8 ms·

I spent two years launching tiny projects

923 points by tinyprojects 4y ago

_pdp_ 4y ago
I believe this is a good way to quickly filter through a bunch of ideas that may or may not work and stick with those that have potential. Luckily these days launching new ideas is easy. You don't need to invest too much money and time as long as you keep it simple and to the point.
munro 4y ago
> Previously I'd used this code to buy facebook.网站, only for Marky Z to snatch it back from me. Cheeky bugger. LMAO. The emoji emails is really cool though. [1] [1] https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji
- itake 4y ago
  That is odd that he would be involved with auditing duplicate domain names. You'd think FB the company would of done the snatching, not Mark Zuckerberg. neat.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I find it kind of hilarious how many domain names have been bought during these projects, renewing all that must be a full time job. Suppose he'll just make a tinydomainmanager.com or something.
softwarebeware 4y ago
As someone who has written down probably 100's of little ideas over the years, and never built even a single one of them ... I applaud you
- kokanee 4y ago
  My problem is a bit different, and I'm curious if others can relate. I constantly have a project in the works, but once I solve the interesting technical hurdles and prove that the concept works, I suddenly think of a "better idea" and never actually release anything. I've been in this cycle for the better part of a decade now. But let me tell you, if my current project works out, I'll never have to work a W2 job again!
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    I do this too, but the larger issue I face is that none of my ideas are even the slightest bit marketable. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221
  - SCUSKU 4y ago
    100% this. I have become better about not nixing projects I am working on when I hit technical walls recently. My strategy has basically become to just do the bare minimum to test whether an idea is good or not and if it sucks I will at least have fulfilled my intellectual curiosity and then I can stop being distracted by that idea. 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.
  - oliwary 4y ago
    This is exactly me. It is like I get bored as soon as I realize that I could do something, and move on to the next thing. 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-Hobbies/dp/1594866260 https://www.amazon.ca/Refuse-Choose-Interests-Passions-Hobbi...
  - frogperson 4y ago
    I once had an artist friend who was world class in his medium. I mentioned to him one day that I have a lot of unfinished code and his response has stuck with for over 20 years. 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.
- mittermayr 4y ago
  Maybe, as a suggestion, launch a Notion page with your “100 side-project ideas I never got around to making” — perhaps this will get that juices flowing?
dostojevski1 4y ago
What's the main advice you can give to a newbie, wanting to start more tiny projects himself?
techsin101 4y ago
what's the fastest tech stack or other way to go from idea to product...
- Sateeshm 4y ago
  Svelte/ Sveltekit
- Geste 4y ago
  I'd say the one you know ? For me it's react and firebase.
  - techsin101 4y ago
    i always felt firebase was a trap, but i can see how having minimal backend can help you move forward fast. i guess ill learn it properly
- asadawadia 4y ago
  git clone git@gitlab.com:asad-awadia/kotlin-server-app.git Deploy to a VPS on DO or Linode
brianmcc 4y ago
There's an undercurrent of subversive genius here, which is awesome. Great read!
klaussilveira 4y ago
I enjoy building stuff, but rarely have any ideas. Congrats on mastering the art of both!
Melatonic 4y ago
How do you get people interested in your projects both from a consumer and production standpoint? Basically I am wondering what the best ways you have found to SELL whatever project you are working on (even if say the project is technically free to the end user) and also how do you sell someone else on collaborating with you?
drewzero1 4y ago
I remember seeing snormal on here a while ago. I played around with it briefly because the idea was refreshing, but ended up not coming back for a while because the scrolling was really painful in Firefox on Android. 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_.
leros 4y ago
I was going to ask how your host your projects since lots of small hosting fees can add up. I saw a guide on your site where you use Firebase, which would explain how you keep things cheap. Is that still your strategy?
l5870uoo9y 4y ago
Properly want to vet ideas a bit before executing.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Depends on how much time you plan on putting into it and if it sounds like fun. Most people have a bit of free time to spend on side projects, even if they're silly.
  - MattGrommes 4y ago
    Or if you're going to learn something new. I do side projects when I want to learn websockets or something like that. Even when the project doesn't go anywhere, I got something out of it.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Considering the amount of success and audience he's reached with this I'd say he's done just fine.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’
- TameAntelope 4y ago
  Bad idea, for a bunch of reasons, the largest being the fact that your "vetting" process is at best a very rough facsimile of reality. Quick, iterative feedback is by far a superior approach when attempting to understand how to build a successful product.
- softwarebeware 4y ago
  I actually agree with this. There are a bunch of low-cost ways to prototype and collect user feedback. The paper notebook idea could have started with surveying people and finding if anyone actually existed who say it would be useful and they would pay for it. Or even just launch a one-page product site with an email sign-up list to get notified when the alpha version releases and wait until it reached some critical mass. All of this would have taken less investment than actually building it first lol.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
