas and making them real.

Don't just take my word for it, ask Alan Watts: https://soundcloud.com/jeffreysource/above-beyond-ft-alan-wa...

I build a lot of things in my own time as well and I learn a lot from them. But for me they're not "worthless". They are just my way of mental relaxation and being my true self, which I cannot do in the commercial world.

I love building stuff that has no purpose whatsoever but is just cool. I love building stuff that only I have a use for. I love doing tech for artistic value because I believe in art as well.

Some people watch Netflix and go to bars. That's their way of fun and that's fine. My ways of having fun just happen to be (0) travelling and (1) building stuff.

I too like building things that I have a use for. And I do think sometimes maybe I'm not the only one who could make use out of it, which is why I believe so much in open source, whether the tool is menial or not.

Even if none of these were a commercial success, it's quite a resume and shows an ability to bring an idea to life. I think what the author needs to do is look for a business savvy partner that can focus on making a viable product. They're different skill sets. The Jobs/Wozniak kind of synergy.

None of the apps or services are even close to art. (Including state of the art.) This is the main problem of small projects that aren't cutting edge. To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.

(Even many startups fail this litmus test.)

Hacking is fun, but life as a starving programmer is not.

There is a vast difference between getting reasonable money and negative money. Bigger than between making reasonable living wage and being filthy rich in fact.

They're all art, more or less. Most art isn't 'state of the art' and it's not obvious why that matters, unless you personally care about that. This person didn't seem to.

The existence of (lots of) 'starving artists' is pretty strong evidence that at least some people may ultimately benefit from art that doesn't turn a profit.

Some people definitely need to make art, whatever the cost to them personally. I'm one of them. (And I'm lucky that my art is really cheap to make.)

The author mentions being a full time software engineer and working on these projects after work. I think he isn't a starving programmer; and I'm going to guess he's probably even getting more than "reasonable money" (but not filthy rich).

It's really more of a question of finding meanings; I see where he's coming from. There is a certain kind of despair when you look back at 10 years worth of side projects and none have "taken off". I've only seriously worked on side projects in the past 3~4 years (full time engineer for 10 years), and even with less than half the time spent, and less than half projects completed compared to OP, I still feel a bit of this.

How do you define art? I've always liked Scott McCloud's definition from Understanding Comics: "Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction."

In my view, anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist.

I am not super familiar with Scott McCloud so sorry for that, but I'm very admirable of comics from a distance.

I think it's worth mentioning I think this might be a little outdated of a definition because philosophy and art is agreeing more every day that everything in art grows out of the survival and reproduction instincts.

They also appear to agree more every day that your last point, that "anyone who dedicates their free time to creating is an artist" holds true.

Consider the question of why humans evolved to make art in the first place, and you'll probably conclude that it was sexual selection. In other words, artists get laid. Though it may be that artists get respect in general, which improves chances of survival in a social species like ours. So I respectfully disagree with Mr. McCloud's definition.

Why reduce all activity to such simplistic motivations? Maybe art is a spandrel. Maybe artists don't get laid any more often than non-artists. Maybe human beings do lots of things that have little to do with passing their genetic material on, because we've acquired motivations that aren't simply reducible to survival or sex. Maybe some of us realized that making art was enjoyable, regardless of whatever reason it arose in the species a couple million years ago.

What then about anonymous artists such as Banksy? Many of the artists we today view as great, such as Van Gogh, were in their time neither respected nor enjoyed financial or, as you offer, sexual benefits from their art. They still pursued it, often into abject poverty and early deaths.

Seems like a very broad definition that would place science, religion, and this comment within the sphere of art.

They very much are art. Even if you're writing the nth incarnation of some tired JS pattern framework, you're coding it the way you want. Your making an API that makes sense to you. In short, the way you chose to implement the tired Ideas is unique to you. It's self expression that others can see. How is that different than a painter reinterpreting some famous piece of work?

Not all creation is art. You don't see people declaring newspapers art, or utilitarian chairs art either.

It has to be something new and different. Otherwise at best you have kitsch.

There is a vast difference between art and craft.

So I guess Warhol isn't art? You are making some very opinionated claims that don't have any basis in, well anything. Take a read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art

>To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.

Building Uber and creating Uber are two entirely different things.

It is easy to build something if you have the blueprint, it is much harder to imagine something new and build it without knowing the exact next step.

Oh but Uber itself is a pretty big and ambitious idea past the single sentence description. It also touches a basic need of transportation and is very ambitious.(trying to displace taxis everywhere) Due to the scale of the idea, both creating and building Uber is a hard task. (Mostly because at small scale you have stiff competition - so it does not make sense asy small scale.)

For comparison, you could back of envelope analyse the market impact of, say, automated 2D floor and garden planning with AI. It is possible to undercut in a week in implementation and in seconds by a single guy with marketing and connections. On the upside, it could be pivoted. The main drawback is that it also does not make sense at a local level. (Unlike the 3D printer repair which might.)

> To know if you are cutting edge somewhere, run an experiment if your work cannot be undercut in a week by a small team of low wage country workers or programmers.

Just as an aside, serious free software maintenance work is not cutting edge and also fulfills your challenge of not being "outsource-able" to a small team of low-wage devs.

Or at least I've always assumed it is. Where can I pay some small amount of money to test and see whether a small team can "fix X without breaking the users' existing programs" for a poorly documented FLOSS interface that depends on undefined behavior in C?

Scratch that-- I just realized that most of the problems I encounter in FLOSS maintenance consist of explaining/documenting the problem. Once I can refine the question of, "Why is the loader being a butt," to, "Why is the loader recursing 1000 levels deep before bailing?" I'm already 90% of the way to solving the problem.

If it takes a single person about a week to do it and mostly by solving a puzzle, then it is not art again, but craft.

