Can you recall any specific thing you did that brought you success?
Choosing good idea worthy of implementation and finding enough inspiration to finish it is another matter.
Incredible comment overall but this line was particularly Woah!
What advice would have for solo founders of a side project (that later becomes a full time day job) in terms of evolving to a large team?
First hire(s), things to look out for, etc.
I’d find this insight incredible! Hope I’m not asking too much. But such an incredible story you have.
I feel like I often hang up on if something should be done or if it is something that will be "successful". So it's cool to hear stories where the goal isn't the financial success of X project -- the goal is the journey and it's a bonus if it's financially beneficial.
Thanks again, know that it helped me to read this comment!
My amateurish approach is to jot down every idea in a single line of a text file, then walk away. If the same idea or topic strikes me again, I give it a separate text file and write some copy that might go on the product page, together with links to related stuff, screenshots, etc. Then, after another few weeks and only if I still believe in the idea I come up with more details, perhaps do some light coding, brand ideas, register domains, etc. Then (You guessed it), I wait another few weeks or even months and if it passes my still-relevant check I start working on it on the side of my existing, well, side project. The challenge these days is when to pull the plug or go all-in since the market, interests and attention shifts so quickly that it's tough to adapt without losing temper. Doesn't get easier as you get I older.
Thanks!
* https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-a...
https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...
I build a lot of tiny projects and Ben (original blog post) is inspiring me to get them better organized.
> If you're stuck for ideas, I recommend just building something; anything; even if it's terrible, and I guarantee a better idea will pop into your brain shortly after.
I have been working on a long project for a few years now and it will not be finished before another few years and I envy the speed at which the author gets feedback after he launches his products.
> Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft.
https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/read-dan-harmons-excellent-a...
A lot of the initial tries will be terrible but it only gets better from there.
Doing roughly $700k revenue yearly right now over the 2 main projects. Hopefully with a 3rd coming this summer.
If OP is actually the author, a question - what was your approach in keeping the projects tightly scoped and not introducing feature creep? Deadlines or time-boxing? Pre-emptive deciding on what you will and won't do? Lowering your standards for "good enough"? Just plain old discipline? Something else?
When you are building for fun, it is for yourself. When you are building for profit, it is for other people. When you are building for fun, you get to decide what to work on and when to stop - usually when it is no longer fun. When you are building for profit, other people decide what you work on and when you are done - usually when no new features are requested, you have no competition, and you have absolutely saturated your market. This rarely ever happens so you always have something propelling you.
The biggest failure most engineers encounter is they build things nobody asked for. They build products without customers lined up, for markets that do not currently exist, with only feedback from themselves. This is because they built the product for fun thinking they were building it for profit.
The line between the two is very easy to blur - especially when reading OP's blog where he genuinely sounds like he had fun building his projects, but I guarantee there was also a lot of very unfun background work done in the name of profit.
Edit: Don't just take my guarantee for it, read about his challenges for One Item Store https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store
Could be worse. I used to have this problem all the time, and at some point managed to fix it. Now I've spent 3 years on a side project (which I originally thought should take a couple of months, and considering its lack of complexity really only should have taken at most a year), and even though I'm fully aware its an "unworkable" idea, I can't stop until its done.
I've read tiny projects in the past though and really like it, I really want to try a similar thing at some point...just as soon as this current project is done ;)
With coding, it seems like it's much more difficult question to answer.
The author seems to be batting an insanely high average for just building things and having them actually get some traction, and be exit-able.
> When I started this mission, I had a big list of project ideas that I'd built up in my phone. Maybe you have one of those lists too.
> Two years later, I've realised a lot of these initial ideas were pretty terrible.
> It's a paradox, but I've found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.
Funnily enough, I went the other way and started sharing my large list of ideas with others (I send 3 non-terrible ones to subscribers every week[0]). Of course, running a mailing list and sharing the ideas was one of the ideas...
At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing. Knowing you should take the month to build before you do, but reading the post it feels like maybe bounding initial development time sometimes can work in lieu of validating the market.
[EDIT] - please see previous discussion about the mailing list as well![1] -- it's released every sunday night.
[EDIT2] - is anyone having trouble sending email to the author? I'm using protonmail and wanted to get in touch but I can't -- email looks to be no bueno for proton mail. I guess I'll either try thunderbird or twitter.
[EDIT3] - Looks like proton mail does not like emoji email addresses currently... Thunderbird happily sent.
[EDIT4] - Nope, nvm I'm getting a mail lookup error (hn strips the emoji)...