$18000 off of emoji email in kazakhstan? what the hell?
- littlevache 4y ago
  Of 700 different emoji domains, people love their cats, hearts, watermelon, rockets, smileys, etc ...
- hamiecod 4y ago
  While reading the post, I realised that it was a really great idea to say the least but I was very shocked when I saw that OP earned $18000 off the project. Although, one down-side of using email addresses which contain emojis is that some email clients do not support them.
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  Also, are domains not $5-$10 say? ~$2000 on 'tiny projects'? ...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)
toto444 4y ago
That was actually a pleasant read. I especially like the conclusion to which I can relate. > 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.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I completely agree with this, I almost have too many ideas and find combining them and building “something” usually results in filtering out the bad ones and brining the better ones to the forefront. Sometimes you just find that something “new” and better comes out of the process of trying to build “anything”.
- lancesells 4y ago
  That conclusion is really applicable to just about everything. Want to start woodworking? Start building something. Want to become a runner? Start running. Want to be a musician? Start making some songs. A lot of the initial tries will be terrible but it only gets better from there.
  - giarc 4y ago
    When I lived in an apartment building, a guy in the next building decided he wanted to learn to play the saxophone and practiced on his balcony everyday. I hate the advice "just start playing" :)
    - lancesells 4y ago
      Luckily he wasn't interested in explosives. Ha
- _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
  Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty, etc) has some advice on this: > 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-advice-for-overcoming-writers-block.html https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/read-dan-harmons-excellent-a...
dafelst 4y ago
As someone who perpetually overscopes side projects and ends up biting off more than I can reasonably chew given my free time, I really love this idea. What happens with me is I start a new project, then add a new feature here and there (because coding is fun) and end up never reaching anything close to "done" then getting into analysis paralysis of what to do next because there is so much. Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects - not that this is horrible, I do them for fun and not profit, but it would be nice to launch a few. 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?
- bodge5000 4y ago
  > Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects 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 ;)
- cjohnson318 4y ago
  This idea comes up in painting. The rule of thumb is that it's done when there's nothing left to add; when adding the next thing does not provide much more value value than it costs in terms complexity. With coding, it seems like it's much more difficult question to answer.
  - ohlookabird 4y ago
    With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
droobles 4y ago
I've seen your projects before, and I am like you where I don't like projects that depend on me creating content but I rather like technical challenges. Great write up!
hardwaresofton 4y ago
One thing I would have loved to read about is more about how they did market validation for these ideas. For a micro-bet strategy knowing which one (outside of really interesting projects that would trend on HN), it feels like market validation chops would be crucial. 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 [0]: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388399
- TameAntelope 4y ago
  The whole point, I would imagine, is to not do very much market validation, and to just build the tiny project. 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).
- criddell 4y ago
  Market validation might take more work than building a tiny project.
p5v 4y ago
Same here, and one of them made it into an actual business: https://murmel.social https://murmel.social One of these days, I need to sit down and write th origin story of Murmel, and how I came to it. Cheers!
- twox2 4y ago
  How many people pay for this?
  - p5v 4y ago
    More than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Including a few businesses that we've created tailor-made solutions for: https://blog.murmel.social/tailor-made-murmel-experience-for-your-business/ https://blog.murmel.social/tailor-made-murmel-experience-for...
drieddust 4y ago
While I want to execute the idea I am always put off by the essential administrative stuff such as user management, payment gateway linking, subscription management. Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?
- UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  Give me some of your ideas, I will do the boring stuff
- axg11 4y ago
  There are a few SaaS templates out there and services such as Memberstack that make it easier to implement the boilerplate SaaS features in Webflow. I'd also recommend just doing the boring work once and keeping that as a template for future projects.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  There are templates like SaaSPegasus for Django (costs $) that will do all of those for you. I'm sure there are open source ones of various quality.
- giarc 4y ago
  They other option is to not worry about those things. Start with a free product and see if people will even use that. Then worry about payment and subscriptions once you validate that people will use it.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Try to think about a way your product (or at least a minimal version of it) could work without "user management." Sounds counterintuitive but sometimes it is a requirement that has never really been thought about, just assumed to be necessary.