Even writing an OSS project from scratch. It only becomes art if it really is done either clearly superior or is something entirely new. Plus it must be executed really well.

A cutting edge product does not mean a successful product. There's plenty of tech already. All I need is for someone to help me make my life better with a killer product or service that uses it or at least show me how to use tech better towards my advantage. Perfect example, binder clips, low tech but I'm always finding new uses for it and people show me new uses. Another example the tech for cell phones was around for years before the cell phone. It took someone to put it together to create something useful.

Products for the sake of art will not make you a business success. You have to ship and you have to sell. Tinkering and producing products for yourself is very satisfying but don't expect to have a killer business out of it. If that's what you want to do then get a job in a research lab or a product development company. It will be a dream come true. A perfect example of someone that loved to tinker and research but could not produces a successful product was Tesla. He invented mind blowing technology but was never able to create a successful company out of it. As a matter of fact the Google funders learnt from him and decided to put business and profit above technology so they could have the money to produce and finance the tech they love.

Obviously there are parallels in other creative fields. The money thing was a big part of what almost ruined music for me - not only wanting to make money from it, but actually succeeding at making some money from it (which was somehow paradoxically even worse than wanting to). Looking at it as an art, that you do for enjoyment or fun or the heck of it or some other reason or no reason at all, is important.

>realize that you are an artist

That statement resonates with me - immensely. I was a musician for almost a decade before going to school for CS. I feel in love with the creativity that knowing how to code enabled. Just like the author, I made my fair share of worthless side projects and just like him I felt pressure to monetize them to no success which ultimately took all the fun out of them.

I've never been able to get the fire back to make stuff just because I can. I really hate that I've lost that.

One can also think of work on one's "side projects" as something like a musician's practice sessions. There's value in the time spent even if all you're doing is drilling your fingers and keeping your technique sharp. It can also be an opportunity to stretch yourself and develop new skills beyond what your main gig calls for.

Build a better mousetrap, and you'll learn how to build a better mousetrap. You need to market it (or partner with someone who will) if you want to make money.

1. Get some kind of market validation before you build. Get commitments from paying customers (or even pre-payment), or directly see them paying for a near-identical offering, and have a competitive advantage to deliver it more cheaply.

2. Do an inventory exercise of why these projects have failed. Doing a quick run-through, it looks like you didn't do marketing or user research for any of these projects. If making a side business still excites you, make sure you do these steps before going to build any future side business.

3. I know nothing about landscaping, but as an outsider, Bloom looks a promising product. Go talk to customers!

3. If the marketing side of things doesn't interest you, but you still want to make side money, reach out to me, my email is <hn username> at gmail. My background is pure engineering, but I have friends who are looking for technical co-founders and have ideas that I could use more technical talent on.

I've had more than 10 projects, but also at least 3 big hits.

I sense your problem is that you love building stuff, but you are not fascinated or obsessed by business.

This is why you reliably build really cool and clever things but never make any serious money. Unless you are truly interested in money and business this is unlikely to change except by luck.

Find someone like me, or several someone's like me to hang out with, and to brainstorm business concepts, business model variations, marketing spins, brandname ideas...

Build your business muscle, or remain an employee forever.

> I sense your problem is that you love building stuff, but you are not fascinated or obsessed by business.

bingo. this is my issue as well.

Sadly, with these projects there seems to be no way to scale or sell at scale. Nor are they impossible to replicate cheaply and easily given the basic idea. Best you could get in my opinion from that is an acquihire. (Which may or may not be better than a straight hire.) No business chops other than straight con will fix that.

The best out of these in my opinion is the flower app, the idea could grow (sic).

Do you blog about the marketing you did? What are the 3 big hits?

Patio11 has a pretty extensive blog about marketing software and a bunch of other stuff : https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

That is not andriesm :), i know patio11 from HN ;)

Would you like to give me ideas on promoting halfchess.com?

What're your goals? Thinking about what you really want out of side projects may help. It gets the blood pumping to think about building a project that is finally the one that makes you millions, but creating a highly profitable business is a very different set of skills to building the technical side of a side project.

I'm in a similar boat, you are doing FAR better than I ever have (many "plans that come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines" over here), but lately I've not been too disappointed.

I stopped caring if I failed to complete a project once my initial burst of interest disappeared - usually as I'd learned what I wanted to learn and my curiosity was best directed elsewhere rather than slogging on with a project I'd lost interest in (plenty of those you can get paid for, this is supposed to be hobby time!)

The new skills I learn for fun have led onto new jobs, better ability to function at my day job, friendships, collaborations, a fun summer at ITP Camp in New York, etc.

I agree. If your goals are to make money on your side project, you'll have to invest time into sales, bd, or the marketing aspects of these projects rather than purely the technical aspects.

I don't think they are worthless, you learned a lot, but it sounds like you also wish to have monetary benefits from them, so I would suggest rounding out your skill set.

Perhaps I can give you some perspective from... the future. I've been doing what you're doing for about 20 years now, and have worked on (mainly with one other partner) probably 100 things? Some were full blown companies, some were just fun side projects, some were apps that made pretty good money, etc. Perhaps some things I've realized recently will be useful to you:

* It took us around 6-8 years before we made any money at all on anything we did. The thing that ended up making money wasn't even a sure thing, it just happened to work out. For a good part of those 6-8 years we thought we sucked because things never quite worked out. It turned out we were learning a bunch of stuff that turned out to be very useful for a whole new thing that came along (phone apps).

* Making money wasn't the most important thing for me in these projects, but once we started making money we could quit our jobs and do our own stuff full time. That turned out to be super important, and is the most important part of making money on your projects probably.

* Making technology and making a business are two pretty different things, and it's pretty rare that someone is really into both of them. That's probably ok! There are a bunch of businesses that naturally develop out of good technology, so you can probably just work on things that make sense given your strengths.

