Why my side projects failed

In an effort to help you in the future, here are some things I noticed:

- 'just quickly fix this'. I cannot enumerate the number of times a junior dev has come to me bemoaning a code break because he 'just tried to fix this', because I've lost count. Anytime you find yourself using that phrase or something similar take a step back put down the keyboard and think through all your assumptions about why this is happening. Write one or more tests to verify each assumption. Once you've verified your assumptions (you will find some were wrong > 50% of the time in my experience) you not only know your assumptions (or revised assumptions) are correct, but also have a much better mental model of the problem. Now break the problem into small pieces, and possibly break each of those into small pieces. Address bottom up.

- Always have backups, and implement them with a backup plan that works. Don't just (I'll backup the data periodically as I think of it - this is the plan of many). I prefer nightly incrementals and a weekly image backup.

- The site was offline for two years. Uptime and adoption momentum are key. So is honesty. This is a hard situation though, and every person will address it in the way that suits them best. I think I would have put a notice at the top of the page that was only visible to returning visitors, saying "We are sorry for the inconvenience. We are suffering early growing pains. Our database is corrupted and our backups were insufficient, so past data is unavailable. We are working to ensure this does not happen again.", cleared the data, and kept going.

- The site concept is interesting but two questions seem unanswered (you maybe just left them out of the video. The first is how you intend to incentivize users to come back to the site (gamification, cash prizes, discounts, lots of options). The second is how to monetize. Without a way to monetize it this is a cool side project, not a side hustle. You might be able to build up enough adoption so someone big buys you (like Wordle) and then you don't need to worry about monetization. But you can't count on that, I'm not convinced that's a good strategy to plan on.

Points for improvement:

- Almost dropped out due to the 1min intro.

- And: are you actually using your mic? It sounds like a built in MacBook/smartphone microphone.