dcchambers 4y ago
Does anyone let the tax implications of launching (several) tiny projects prevent them from even starting? 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.
- strbean 4y ago
  Maybe you should start a tiny project called TinyTaxes to handle simple tax filing for such unprofitable tiny projects!
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    And then TurboTax sues you into the ground.
- chrisa 4y ago
  You can launch multiple tiny projects under a single LLC, then just pay taxes on the total income from all of them for the year - you wouldn't have to do any separate filing
- maxverse 4y ago
  A past manager once gave me great advice for situations like these when I was thinking about applying to grad school worrying about my then-job if I got in: "deal with this problem if you get in." The chances of you making a few hundred dollars in revenue by next Spring are statistically very low. And if you are persistent and talented and lucky enough to generate hundreds of dollars in revenue, you're certainly capable of paying taxes on your earnings. 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.
abhishek945 4y ago
I really like this idea of creating small projects instead of just building a startup as it would be too much work for me. Can you guys give me more examples about projects that generate money or least a lot of people use it for free.
- danenania 4y ago
  Check out the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter. You’ll find many good examples. Also Indiehackers.
reiichiroh 4y ago
This reminds me of Don Lapre’s placing tiny classified ads verbiage.
mNovak 4y ago
I've been following these, and it seems like such a fun thing to do. He seems to have been lucky that he caught on to his real product on day 1 -- semi-viral blog posts. Still I imagine it's hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.
- bemmu 4y ago
  I basically launch tiny projects full time, and have noticed that these have a power law to them. He'll mostly hit $0, with some occasional mid-hits as he has listed, but if he keeps at it I wouldn't be surprised to see one of the later projects make 10x as much as the best one now.
ishjoh 4y ago
Great projects, has already kicked off some ideas for myself. Thank you for the inspiration!
marban 4y ago
I started my professional life ~25y ago with a side project that by 2022 led to roughly 50 more side projects — The vast majority failed, some turned into 200 employee businesses, some others got acquired. In essence, I make a living out of side projects. Side projects are life.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- acuozzo 4y ago
  If you have some time, would you mind replying to my "Ask HN"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221 Thanks!
  - pflanze 4y ago
    It's too late to reply there (IIRC the commenting period closes after (about) 15d).
    - acuozzo 4y ago
      Got it. Thanks! Perhaps he can just reply here instead (if he's interested, of course).
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  What are some of your favorite stories from that life, if you don't mind me asking?
  - marban 4y ago
    I built the first Android Twitter client, sold that to Idealab* and given our huge market share (~40% IIRC ) pitched them the idea to build our own Twitter clone in order to move those users over. Twitter took notice and locked all our apps which eventually kicked off the anti-third-party tendency that we see today. Good times. * https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-and-mass-distribution-to-follow/ https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-a...
immigrantheart 4y ago
How do you even find ideas for these?
- dkasper 4y ago
  IMO tiny ideas like this are mostly for fun and learning, they don't need to be unique. Build another take on a blog or a game or utility or whatever you like to do online, but put your own spin on it.
- muttled 4y ago
  Speaking from personal experience: just seeing what unsolved needs you have yields a lot of ideas. I had coworkers who would go to email something confidential to someone and click the wrong auto-complete contact and then we had a full-blown crisis. I thought "is there a way to stop that without the user hating me?" and that's how I got the idea for https://jiminyclick.com https://jiminyclick.com
  - immigrantheart 4y ago
    Do people want to pay for that?
    - muttled 4y ago
      Yep. It costs a lot of money every time they make that mistake.
m3047 4y ago
Ummm. Interesting about mailoji. Not actually legit according to ICANN to use "non collating" punycode or multiple languages in an ICANN-controlled domain: you can't register them. 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".
pnelson 4y ago
This is awesome and what I initially set out to do but always found a way to talk myself out of it. I dream big. I found a project to stick to "completion" but it took me two years to build alone. I've only lost money but it's been a wild ride of an experience. This tiny project approach sounds like a lot of fun and conveniently my project will help me down that path while I try to market my work.
jonathanberger 4y ago
I love this post. Thanks Ben. It's especially generous to share pageviews and revenue numbers which are so frequently kept private. I didn't though understand this point from the post: > 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?
galactus 4y ago
I loved this post. Congratulations, really cool tiny projects, I'm jealous.
mft_ 4y ago
Have you written anywhere about the technology you use underneath - from languages to libraries to hosting? 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.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  Pick what you know, that way you can focus on the project.