* Jumping around and doing lots of different things is one of my traits as well, and for a while I thought it was a big weakness. It can be. Sometimes an idea needs a few years of consistent effort to see results. Other times though, you were right to give up as it wasn't going anywhere. For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done. Then I am making progress no matter which ones fail. Then jumping around doesn't feel as bad. That all being said, there are boring and discouraging times in every project and it can be important that you see things through beyond where you're simply interested intellectually.

I'm sure there are a bunch more things that might be helpful that I can't quite think of now, I'll add them as I think of them.

Bottom line, what you can do is surprisingly rare (it just doesn't feel that way on HN). It's ok to take some time to develop these skills, one of which is filtering ideas to work on. If you spend enough years working at it then you might even end up an overnight success :)

> For me, what helped was to think of what I'm working on as the collection of ALL of the projects that I've done.

A project portfolio

> The exact opposite of the above. Spend my free time exploring things that really interest me without worrying about selling it or career application.

This is probably what you should actually do.

I thought that was the whole point of side projects.

If you equate side project with hobby, yes. If you equate side project with entrepreneurship, then no. For a lot of people, I think it's somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps the problem is a lot of people don't decide and then don't do well at either. As the proverb goes, a fox who chases two hares catches neither.

> Stop Thinking about Money

That has been my approach all the time. For me, the problem is quite the opposite though. I tend to build things that go viral and become potential cash cows. I have no interest in that though and as soon as something gets popular I abandon it.

Sounds crazy but when my pet project becomes serious business I get cold feet and can't even touch it. The creative choices all of a sudden seems really crucial and I start procrastinate. I just want to experiment and build stuff without pressure.

Just curious, how do you get your projects viral? I'll be honest to admit, I've worked on side projects before that I've deliberately attempted to manufacture virality (build viral mechanisms off simple games, etc.), but it seems hard. When the simple game with viral hooks is done, I post it up on reddit or HN or PH or whatever, and it never takes off. I know the obvious conclusion is "the game/project sucks", just curious if I'm missing anything else.

You ever think about selling these? Asking as a potential buyer.

"In many ways, I’m an just an obsessive builder, and like to busy myself learning new things and making cool projects."

In which case, I'd say he accomplished his goals! These sound like great projects.

Unfortunately actually building a product is only one part of building a successful business.

I wonder how often this guy talks to customers? Learns their needs? Pain points? Did he ask anyone if they would pay for a new Javascript game engine (for example) before he wrote one?

If he didn't, then he shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't understand how his products fit into the market and into his potential customers' lives. And if he doesn't understand any of that, then making money will be next to impossible.

I remember stumbling across http://www.plantwithbloom.com/ in the past and thinking it was amazing. Consider this at least a small thank-you for your efforts!

Thanks! Bloom is my latest endeavor, and one that I don't think belongs on the scrap heap yet.

I'm just not sure how to market it. I was going down a path of appealing to data-nerds with yards, focusing on the data techniques used to make decisions.

I've also experimented with using a physics ending to design beds, but haven't got it tweaked right: http://www.plantwithbloom.com/physics.html

(pretty fun if you want to see some plants get wrecked)

The value seems too low as it to get people purchase it. I'm considering partnering with nurseries, but the build out to use their inventories would be ambitious.

I just checked out that link you posted. The idea seems like it could introduce a certain "naturalness" to the gardens by resisting the temptation to exactly plant in rows. "Organic" planting plans! https://ibb.co/nfnQh5 (screenshot of one that I found particularly interesting).

Yeah, gravity seemed like a good way to do circle packing with different sizes. Also would be a way to place neatly in irregularly shaped (non-rectangular) beds.

I was just thinking about something like this over the weekend when I was working on my garden. Something I was not sure if you did consider was the blooming times. When I first moved into my house I did not have much of a garden. The previous owner did not really keep the garden up. The first year I had a mish mash of different plants. By year 3 I have everything almost figured out where I have different stuff starting to bloom as other plants are finishing.

I was talking to a professional landscaper about this (a relative of my significant other) during a family event earlier this summer. The casual spouting of information about keeping the garden in color all summer was intriguing. It of course helped that he had done the entire backyard at her mother's house.

Japanese beatles are one of the things that can really ruin plants like roses. If you can find a solution for them, you can really have a nice garden.

Instead of calling them worthless, enjoy that your side projects have no deadlines! Say no to deadlines!

Having side projects is a luxury of true joy. I notice this all the time when life(tm) tries to push side projects aside.

I love my side projects.

It sounds like you want to build a successful business, but end up building another coding project. I think that this is very common withs devs and the vision involved in each (business vs project) is incredibly different.

For one, a good business does not have to be innovative, it just has to be something you can sell. You might be able to make the most innovative AI to do X, but if it is not useful to anyone, it won't matter how innovative it is.

It's fantastic for a coding project, just not for a business.

I think the big difference is doing the non-technical part well (sales, marketing, branding, networking) and having the vision for what your business should look like.

Personally, I like to read IndieHackers to see what others have done well. A lot of it tends to be overcoming technical challenges and then business side work. Seems like you can handle the technical challenges!

There is. while book series on this very topic. The authors style doesn't suit everyone, but I agree with him.

Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited should be required reading for anyone thinking about starting a business or for those who have already taken that fateful step. The title refers to the author's belief that entrepreneurs--typically brimming with good but distracting ideas--make poor businesspeople. He establishes an incredibly organised and regimented plan, so that daily details are scripted, freeing the entrepreneur's mind to build the long-term success or failure of the business.

The 3D printer repair one seemed like a straightforward small business. However it is a very small or local market - hobbyists tend to know how to fix them on their own and big businesses get support plans from manufacturers. Not impossible though.

