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I searched for all posts from /r/SideProjects that contained these strings:
"I built", "I made an alternative to", "I created a clone of".
Most posts are <=1 year old.
Reddit API does not allow parsing older posts hence the amount "968" I wish I could parse more.
The list of clones of popular apps:
Loom (screen recording app) (6‼)
Typeform (form builders) (7‼)
Resume/CV apps (3)
Pastebin (5)
Habit trackers (12‼)
Link in bio (5)
Screenshot making tools (3)
Todo lists (3)
Bookmarking tools (8)
Website builders 29 (‼‼)
Notes taking tools (10‼ classic )
Health, fitness, and wellness apps (19‼)
Feedback gathering tools (10‼)
Time tracking and invoicing tools (4)
Patreon alternatives (2)
Bookmarking tools (8)
Twitter (16‼‼‼ wtf?)
Product Hunt (6‼)
Pomodoro timers: (1)
Categories:
Language learning (4)
Directory/list (7)
Chrome extension (21)
Crypto or decentralized (5)
Finance (15)
Dev tool (26)
Self-hosted (14)
Growth or marketing tool (11)
Open-sourced (37)
Some stats:
B2C: 69.8% ↔ B2B: 30.2% (please do b2b!!!)
AI tools: 108 (10.8%!)
Most boring title:
"How I stumbled upon my startup idea: A casual chat"
Most inspiring title:
"I taught people to code for 10 years. So I started my own learning platform for fun and it got REALLY BIG."
Least catchy title:
"I made an alternative free WordPress theme directory"
Most catchy titles:
"I made a multiplayer game, got beaten at my own game, then made a bot for my game so I could finally win"
"I made a chrome extension that makes music sound like it's coming from another room"
"Too lazy to post daily, so built an app to do it instead"
People reach me out often there. Half of them ask questions about my project. The other half wants me to upvote their thing on Product Hunt.
To people who need me to press "Upvote" I reply with a template. Here it is:
> "Hey! I supported you (put my upvote) Good luck on your launch. P.S. Check my YouTube channel about launching on Product Hunt. I made an entire playlist of videos about this: <link> I also tell there about how to grow startups with $0 budget."
So I sent this text to roughly 25 people who asked me for an upvote.
And got my account permanently suspended. I'm also disallowed to create a new account
> Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, Repost, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts.
Lessons:
1) According to Twitter's documentation, your account gets blocked after 500 DMs. But I barely sent 50 DMs. Be careful.
2) Do not send copy-paste. Type.
3) Better avoid sending links to external resources.
4) The most important: you do not own your Twitter account.
1) AI lacks the creativity and critical thinking ability of human programmers.
2) The 8,000 token limitation of code-davinci-002.
Regarding these points:
While top 1% software engineers may handle more complex tasks, many programmers mostly perform repetitive tasks such as finding npm modules, importing them, reading documentation, testing, and debugging. Product vision is typically led by product owners or managers.
The token limitation is a significant issue. Storing an entire codebase in a language model is not feasible, as it would exceed the token limit. My team at MarsX has addressed this problem by creating a higher level abstraction programming language, which requires fewer tokens, allowing an entire app to be stored within a context. We plan to release this on GitHub soon.
Given these challenges, I believe that many programmers will likely lose their jobs within 1-3 years.
Is there anything else I should consider?
First, you can sell your hours to a company as an employee and earn its stocks. Eventually, you can get a lot of stocks, sell them, and become rich. This can work, but it is gambling. Why? Because you will only earn a significant amount of money if you join the right company at the beginning. No one will give you many Twitter-like company stocks today.
The second option is to build your own company and make an exit. Only 6% of companies make it to an exit. So if you are ready to play the big game, you can try. A try costs 7 years and 999 pounds of stress Enjoy!
There is a big downside that makes those 2 ways to become rich fail by design. They offer you to earn a pile of money. Then you will need to become a financial expert ASAP because your money will start to melt. Chances are, you will lose all your capital in 5-10-20 years.
Thus, you need to build streams of revenue, not a pile of cash.
Fine. You can create a plugin for a platform such as WordPress, or Shopify. Cool, but according to Shopify, the average app revenue is $2,138 monthly per app. Count on the risk of a platform going away and you will understand that this way will never give you financial freedom.
Making SaaS get recurring revenue from subscriptions sounds like an option. But eventually, 90% of all products fail. Does not sound like a bulletproof way to become rich either.
The ideas above may sound demotivating. This is because they are. The world does not have an acceptable way for developers to build their own financial freedom yet. A developer must be a strong person with great motivation to go through the stress and become rich.
So how will a smart developer do that in the nearest years? By creating micro-apps
Any modern developer has thousands of lines of code that they reuse. Those lines can be wrapped up into a full-stack module aka micro-app and sold to people who create apps for clients or for themselves for a monthly fee. For a developer, it will look like building 100 SaaS products but with less hustle. And with no need to market besides publishing them on the marketplace.
Some of your micro-apps will die unnoticed, some will be used by others and bring you cash. As years pass and you as a developer create more code and wrap it into micro-apps, your revenue stream grows. You will be paid not by a single employer, but by thousands of them. Which is way more sustainable.
Thoughts???
Speed. Aww yeah, it is lightning fast! My daily setup: Postgres, VScode (+48 plugins), Sublime Text, Slack, Discord, Spotify, Thunderbird, Telegram, Chrome, Firefox, iTerm, Figma, Alfred. All simultaneously. Not a single freeze so far. Each app opens instantly.
Apps. As you know, there is a chip incompatibility issue. And there is something called Rosetta to fix it. So I expected some problems with apps. But in reality, I did not have to care about this. There's no difference between M1 and Intel to me.
What went wrong. My biggest fear was not being able to launch my development environment. When I typed brew install python@3.7 in the terminal I got this error: "The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.". It instantly made me pale because this means I will have to carry 2 laptops to be able to code my product The problem was solved quickly by upgrading the project to a newer version of Python. Thank goodness our dependencies did not mess up because of the update. The next problem was nodejs v11 which was needed to launch the product locally. yarn start took ~2 hours (HOURS!) to launch. Each update took ~5 minutes to compile. The development process was awful. I got pale again The problem was solved by moving to a newer nodejs version. Again, the dependencies did not break up. But the things could easily mess up because nodejs dependencies are complicated as hell. Now it compiles instantly, yarn build takes 30 sec.
Keyboard. It is much better than the previous generations have. Apple has fixed it. It is not as brilliant as the old one from my MacBook Pro 2012, but still fine.
Why Air, not Pro. AFAIK, the Pro version has these differences: better battery, better mic + sound, more ports (+2). I did not find these features significant enough to pay extra. And I also dislike Touch Bar.