- abrookewood 4y ago
  Haven't tried this yet, but Oracle have a very generous free tier: https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/#always-free https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/#always-free
- aqme28 4y ago
  Build on the easiest thing possible (probably Heroku or a competitor). If you have to worry scale and how you'll pay for it then, well that's a good problem to have. Most projects won't get to that point.
jjice 4y ago
I feel like having a bunch of tiny projects is probably a great way to learn a ton. I've slowed down on personal projects since graduation, but focusing on something tiny might be what I need to hear/do to get back into learning some new stuff. Good on the author/OP!
spicyramen_ 4y ago
Amazing advise, always been thinking of my next great idea and never have time to complete it
alin23 4y ago
I started doing the same but with macOS apps: https://lowtechguys.com https://lowtechguys.com 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 https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Lowtech [2] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/LowtechPro https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/LowtechPro
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Any chance you could add licenses and maybe a screenshot to each of those repos?
  - alin23 4y ago
    I haven’t open sourced them in that sense. I don’t want to maintain them for others to use. I just shared the source code for inspiration.
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  rcmd looks great. Going to give that a try. Nice work!
  - alin23 4y ago
    Thanks! Hope you find it as useful as I did :)
blobbers 4y ago
Very cool that you're launching projects! 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.
liorben-david 4y ago
Loved this! Being able to limit scope and just build is a skill that too often gets lost
Sinidir 4y ago
General Question for people who do these tiny projects, which might make some money. Do you register a company for this? How do you deal with taxes if you made a small amount of money from them?
- danvoell 4y ago
  Work off an existing Llc. Spin it out if you have traction.
buf 4y ago
I also do the same as the author, but I only build websites with a clear monetization model. Every project I've done after my first successful one as been in an adjacent audience. Doing roughly $700k revenue yearly right now over the 2 main projects. Hopefully with a 3rd coming this summer. https://siliconvict.com/projects https://siliconvict.com/projects
- keyle 4y ago
  Wow, I love the honesty within that page. Keep up the good work!
- nukst 4y ago
  As someone who wants to be a software developer one day, I took notes from the 'How to hire actually good engineers' post. Honestly, I lack code and I'm gonna fix that.
- RupurtMurloc 4y ago
  Were you really a convict?
  - buf 4y ago
    Yes, for 17 years.
- FL33TW00D 4y ago
  700k solo?
- willemh 4y ago
  I really like this basic list of all your projects and links to them. You've got quite the repertoire. It's inspired me to do something similar, thanks for sharing.
6510 4y ago
I did this for a while (most never shipped) but I had a different idea that I haven't tried which is to set a small monthly budget and have others develop and maintain the tiny project. That way you get a whole different game to play. Some tasks are much cheaper than others and hiring experience is a lot more efficient than learning a new skill yourself. 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.
krick 4y ago
How do I start coming up with all these actionable ideas? I mean, not that these are great, but it really doesn't matter for me, implementing them does. It just makes me feel ashamed for my lack of industriousness.
- DantesKite 4y ago
  The author addresses your question at the end. > 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.
  - krick 4y ago
    It doesn't really address the question. There's no such thing as "something, anything". I mean, there obviously is for the author, but that's exactly the difference between our mindsets, which is exactly the problem. I know how to build a concrete thing, most of the time. I have no idea, how to build "something", most of the time. I mean, there always are exceptions and sometimes I can come up with something, but that obviously happens rarely enough, compared to the OP.
    - abrookewood 4y ago
      Why don't you just copy something he's already done? His point is that you just need to start.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  The world is full of interesting people doing interesting things, who come with interesting problems, who don't even know there might be a software solution for it. 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.
dasz 4y ago
What I found interesting is the iterative process. Failure is simply experience you carry forward to inform future decisions. Its not necessarily a permanent judgement that cripples you.
textninja 4y ago
This is very inspiring, thank you! Having never done it, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get your ideas out the door. It looks like you found the perfect tempo and scope, tiny projects rock.
sagarpatil 4y ago
I’m interested in finding out how did you come up the ideas? I’m trying to come up with ideas and drawing a blank.
- ngshiheng 4y ago
  The author mentioned it in the conclusion:”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.”
yingnansong 4y ago
Many thanks for sharing your stories with us! Very impressive and inspiring.
corderop 4y ago
Haven't you have problems with emojis emails? They are supported everywhere?
corderop 4y ago
Always, when I see someone doing this projects I wonder how easily is to do legal stuff with projects that don't offer you a high revenue. 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?
newbie578 4y ago
Anyone got any tips on how you write down your ideas? Physical pen an paper, digital, excel sheet, or word?