The bloom app could be either improved or even pivoted. Quite promising, but unless it becomes a real business or is really the best of is class it can easily be cloned and undercut.

The "smart" watch of this kind litters the Kickstarter for example... and it is too nerdy to scale.

Others are random hacks. :)

Rentals (not repairs), to be clear, but man were they heavy to ship. I did have a few rentals to bigger companies (Google, Samsung), sometimes it's easier for them to rent.

Yeah, most of them are random hacks. I don't mean to imply they were all intended to be businesses, though some were. More just meaning I have a lack of direction and haven't produced much of real value, despite thinking I was. After ten years, you realize the code and time spent starts to pile up.

I like your product ideas so I can see why you thought they had merit. But burn this into your mind "the product is only the start." Marketing is what most new company spend their time doing. Look at any new company and you'll see that their marketing budget is by far larger than any other part of their business. If you are lucky you might have a viral marketing episode but after that marketing spending is what keeps the business going. So in essence there's a cost for every customer you get. So, Sale price - (Marketing+ product costs) = profit. It better be positive to stay alive as a business. Marketing also helps you refine your product to meet customer needs.

Also, to start, a product must meet your customer's needs not yours. I love programming but I can tell you 99% of the people out there don't. If I want a successful product it's much easier to hit the 99% rather than the 1%. It's a numbers game. Also you have to tell customers why your product is great and how it's going to make their lives better - real or not.

The media has conditioned most of us to think that all you need is a good idea to be successful but they never tell you about the hard work it took to get to be successful. A product is not a business. A business is so much more. As a business owner you have to deal with, marketing, taxes, payroll, hr, leases, unhappy employees (because they rather do anything than work one more day) and on and on. Your goal is to make the business profitable enough to have those chores done by someone else so you can focus on what you like or at least get someone to finance you to do it. Read "The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber." It's old but the wisdom it provides is timeless. All startup wannabes' need to read it.

Given that you can come up with good ideas and produce a working prototype you might want to patent and licence your product. There you only need to figure out who might want to license it and work towards selling the idea to them. Good luck!

The amount of side projects you've gotten off the ground is really impressive!

Something that's been invaluable to me has been coming up with a goal hierarchy -- an idea taken from Angela Duckworth's Grit. It's helped me focus where I direct my energy both professionally and personally. Maybe it could help you decide what to do next, and show you how your projects thus far tie together.

I'm now up to 20 years of - I don't say side projects - but real attempts to build something people want.

Still trying...... it hurts.

But theoretically you only need one to succeed, right?

One day I hope Andrew Warner from Mixergy will want to interview me about "my success" and I'll have a tale that will amaze him of how hard I tried for how long before finding "the one".

Doing side projects because you think it will make you money is probably the worst way to do it. Or at least have almost no expectations of making money.

You do side projects because it's interesting to you and you want to learn. And maybe you can leverage what you learn into getting a job doing something that really interests you. Chances are much greater that you will make a lot more money getting a better job through a side project than you will from the side project itself.

By that logic side projects should just be stripped down to their novel bits to learn from and that's it.

Otherwise you'll just be writing non-novel web code over and over and not learn anything from that.

I would suggest thinking harder about making money, not less. I think these projects represent a half measure between _really_ trying to make money, and having fun. Real, profitable side projects cum businesses are usually much more boring. You may enjoy a talk I gave at Dropbox about how to start a side business without quitting your day job: https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0

Great talk, enjoyed it. Maybe because it's exactly what I wanted to hear. Hopefully it's a good idea.

There's a certain disconnect in that the author seems to require and at least want validation in terms of business success while selling himself as a 'true artist' interested only in making things.

Here's something unintuitive for engineers about successful entrepreneurs, they're usually not very curious. Seeing the world in black and white rather than in color creates tunnel vision and focus. However many engineers in the bay area don't see themselves as engineers in the traditional sense of the word but some new combination of hacker-artist-technologist-elite. It's unintuitive because many bay-area engineer feel undervalued and that this mythos is bolstered by the success of people they actively look down on.

So many engineers think that they are special snowflakes via: "I'm so smart and curious, I get bored so easily b/c I learn so fast. I need to constantly be learning and creating." They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique.

It takes a certain amount of focus and thus lack of curiosity to practice one kick a millions times vs a million different kicks. The expertise often comes at the cost of an uninteresting and single-direction life. Wether this is better or worse than sampling all the pre-packaged things (things like TED talks are the hedonistic equivalent of sex/drugs/food) that life has to offer is up to the individual.

In the Bay, the jack-of-all-trades think of themselves as master-of-all-trades while following to the letter online-recipes for success and wondering why they aren't a michelin start restaurant. Specialization puts you in a sparse enough zone where your thoughts can actually be unique.

* A curious life with specialization is possible though if the specialization is abstract enough. Specialization can also be built by following your true voice of curiosity rather than having it be influenced by social and monetary pressures. You can say that many youtuber for example followed their true voice, learning some video editing, learning to be humorous to make up for lack of academic success, and managed to be lucky b/c youtube was created. Most people stamp out their inner voice because 99% of the time, you'll end up specialization in something that can't create value that is directly linked to USD. Teaching is one example where the payoffs are so far down the road that they are inadequately compensated for what they do. (I'm ignoring the the majority of US teachers who are often losers on power trips)

>They fall into the trap of valuing breadth over depth (as depth has diminishing returns to time-spent) that they ironically never become an expert in anything to a point where their expertise is truly unique.

Go look at some hilariously long job requirements and tell me there is not an economical reason for breadth-over-depth engineers.

