I would never follow advice coming from a rant. My advice is that you don't follow your own advice coming from a rant either. :)

There are companies that will value your experience and there is the possibility that the projects you chose do not showcase your software development skills properly.

My impression is that you got lost between creating a portfolio project and building a startup, ending up with the worst of two words. You can name both as "side-projects", but they are very different things with very different goals.

While learning to code a couple of years ago I built a lot of small projects with the sole purpose of showing that I could build and put in production very small, humble projects as a junior developer. My portfolio is here, although most projects are not online anymore (just stopped maintaining and paying domain fees): http://rodrigo-pontes.glitch.me/

They were great to learn and the portfolio was essential to be hired on my first job as a web developer.

Now I have another side-project that is totally different from those early ones. It is a bootstrapping business where the goal is not to learn and show to potential employers, the goal is to create a product that adds real value to the customer and earn money with it: www.oneonemeeting.com

I imagine a company looking to hire me as a frontend web developer won't necessarily care about all the work that went into the design and copy of the landing page, the product development, the sales part, the conversation with potential customers.

So my advice is: when starting a side-project, think hard about what are you wanting to achieve with it, what is its goal and plan it accordingly. If you build it for making money, don't expect it will help you with being hired; and vice-versa.