923 points by tinyprojects 4y ago

I believe this is a good way to quickly filter through a bunch of ideas that may or may not work and stick with those that have potential. Luckily these days launching new ideas is easy. You don't need to invest too much money and time as long as you keep it simple and to the point.

munro 4y ago

> Previously I'd used this code to buy facebook.网站, only for Marky Z to snatch it back from me. Cheeky bugger. LMAO. The emoji emails is really cool though. [1] [1] https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji

itake 4y ago
That is odd that he would be involved with auditing duplicate domain names. You'd think FB the company would of done the snatching, not Mark Zuckerberg. neat.
moffkalast 4y ago
I find it kind of hilarious how many domain names have been bought during these projects, renewing all that must be a full time job. Suppose he'll just make a tinydomainmanager.com or something.

softwarebeware 4y ago

As someone who has written down probably 100's of little ideas over the years, and never built even a single one of them ... I applaud you

kokanee 4y ago
My problem is a bit different, and I'm curious if others can relate. I constantly have a project in the works, but once I solve the interesting technical hurdles and prove that the concept works, I suddenly think of a "better idea" and never actually release anything. I've been in this cycle for the better part of a decade now. But let me tell you, if my current project works out, I'll never have to work a W2 job again!
- acuozzo 4y ago
  I do this too, but the larger issue I face is that none of my ideas are even the slightest bit marketable. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221
- SCUSKU 4y ago
  100% this. I have become better about not nixing projects I am working on when I hit technical walls recently. My strategy has basically become to just do the bare minimum to test whether an idea is good or not and if it sucks I will at least have fulfilled my intellectual curiosity and then I can stop being distracted by that idea. 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.
- oliwary 4y ago
  This is exactly me. It is like I get bored as soon as I realize that I could do something, and move on to the next thing. 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-Hobbies/dp/1594866260 https://www.amazon.ca/Refuse-Choose-Interests-Passions-Hobbi...
- frogperson 4y ago
  I once had an artist friend who was world class in his medium. I mentioned to him one day that I have a lot of unfinished code and his response has stuck with for over 20 years. 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.
mittermayr 4y ago
Maybe, as a suggestion, launch a Notion page with your “100 side-project ideas I never got around to making” — perhaps this will get that juices flowing?

dostojevski1 4y ago

What's the main advice you can give to a newbie, wanting to start more tiny projects himself?

techsin101 4y ago

what's the fastest tech stack or other way to go from idea to product...