Following a specialization is risky. Going after unique expertise is risky (it probably isn't unique anyway, just rare). These are true for tech because everything moves so quickly. You don't hear about the people that tried to specialize and failed to do so. You hear a bit more about people who specialized but the company/committee responsible for the tech decides to deprecate it.

It's also a slightly condescending and forced narrative when the pieces are examined.

Pursuing depth in knowledge isn't synonymous with a lack of curiosity just by definition.

People should probably also consider taking a break from quoting Fight Club and attacking people for "thinking they are special snowflakes" when making generalizations. It is not an argument that contributes much to a discussion and seeks to strip people of dignity.

I like what you got started on Caffeine. But how long would you say you spent on that? If it was more than 1 month, than that might be the start of your problem.

If that came together quickly, why did it stop? I need a tool to help me quit caffine. If this had a daily tracker, with little questions designed to assess my withdrawl and alert fullness, I would love to give you $5 a month for 2-3 months while I used your tool to help me gradually get off caffeine.

Hah, thanks. It's a pretty simple one, probably just took a few days. I think I ended up realizing that I really like coffee.

Here's some source if you're interested: https://github.com/LastZactionHero/caffeine_js https://github.com/LastZactionHero/caffeine_api

I made a similar tracker, let me know what you think, and what additional features you think would be helpful for someone that is interested in lowering their caffeine consumption like yourself.

https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cucuso/caffeine-tracker/i...

I love yours as well. I drink an embarrassing amount currently. 2-3 coffee drinks and 4-5 sodas throughout the day.

I'm terrified that if I cut anything, my productiveness will suffer. I didn't even realize how much these drinks were overlapping before seeing these trackers, which is a good first step.

The number 1 thing I would like would be some type text message question I received every couple hours throughout the day. The question would just ask how sleepy I am. I would respond with a 1-5 based on how awake I am.

Then my alert fullness could be charted along with the caffeine in my body to see if they are even matching up. The app could then suggest which drink I could cut out, and suffer the least.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate the feedback. That sounds like a great idea I will work on that functionality the coming days and keep you posted. I did that yesterday from reading your post.

"Building the correct product" is a good way to put it. If you want a shot at a building a business, a good strategy is to make something people want, a la YC.

If you do that, "marketing" is just telling people who have a certain problem that you can help them.

For a lot of products, basic documentation is excellent marketing. What is this? What does it do? Who is it for? Why is it better than XYZ?

All I can say is "winners never quit, quitters never win but those who never win and never quit are idiots" I've also put over 10 years into side projects with practically no success. Makes me think that maybe I would have been better off socializing or something than rather than wasting my time on shit ppl don't want.

In over 30 years of being a software developer, I think I have probably created more than a thousand apps that have been used in the 'real world', from tiny command line utilities to major ERP systems.

About a hundred or so have been used in businesses to make money and improve efficiency, and while I earned money writing those systems, it was a tiny fraction of what the actual value of those systems could have been.

(One example: I wrote a charter booking system for a local bus company back in the early 2000's. Total billings was about $10K. The owner of the company came to me after 10 years of using my system to thank me and say that my software helped to improve his $1M turnover company by around 10% with booking efficiency. That is $100K/year for 10 years = $1M productivity improvement for $10K!)

I have had a couple of apps that could have gone BIG - One was in the early 90's when I wrote an app to build and organise armies for Warhammer 40,000. I released it on a couple of WH40K forums and got a TON of great feedback, but the app had a few Games Workshop copyrighted images in it, so they rightfully sent me a 'cease and desist' letter that was actually quite nice and recommended I remove the copyrighted elements only.

I decided that I would just can the whole project. Bear in mind this was the first app I knew of to automate the army building, tracking points and printing character sheets out. There are a ton of them that have come out since then which are great, but I always wonder 'what could have been' and if my pride was just some form of self-sabotage?

Anyhow - looks like the OP has got his perspective right - focusing on life and his new born son. I find that now I am older, doing stuff like spending time with family or playing my guitar is far more attractive than coding. I don't regret the time I spent on 'dead' projects though... Everything is simply a learning experience.

>That is $100K/year for 10 years = $1M productivity improvement for $10K!

There are two parts of the equation here: [His business] + [Your software] = [Value]. Your software alone, meaning when it is not in use by his business, is not worth $1M over 10 years. It is worth $0. His business is what gave your code value.

You should try to publish some code for a change, as open source. You can keep improving your skills but without having to worry about making money (thats what your job is for) and getting help/input from the community

> getting help/input from the community

I don't think this is any more likely than a financial success. I have 24 github repos for side projects, and have only had one issue created.

I think this is a good idea. It crossed my mind while writing this, and I didn't put it down. Thank you.

Others have said build a better mousetrap, but that isn't your problem.

You just need to solve somebodies problem. It could even be yours. The one that stood out to me was identifying which pet is at your door. It sounds like that was a problem (probably pretty minor...?) that you wanted to solve yourself. Show people how you solved it, and others might comment on it and say, "That's really cool! Can you make me one?", or offer some new feature idea that would make them say it's really cool. Boom! First customer. Hell, don't even tell them you made it, see if they ask you where you got it! Basically find a need or want from somebody else for something you find fun. People like cool things.

An example of something to probably not do again would be the Boulder tubing thing. Was it a problem you or others had? The flow rate can be visualized by looking at Boulder creek, which runs through much of Boulder, and by going outside... which it's almost always nice anyway ;) So I don't see how it would solve any problem you had even.

Building a business is a lot more work than hacking on some fun ideas. There is significant risk, often little chance of a payoff, and it consumes everything in your life. IMHO there's nothing wrong with working for other people from time to time and being apart of a community of engineers. That being said, I have had the privilege of helping build a few startups and it involves a number of people. So if you are truly interested in building a successful startup, you need to do with with other people.