> Delivery to tinyprojects@.gg failed with error: MX lookup error
Market validation - especially for online products and services - is indeed incredibly important, but not many people like to write about it because it is actually very drab and a tiny bit audacious.
His market validation - you are seeing it. It is a submission to Hacker News.
Ok ok, that is a given, but the author alludes to other various ways he gets feedback and validation for his products. He also talks about how well his products were received on Product Hunt and you can also follow him on Twitter.
My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
Yup you're totally right. All these ideas really seemed like things that would trend on HN (but that's easy to say in retrospect, getting to the front page isn't quite so easy!).
> My final advice for seeing how online services validate their ideas - run the product's domain through a backlink checker. It lets you see what other websites link to their product and what avenues they pursued for outreach. Each of those submissions exposes the product to potential customers and gives valuable feedback to the creator.
This is one thing I know I'm terrible at. I barely use any SEO tools properly, I should probably just hurry up and pay for ahrefs or whatever already.
I don't think the concept of checking backlinks even clicked properly in my head until I read your explanation, thank you very much.
If it does fit or is close to fitting, great! If it doesn't fit, oh well, not much is lost (after all, it is a tiny project).
I know LLCs allow for pass-through taxation and you don't have to file as a business, but I get frozen by the idea that generating a few hundred dollars in revenue from some silly side project means I have to spend hours/days of my time the next Spring figuring out how to properly pay taxes on it.
The fact that you're asking this question means you're interested in launching things. If so, the cliched, true advice is: launch.
If you want practical advice: I run a one-person LLC in the US. Taxes on a few hundred dollars are nothing to worry about.
For inevitable naysayers: my manager's advice doesn't mean you shouldn't ever plan or prepare. Just that when your chances of success are very low, don't worry too much about the repercussions of success. I applied to grad school, and didn't get in. My career continued on just fine.
Once you get to the scale of a few thousand dollars a year, you can file what's called a Form 1040 Schedule C which allows you to declare your business income, claim expenses and other deductions, and include it in your taxable income. For that scale it's an extra 10 minutes with your tax software or even by hand, as long as you keep good records, and you're done.
The point at which an LLC or other more formal business structure makes sense is fuzzy and can have different ranges depending on the business, but typically you probably don't need or want to invoke the expense of a CPA until you're making more than six figures (or if you've taken outside investment, obv).
While the IRS likely won't audit you for a few hundred dollars (US), there are laws about what you have to do. You don't need to become a tax expert, but knowing the very basics so you don't run afoul of any laws and end up owing some $$ or penalties is probably worth taking a bit of time to do at the end of the year.
All your costs are tax deductions, whether you incorporate or not. The incorporation cost is negligible and you can ignore everything about a local/foreign llc registration simply because the consequences are improbable and inconsequential, just make the llc in the best states. If your employer is withholding any taxes, you’ll get so much more of it back because you have so many deductions now.
If you make any revenue its easy to count.
Your standing in society is based on gross revenue, your tax footprint is a fraction of net revenues. Its low key perfect. Net operating losses are the greatest of all time.
In addition, You get massively disproportionate security and anonymity by operating under entities you created. And you can prove product market fit in private and then inherit all the credit for it when it works.
The LLC (and other entity types) increases the deterrent of this ever affecting you.
The LLC specifically has some theoretical weaknesses, but the reason it is a deterrent is because it deters people from spending more money to find out about those weakenesses, and it also increases the odds that people won't be able to know where you are or serve you properly. The more expensive it is to find out anything, the less potential aggrieved people will bother, and "finding out" for them could mean "even harder to create liability and a payout", so they get bounced, or deterred, from trying.
There are lawyers and some very shady businesses, that sweep through the web and report anyone who doesn't comply to any kind of law. They actually make money with this. When i had a small business, i've got a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer of a "competitor" because a single link in my imprint page wasn't clickable. I guess that's why so many people are afraid of starting a business...
But yes, I was thinking of that ('entrepreneur's relief' I believe) too - it solves this problem nicely: don't worry about it until you know you're making money.
(And also other problems like 'hang on I sold some old crap on eBay.. was that income')
Then I became older and just started caring less about doing things "the right way". It was liberating.
Put it on Schedule 1 line 8z and work on making it a few thousand dollars for next time!
To summarize someone else's better point: worry about this problem when you have it. In the mean time worry about problems you have right now.
In the end, I decided to launch all my side-projects for free (sometimes I outright include a "non commercial" clause because I don't see why somebody should profit off my free work). I find this reduces all the project related stress to a fraction.
Reading about the author's projects in the past is actually what inspired me to do it.