Sateeshm 4y ago
Svelte/ Sveltekit
Geste 4y ago
I'd say the one you know ? For me it's react and firebase.
- techsin101 4y ago
  i always felt firebase was a trap, but i can see how having minimal backend can help you move forward fast. i guess ill learn it properly
asadawadia 4y ago
git clone git@gitlab.com:asad-awadia/kotlin-server-app.git Deploy to a VPS on DO or Linode

brianmcc 4y ago

There's an undercurrent of subversive genius here, which is awesome. Great read!

klaussilveira 4y ago

I enjoy building stuff, but rarely have any ideas. Congrats on mastering the art of both!

Melatonic 4y ago

How do you get people interested in your projects both from a consumer and production standpoint? Basically I am wondering what the best ways you have found to SELL whatever project you are working on (even if say the project is technically free to the end user) and also how do you sell someone else on collaborating with you?

drewzero1 4y ago

I remember seeing snormal on here a while ago. I played around with it briefly because the idea was refreshing, but ended up not coming back for a while because the scrolling was really painful in Firefox on Android. 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_.

leros 4y ago

I was going to ask how your host your projects since lots of small hosting fees can add up. I saw a guide on your site where you use Firebase, which would explain how you keep things cheap. Is that still your strategy?

l5870uoo9y 4y ago

Properly want to vet ideas a bit before executing.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Depends on how much time you plan on putting into it and if it sounds like fun. Most people have a bit of free time to spend on side projects, even if they're silly.
- MattGrommes 4y ago
  Or if you're going to learn something new. I do side projects when I want to learn websockets or something like that. Even when the project doesn't go anywhere, I got something out of it.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Considering the amount of success and audience he's reached with this I'd say he's done just fine.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’
TameAntelope 4y ago
Bad idea, for a bunch of reasons, the largest being the fact that your "vetting" process is at best a very rough facsimile of reality. Quick, iterative feedback is by far a superior approach when attempting to understand how to build a successful product.
softwarebeware 4y ago
I actually agree with this. There are a bunch of low-cost ways to prototype and collect user feedback. The paper notebook idea could have started with surveying people and finding if anyone actually existed who say it would be useful and they would pay for it. Or even just launch a one-page product site with an email sign-up list to get notified when the alpha version releases and wait until it reached some critical mass. All of this would have taken less investment than actually building it first lol.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

$18000 off of emoji email in kazakhstan? what the hell?

littlevache 4y ago
Of 700 different emoji domains, people love their cats, hearts, watermelon, rockets, smileys, etc ...
hamiecod 4y ago
While reading the post, I realised that it was a really great idea to say the least but I was very shocked when I saw that OP earned $18000 off the project. Although, one down-side of using email addresses which contain emojis is that some email clients do not support them.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Also, are domains not $5-$10 say? ~$2000 on 'tiny projects'? ...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)

toto444 4y ago

That was actually a pleasant read. I especially like the conclusion to which I can relate. > 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.

samwillis 4y ago
I completely agree with this, I almost have too many ideas and find combining them and building “something” usually results in filtering out the bad ones and brining the better ones to the forefront. Sometimes you just find that something “new” and better comes out of the process of trying to build “anything”.
lancesells 4y ago
That conclusion is really applicable to just about everything. Want to start woodworking? Start building something. Want to become a runner? Start running. Want to be a musician? Start making some songs. A lot of the initial tries will be terrible but it only gets better from there.
- giarc 4y ago
  When I lived in an apartment building, a guy in the next building decided he wanted to learn to play the saxophone and practiced on his balcony everyday. I hate the advice "just start playing" :)
  - lancesells 4y ago
    Luckily he wasn't interested in explosives. Ha
_whiteCaps_ 4y ago
Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty, etc) has some advice on this: > 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-advice-for-overcoming-writers-block.html https://www.vulture.com/2016/11/read-dan-harmons-excellent-a...

dafelst 4y ago

As someone who perpetually overscopes side projects and ends up biting off more than I can reasonably chew given my free time, I really love this idea. What happens with me is I start a new project, then add a new feature here and there (because coding is fun) and end up never reaching anything close to "done" then getting into analysis paralysis of what to do next because there is so much. Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects - not that this is horrible, I do them for fun and not profit, but it would be nice to launch a few. 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?