As an aside, these sound like awesome projects and it sounds like you accomplished your goals of creating and learning from new experiences! I wouldn't call them worthless but rather adventures! That 3D printed watch is neat, I've been trying to come across a new kind of PC for the year 2020 and beyond which acts as a hub. There are all sorts of exciting stuff on the horizon that you can continue to explore like WiGig and beyond. Don't give up!

As many have said, there's nothing wrong with cash-less side projects. I wouldn't call them "worthless". You have learned valuable skills and you have kept your mind malleable enough to learn new skills. That's invaluable as a software/hardware developer.

I really enjoy following https://www.indiehackers.com/ for inspiration and ideas about money-making side projects.

If your goal is to make money, then you have to look at the value your product provides. What is valuable? Could be entertainment or attention (your average consumer application). Or you could build a product that saves time and solves business problems.

I would argue that consumer apps and products are tougher to compete in. Business problems? Those will never go away. And businesses are almost always willing to spend a $1 if it saves them $2 or more.

I got married and had a child. That solved the problem for me!

Good on you for doing so many side projects. I barely get started on mine. Give up/stop way too quickly.

I think I would give this advice to just about anyone who is trying to follow their interests and build a career at the same time:

It just sounds like you enjoy learning. That is great, but it sounds like you also want a career.

If you want to find similar happiness in a career as you do with learning you'll need to decide to enjoy making things that are valuable to others. It may be that you already enjoy this; otherwise you'll have to train yourself to be happy when others find your work valuable. If you can do that you shouldn't have much trouble building a career given the skills you already have. Learning to work with other people will dramatically increase the number of potentially valuable things you can create so you should also pursue that (as you've already surmised).

I can relate to this. I'm in my 8th year and $0 so far. I only did 3 projects though. All based on open source work. My first took 3 years. Second one took 1 year and I spun it off into my current one which I've been working on for almost 4 years.

Things have started to look up recently. For years it looked like everything was going against me: Competitors kept coming up with products that got tons of attention and were shaking things up towards a different path. But now I feel that something changed and some opportunities are appearing all at once

Just a quick note: competition should not deter you but empower you. Any successful product will bring competition. Your job is to make sure your product is better and sell better than your competition. Giving up is not an option.

What Mizza said: "Realize that you are an artist." What perfect, elegant statement. And so very true!

I'm a professional artist and have been earning 50-100% of my living through my art for about 20 years. I sold a publishing company I co-founded about 5 years ago and was so burned out, bitter, and over the art world that I went through a devastating creative slump that took 3.5 years to dig my way out of.

It was the first time in my life I didn't create art in some form daily. I was convinced my creative talents were either atrophied or dead when business idea after business idea either failed or were abandoned.

I was fortunate, however, to have the ability to take several years off and just tinker. Once the burden/responsibility of creating solely for monetary gain was lifted, everything changed.

I would say, "Let me build this idiotic thing I'm thinking about today!" The sillier the idea, the more I welcomed it because, after all, I'm not an artist anymore and my career is over.

Just the process of saying "f-it" and trying damn near anything has turbo-charged my creativity. So much so, that I feel the way I did when I was a child.

When you completely relax, get your mind out of your own rear end, and just try neat - albeit meaningless - crap, amazing things can happen.

The point is not the failed side project! The point is all the beneficial things you learned/solved for/figured out to make something cool. They stay with you and will benefit you in ways you can never, ever expect.

Recently, I decided I wanted a vertical clothesline. Stupid, right? Something nobody would ever buy. (Oh well.) I have a very shady back yard and wanted the ability to move my clothes to whichever point in my yard had the most sunlight given the time of day. Just the process of figuring out how to get an entire load of laundry quickly onto this contraption and then have it fold down into nothing when not in use was an intense creative exercise...especially because I have no engineering background.

I could go on and on about how side projects with no hope of monetary gain saved my grits.

(Love this community...finally something on which I can offer "expert" advice. ;) )

I would say don't be too hard on yourself. It's difficult to find something you're passionate about and have it practically used by many people.

The best thing you could do is actually work on side projects related to your paid work. Come up with an idea, prototype it, demo it and convince your boss/peers that it's something beneficial for you or the company. Many obvious examples where a lot of successful applications first came up as someone's side project at work.

I think that i'm only as good as i'm right now because i do things like side projects. Or i'm good because i'm someone who is doing side projects, whatever :)

I think the payout for these activities is the honing of your skill set.

Some of those projects still have potential (Zookeeper) to earn some ROI.

I would, instead of giving up on all of these, pick one that you think has the most promise, and develop it until you have a solid prototype.

Your market fit doesn't always come immediately, it may take you years of focus and stress.

What Mizza says is very true as well, you are an artist. So I think you should build your masterpiece.

Some people's masterpieces are a colossal waste of time. Not everyone can make a hit even if they are doing the exact same thing.

Also quite a few masterpieces were just buried or hidden away. And even more masterpieces are work of easy more than a single person really.

Side projects are better compared with other investments in your skills, such as taking classes.

If you "need" them to go somewhere, you need to start on a commercial path. Arguably, models like the App Store (while certainly flawed in many respects) do provide at least an option for hacking a project into a viable product without necessarily needing a full startup and investors, etc.

>Marketing: The worst. I’m bad at it and it just does not interest me. Building the correct product and learning to sell it is a clear area for me to improve.

Why improve? There are lots of people out there with marketing skills looking for side gigs. Find a co-founder that is willing to do the marketing, customer acquisition side.

Any recommendations on where to find people like this? I have the same issue as the GP.

I'd look around for startup-networking meetups in your area. I've been to Seattle Startup Drinks on a number of occasions, and there are plenty of more "business-side" people that show up looking exactly for us--I didn't even have any interesting ideas to share, but when they heard I was a dev, I was instantly one of the most popular people there.

