HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mogulchris

14 karma · joined July 17, 2020

submissionscomments
mogulchris··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell
I definitely did.

I got over both the starting paralysis (and then the subsequent doubt paralysis that I picked the wrong one to work on) by doing 2 major things:

1. Making the definition of "project success" being that I learned a ton.

Once I did this (like consciously did it, for example my decision to work on E2EE was a terrible biz decision because nobody asked for it, but I wanted to learn more about cryptography) the decision became easier. I picked the one that had something I wanted to learn in the immediate term. Mogul had more interesting things at the time that I wanted to learn (E2EE, push notifications, CSV uploading, etc...)

2. Choosing to work on these projects over a very long period of time. Once I had the mindset that these were 10+ year projects for me, the approach really stopped mattering to me. As long as I pushed forward, I felt like I was going in the right direction.

Working on 1 feature per app each week vs focusing 1 year on each app stopped mattering because the end result over a 10+ year period would be the same. Both apps would be there, probably have similar features and I would have learned the same things. Just in a different order.

Second one is definitely more specific to me, but I think some of it can be applied when you think about a project/product as a small part of someone's life journey.

Hope that helps!

(edit: I also wanted to say that I have 2 more apps on my roadmap. No idea when I'll start them but I know the I'll do it when the time is right)

mogulchris··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell
I resonate a lot with what you are saying.

Although Mogul was originally built for professional networking, I personally use it to maintain personal relationships (it’s amazing to see how impactful it is when you can recall super small details about someone/a convo with a friend).

Thanks for sharing this.

mogulchris··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell
I have 2 projects right now, combined doing over $500+/mo :)

They are pretty different target market wise/price point and that has been pretty cool to see the differences in marketing/churn/adoption/etc...

1. Mogul - Privacy focused Personal CRM (https://mogulnetworking.com/) (~$650/mo, ~6 years old)

2. Ellie - A better day planner (https://ellieplanner.com/) (~$160/mo, ~1 year old)

Honestly no game plan, I just enjoy working on both and plan on iterating for a long long time (10+ years) and just slowly growing. I am literally addicted to working on these apps.

I tweet about these projects extensively on Twitter btw if anyone is curious to see what work went into both of these (https://twitter.com/raroque)

mogulchris··on Monica: Open-source personal relationship manager
I had a similar concern so one of my side projects is a personal CRM with E2EE: https://mogulnetworking.com/

Someone could probably fork Monica and build an E2EE version for people who care about that kind of stuff. That would be pretty interesting actually.