bodge5000 4y ago
> Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects 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 ;)
cjohnson318 4y ago
This idea comes up in painting. The rule of thumb is that it's done when there's nothing left to add; when adding the next thing does not provide much more value value than it costs in terms complexity. With coding, it seems like it's much more difficult question to answer.
- ohlookabird 4y ago
  With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

droobles 4y ago

I've seen your projects before, and I am like you where I don't like projects that depend on me creating content but I rather like technical challenges. Great write up!

hardwaresofton 4y ago

One thing I would have loved to read about is more about how they did market validation for these ideas. For a micro-bet strategy knowing which one (outside of really interesting projects that would trend on HN), it feels like market validation chops would be crucial. 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 [0]: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388399

TameAntelope 4y ago
The whole point, I would imagine, is to not do very much market validation, and to just build the tiny project. 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).
criddell 4y ago
Market validation might take more work than building a tiny project.

p5v 4y ago

Same here, and one of them made it into an actual business: https://murmel.social https://murmel.social One of these days, I need to sit down and write th origin story of Murmel, and how I came to it. Cheers!

twox2 4y ago
How many people pay for this?
- p5v 4y ago
  More than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Including a few businesses that we've created tailor-made solutions for: https://blog.murmel.social/tailor-made-murmel-experience-for-your-business/ https://blog.murmel.social/tailor-made-murmel-experience-for...

drieddust 4y ago

While I want to execute the idea I am always put off by the essential administrative stuff such as user management, payment gateway linking, subscription management. Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?

UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
Give me some of your ideas, I will do the boring stuff
axg11 4y ago
There are a few SaaS templates out there and services such as Memberstack that make it easier to implement the boilerplate SaaS features in Webflow. I'd also recommend just doing the boring work once and keeping that as a template for future projects.
reducesuffering 4y ago
There are templates like SaaSPegasus for Django (costs $) that will do all of those for you. I'm sure there are open source ones of various quality.
giarc 4y ago
They other option is to not worry about those things. Start with a free product and see if people will even use that. Then worry about payment and subscriptions once you validate that people will use it.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Try to think about a way your product (or at least a minimal version of it) could work without "user management." Sounds counterintuitive but sometimes it is a requirement that has never really been thought about, just assumed to be necessary.

dcchambers 4y ago

Does anyone let the tax implications of launching (several) tiny projects prevent them from even starting? 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.

strbean 4y ago
Maybe you should start a tiny project called TinyTaxes to handle simple tax filing for such unprofitable tiny projects!
- moffkalast 4y ago
  And then TurboTax sues you into the ground.
chrisa 4y ago
You can launch multiple tiny projects under a single LLC, then just pay taxes on the total income from all of them for the year - you wouldn't have to do any separate filing
maxverse 4y ago
A past manager once gave me great advice for situations like these when I was thinking about applying to grad school worrying about my then-job if I got in: "deal with this problem if you get in." The chances of you making a few hundred dollars in revenue by next Spring are statistically very low. And if you are persistent and talented and lucky enough to generate hundreds of dollars in revenue, you're certainly capable of paying taxes on your earnings. 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.

abhishek945 4y ago

I really like this idea of creating small projects instead of just building a startup as it would be too much work for me. Can you guys give me more examples about projects that generate money or least a lot of people use it for free.

danenania 4y ago
Check out the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter. You’ll find many good examples. Also Indiehackers.

reiichiroh 4y ago

This reminds me of Don Lapre’s placing tiny classified ads verbiage.

mNovak 4y ago

I've been following these, and it seems like such a fun thing to do. He seems to have been lucky that he caught on to his real product on day 1 -- semi-viral blog posts. Still I imagine it's hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.

bemmu 4y ago
I basically launch tiny projects full time, and have noticed that these have a power law to them. He'll mostly hit $0, with some occasional mid-hits as he has listed, but if he keeps at it I wouldn't be surprised to see one of the later projects make 10x as much as the best one now.

ishjoh 4y ago

Great projects, has already kicked off some ideas for myself. Thank you for the inspiration!