Same as what xxr said below. Meetups.com usually will list informal or formal get togethers. Could also email your local startup association/incubator and ask. They may know of people hanging around or coming out of a startup and are looking for a new project. Also check out reddit subs /r/startups and /r/entrepreneurs I see a lot of "marketing experts" on there, however I would take anyone on the internet claiming to be an expert or a "growth hacker" with a grain of salt.

I was thinking a part time marketing job would be an ideal gig for a woman who's looking after young kids, has experience and wants to work 5-20 hours a week on something interesting to keep their eye in. I'd look in those circles.

founder dating

The same way non tech folks are terrible at hiring programmers is the same way tech folks are bad at hiring sales & marketing folks. Many people who claim to be good at marketing at terrible, worse you might end up with someone tarnishing your image by spamming your product or even getting your site blacklisted by Google due to bad SEO.

So do tell, how can we evaluate and vet that someone is good at sales & marketing?

Ask yourself what your motives are. Did you post to fish for compliments? Are you depressed/overworked and want sb to advise you changing your life? You know best. Ask yourself what makes you happy. How do you feel about what you do? If you love it, just keep pursuing and others will also do and spend on it.

You may think those are worthless but it proves that you can ship products. I struggle with shipping also.

I am almost in the same boat. I kind of feel, that I did not make it big considering the amount of time i spend. If it worked on freelancing, I would have made more. But i still think, perseverance would pay. We may be down but not out !

A few of the projects could benefit from aggressive marketing tactics such as email campaigns and cold calls.

On the other hand, why pursue customers when you could be programming an android game?

This seems to be the general tone of this article.

This is very familiar. There's nothing we can do except keep trying. Most of the time you don't even make any mistakes to learn from, you're just not one of the lucky ones.

Hey Zach, I'm in a similar boat to you, although less prolific. I read your post as saying "I'm trying to figure out what to do next", and this is some food for thought in that regard. Personally, moving forward I intend to do what you call a "project deep dive", but from a slightly different angle.

There was another highly upvoted post on HN last week titled "Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers" [0]. The article itself had a lot of interesting advice, distilled from interviews with people who had taken side projects and turned them into profitable businesses.

In the comments, soneca had some insightful additions [1]. And we are increasingly in an attention-driven economy [2]. But while attention is being widely harvested through exploiting addictive tendencies [3], that does not motivate me. Reading Hooked [4] was interesting, but also terrifying.

For me, bringing this together means my course of action is as follows: Build an audience around content which enriches the lives of people. Way easier said than done. And some may write it off as hopelessly naive.

But while Facebook and friends scour the dopamine landscape for user attention, building an audience around long-term content that challenges and enriches the lives of people seems wonderfully contrarian to me. And it's in that contrarian tenet that I find solace. Take the slow and the long road, and you can build a sustainable source of value.

In the grand scheme of things, spending a few years of my life creating short interactive games which explore philosophy and society is the path that makes the most sense to me. Like I said, food for thought in your journey forward.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803468

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803468#unv_14804395

[2]: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...

[3]: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

[4]: https://www.amazon.ca/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Product...

I tried to look at each of your ideas to see if they solve any of my problems - they don't. If they, I did be happy to use them and provide more feedback.

typo corrections: if they did, I be happy ...

The titles and purpose for these side projects are hilarious! I bet the author learned a lot though. Perhaps it's not a total waste...

If you learned something, it wasn't worthless.

Well, sure, but if you're not enjoying it, slogging through tons of side projects isn't the best use of your limited time on this Earth.

When every side project is wildly different and requires learning considerable new skills, there's clearly something else going on besides unenjoyable work just to bootstrap a business.

Maybe. I'm just responding to what seem to be the OP's own sentiments that he's wasted a decade.

He should do something with crypto that's novel/tongue-in-cheek enough for people to want to send him money

interesting - I'm also a hacker (CTO-type) between gigs and looking to collaborate on technical projects. Hit my profile and connect on linkedin.

I'm pretty good at marketing and making small-medium money, happy to either do it or teach-to-fish...

can I ping you? I do like to learn marketing and how to fish and possible collaboration too.

hmm. bloom seems to really amazing, everbody with a garden might want to use.would be cool if this works in europe also...

> Find collaborators

take a look at The Recurse Center

www.recurse.com

I share the same affliction haha

do you want to make money or do you want to hack?

you need to answer that for yourself.

why can't he do both?

As he says, he previously had a number of priorities - learning new things, making cool projects, as well as trying to make money. If he's unsatisfied with monetary returns, he has to put more focus on making money. Because even if he decides to prioritize that right now, it still will probably take some time.

He throws out some ideas of how to solve this problem

> Find Collaborators

If I was him I would not look for people that I would call collaborators at this point. What would be helpful is talking to people working in the same space. If he is building a Javascript application, he should talk to other people who are building their own Javascript application. They'll teach you things, you'll teach them things, you can bounce ideas off each other. Start on that level. Then at some point in the future you both might want to collaborate on something.

Also, not that it would help in making money in the short term, but you might want to look at active, cool FLOSS (open source) projects that are out there. See what bugs people are reporting, and see if you can patch them and send a pull request. Perhaps you are a FLOSS user and notice a bug yourself which you can try to patch. This helps you learn how to collaborate with people outside of work.

> Project Deep Dive

This makes the most sense of all the ones he says. He did a 3d printer, a Javascript application, an Android app, a smartwatch etc. Focus on one project. Or at least one field - build up expertise writing Javascript applications, or designing smartwatches etc. Expertise in an area will help you - especially in a new or fairly new field.

> Marketing

Marketing will bring in users to your product even as you're polishing off the rough edges. Depending on what it is it's not hard - either be really clever and get some free users, or pay a few cents for each user who clicks an ad and comes to your website and downloads your app. Improve your product responding to consumer demand.