I used Windows for a long time before as a power user (living my life in FarManager and WinAPI), then switched to Ubuntu with i3.
After finally switching to the Mac, I loved its simplicity and how it freed my mind from micro-managing the system, but I also noticed its shortcomings and how some things were better on Windows/Linux.
Nowadays I'm making small apps to overcome those macOS shortcomings, and help others find their carefree macOS setup where the system doesn't get in the way of real work.
And it's going pretty well! I've also shared the source of the framework [1] I'm using for these apps, so that I don't have to constantly reimplement payments, licensing [2], SwiftUI styles/components and utility functions on each new project.
[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Lowtech [2] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/LowtechPro
Still I imagine it's hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.
But, it's a CC TLD, in fact it's .kz who I still carry a scar or two from when they issued some domains starting with "-": you know what happens when you "dig -yo.tld"? OWASP applies to domain names.
However, the RFCs for the actual _protocol_ declare a label can contain "any octet", so you can use and abuse this in FQDNs under your control and the internet police won't come to get you. "poop".example.com would be fine if you control example.com (either as a quoted string or as an emoji), so would "rm -rf *.example.com".
Also Indiehackers.
But let me tell you, if my current project works out, I'll never have to work a W2 job again!
For example, I am currently working on a project to send personalized slack messages in bulk. But I then became really interested in the idea of automatic podcast transcription using GPT-3. So I ended up just one night banging out a prototype on jupyter notebook and it turns out the auto transcription was pretty bad and expensive, but at least I know now. So now I don't feel as bad and I can focus on the boring aspects of building this slack plugin, like accepting payments.
The book "Refuse to choose" was really enlightening to me, it talks about "scanners", people that have this attribute. I felt very seen and it taught me that this style of working can be an incredible strength.
https://www.amazon.ca/Refuse-Choose-Interests-Passions-Hobbi...
He said great artists have one thing in common, they finish projects. It's OK to have a workshop full of experiments, but you must finish projects.
I've always taken it to mean that forcing your self to do that last 20% of a project is the only way to learn how to make something great.
I suppose I naturally gravitate to problem domains with little market potential. I don't know why.
I go into more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221
LMAO. The emoji emails is really cool though. [1]
Suppose he'll just make a tinydomainmanager.com or something.
Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?
One of these days, I need to sit down and write th origin story of Murmel, and how I came to it.
Cheers!
I’ve got a few ideas somewhere between just started and half-written, but I often grind to a halt when it comes to figuring out sensible hosting. As an amateur, the world of AWS vs. GCE vs. Azure vs. Heroku vs. many, many others is difficult, and there are scary stories about out of control costs abound.
On a tiny scale, I'm a programmer. I happen to be between programming jobs and to keep the roof over my head I'm working as a Medical Receptionist. I see lots of ways my skills (totally exotic in that arena) are useful. For example, I see someone doing brute-force hand search-and-replace on a document. I said, give me 10 seconds and I'll do it for you. Regexps, despite the "two-problems" joke, are fantastically powerful and made them drop their jaws. But there's larger problems I have written Powershell scripts to solve, python scripts, macros in the software they use, excel spreadsheets, etc. Whatever tool to get the job done.
Problems are everywhere where people are. Go talk to them.
> If you're stuck for ideas, I recommend just building something; anything; even if it's terrible, and I guarantee a better idea will pop into your brain shortly after.
I imagined myself [silently] looking at such projects to see how they progress. I had a lot of fun looking from afar after explaining to folks how to do websites in html.
I endeavour to do this as well.
Out of curiosity, what do you do to generate food to eat though? The projects don't appear to bring in much bread.
> One other weird downside is that .. I sometimes catch myself thinking "should I build something just for the upvotes".
Is the author saying the attention from social media sites like Hacker News sometimes seems like motivation enough to build the next project?
...ahh, read the full breakdown, it is approximately something like that, which seems crazy, but I dunno, guy has some money to spare and went nuts with the project and sold a bunch of accounts. (also weird, but tiktokers susceptible to random stuff I guess)
The premise really resonates with me. I've often struggled with maintaining a presence on any social media, and barely ever post because everything'_s normal_.
How do you pay taxes for a international business? Do you have to pay in every country that you have s costumer?
Also, how do you make sure everything is legal in every country that it's accessible?
Quick, iterative feedback is by far a superior approach when attempting to understand how to build a successful product.
Building and failing and building and failing might be a faster way of getting to something great than vetting, vetting, vetting, building, vetting, vetting building...
Deploy to a VPS on DO or Linode