Once closing thought is to have two side project tracks going - a money-focused one, and one not focused on money. Spend a few weeks/months on a project that will try to make money. Also plan ahead - if the project is a Javascript application, decide that if it fails you will build another Javascript application as your next money-making project attempt, and will reuse code/knowledge from your first attempt in the second one. Then - after release version 1, fixing bugs, making improvements etc., if it is not going anywhere or you feel a lull - go to track two, learn something new and do a cool project on it. Every few weeks you can shift between the money-making project track, and the learning/fun track. The one difference is you can abandon projects on the fun track as soon as they stop being fun, whereas the money you tend to work and work on something until you decide that your MVP is dead and you must pivot.

> Marketing: The worst. I’m bad at it and it just does not interest me.

This resonates with me, and I am sure a whole lot of other engineers working on side projects out here.

What's the solution? How do you find a "Marketing" person on a side-hustle budget? Without any network.

Like OP, I know my side-projects need to be marketed, but I also don't enjoy cold emailing or cold-calling and would really leave it to an expert in that domain, as long as I can pay him/her by output and not on a full-time salary or a contractor rate...

In this day and age, marketing is not limited to cold calling or posting on Facebook to one's inner circle of friends.

You need to wear your engineer hat to do very tightly focused marketing. Say you are making a widget for wordpress which lets you accept bitcoins - your target market is likely to be very small compared to a mass market site like HN. Find out where those people who want to pay or receive btc payments hang out or find out where people who want to extend btc into blogs hang out and connect with them - read their discussions and learn their cadence. Talk up your solution at opportune points in the discussion.

Do a little every day - no zero days, remember? - and over time, you will either get more comfortable talking up your product to the lay audience or realize your market doesn't actually like your product and wants something else.

I enjoy marketing for fun ( I work at an ad agency) and always feel I could contribute to open source / people's side projects, but there is never an opportunity. No one ever lists the need for a marketer, and reaching out generally goes unanswered.

There are marketers out there who want to contribute, but just don't see opportunities.

The few marketers we reached out to asked us "What is your budget?", and then instantly dropped off when we told them our budget wasn't anywhere near the "$10000+" dollars per month they were used to.

I mean, what the hell? We're searching for someone to help with something that doesn't even have visitors, much less customers, yet. What are they expecting?

Sounds like big agency or freelance guys. If their 30%+ cut isn't $3k or more, its not worth the work.

Those people were looking for leads, just like a freelance developer would. But I do not know where you find freelance marketers who want to help build something, not to add a client to their portfolio.

Depends what you consider for "opportunity", would you do it for free and just have a cut at the end of a month based on the profit?

I've reached out to projects that aren't profitable at all, just side-projects I thought were cool. If someone builds a project I think is cool, I sometimes want to help out in a way that benefits them and I enjoy, even when their is no money involved.

Hi! I have a side project and would love to get some marketing ideas / support.

Please get in touch vic@smalldata.tech

Cheers!

A lot of people have asked in this thread if I did any customer development. Many of these projects aren't actually indented to be companies, fwiw. But some were.

My day job for years has been a developer at early stage startups, so I'm fully aware of the amount of sheer grinding involved in customers. And the years of iteration to achieve something that resembles product-market fit. I've incorporated some of these tricks we've used as I've learned them from our teams.

Some of the low-cost things I've tried, with varied success:

- Writing to influential bloggers, - Social media grind - Adwords

But ultimately these are side projects. Can't pound the pavement in the middle of work.

It is much easier to build a business around a product if you start by solving a problem that people are actively searching online about -- rather than building whatever is exciting you at the moment.

For example, what questions are you seeing repeatedly on StackExchange or Quora? If you are a developer, what issues do you see other developers continually asking about?

Could you build a solution to meet that need? If so, marketing that solution to the first 100 users becomes so much easier. It just about answering those questions as they come up.

Suddenly though, you are not building something to satisfy your curiosity but you are building something to satisfy someone else's need. Is that something you want to do?

Those questions are also not that easy to find.

Email me, I can share a technique I use to find them.

> as long as I can pay him/her by output and not on a full-time salary or a contractor rate...

Does this kind of thing actually exist? Or it is wishful thinking? I'm under the impression that anyone worth their salt won't settle for payment solely based on output/performance.

> Does this kind of thing actually exist?

I thought that sales people who get commission per sale fall in this category. But I might be wrong, maybe sales and marketing are 2 different roles? Not sure.

For instance, what I was referring to was this. I've created a niche job board and have steady traffic for the last few months now. I want to hire someone from recruiting background who can get me paid job listings, and I pay him/her per listing he/she closes. How do I find such a person(s)

No good sales person will work on 100% commission, unless they can make huge money in a market they already know. 100% commission on a product that isn't even fully developed - no way.

I never really tried to build a side project of any real substance. Sometimes I wrote libraries or other things to better understand a language I was learning, or something like that.

I like to cook, I think the physicality of it is satisfying after dealing with computers all day. And as time goes on, the problems that get solved with code seem more and more frivolous. Though I guess you could argue I should try to change that instead of posting about it.

> I’ve learned a lot, but what’s the point without application?

An entertaining hobby? People who do archery for a hobby don't bemoan that they've spent another Saturday shooting arrows at targets without making a cent, and that their club dues are just wasted.

For me ambitious side project require lot more money, time and focus which I could never afford while working at some company. That's was my primary motivation behind starting my own company. Don't shy away from business opportunities.

How did you learn and how did you handle sales & marketing?

> LocalFavorite: A location-based tweet favoriting application. Made $10/mo until it was shut down by Twitter.

Curious. Why did Twitter shut it down? Was it from the updates to their API Usage TOS? Or something else?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com