marban 4y ago

I started my professional life ~25y ago with a side project that by 2022 led to roughly 50 more side projects — The vast majority failed, some turned into 200 employee businesses, some others got acquired. In essence, I make a living out of side projects. Side projects are life.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
acuozzo 4y ago
If you have some time, would you mind replying to my "Ask HN"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221 Thanks!
- pflanze 4y ago
  It's too late to reply there (IIRC the commenting period closes after (about) 15d).
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    Got it. Thanks! Perhaps he can just reply here instead (if he's interested, of course).
bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
What are some of your favorite stories from that life, if you don't mind me asking?
- marban 4y ago
  I built the first Android Twitter client, sold that to Idealab* and given our huge market share (~40% IIRC ) pitched them the idea to build our own Twitter clone in order to move those users over. Twitter took notice and locked all our apps which eventually kicked off the anti-third-party tendency that we see today. Good times. * https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-and-mass-distribution-to-follow/ https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-a...

immigrantheart 4y ago

How do you even find ideas for these?

dkasper 4y ago
IMO tiny ideas like this are mostly for fun and learning, they don't need to be unique. Build another take on a blog or a game or utility or whatever you like to do online, but put your own spin on it.
muttled 4y ago
Speaking from personal experience: just seeing what unsolved needs you have yields a lot of ideas. I had coworkers who would go to email something confidential to someone and click the wrong auto-complete contact and then we had a full-blown crisis. I thought "is there a way to stop that without the user hating me?" and that's how I got the idea for https://jiminyclick.com https://jiminyclick.com
- immigrantheart 4y ago
  Do people want to pay for that?
  - muttled 4y ago
    Yep. It costs a lot of money every time they make that mistake.

m3047 4y ago

Ummm. Interesting about mailoji. Not actually legit according to ICANN to use "non collating" punycode or multiple languages in an ICANN-controlled domain: you can't register them. 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".

pnelson 4y ago

This is awesome and what I initially set out to do but always found a way to talk myself out of it. I dream big. I found a project to stick to "completion" but it took me two years to build alone. I've only lost money but it's been a wild ride of an experience. This tiny project approach sounds like a lot of fun and conveniently my project will help me down that path while I try to market my work.

jonathanberger 4y ago

I love this post. Thanks Ben. It's especially generous to share pageviews and revenue numbers which are so frequently kept private. I didn't though understand this point from the post: > 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?

galactus 4y ago

I loved this post. Congratulations, really cool tiny projects, I'm jealous.

mft_ 4y ago

Have you written anywhere about the technology you use underneath - from languages to libraries to hosting? 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.

cinntaile 4y ago
Pick what you know, that way you can focus on the project.
abrookewood 4y ago
Haven't tried this yet, but Oracle have a very generous free tier: https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/#always-free https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/#always-free
aqme28 4y ago
Build on the easiest thing possible (probably Heroku or a competitor). If you have to worry scale and how you'll pay for it then, well that's a good problem to have. Most projects won't get to that point.

jjice 4y ago

I feel like having a bunch of tiny projects is probably a great way to learn a ton. I've slowed down on personal projects since graduation, but focusing on something tiny might be what I need to hear/do to get back into learning some new stuff. Good on the author/OP!

spicyramen_ 4y ago

Amazing advise, always been thinking of my next great idea and never have time to complete it

alin23 4y ago

I started doing the same but with macOS apps: https://lowtechguys.com https://lowtechguys.com 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 https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Lowtech [2] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/LowtechPro https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/LowtechPro

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Any chance you could add licenses and maybe a screenshot to each of those repos?
- alin23 4y ago
  I haven’t open sourced them in that sense. I don’t want to maintain them for others to use. I just shared the source code for inspiration.
xwowsersx 4y ago
rcmd looks great. Going to give that a try. Nice work!
- alin23 4y ago
  Thanks! Hope you find it as useful as I did :)

blobbers 4y ago

Very cool that you're launching projects! 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.

liorben-david 4y ago

Loved this! Being able to limit scope and just build is a skill that too often gets lost

Sinidir 4y ago

General Question for people who do these tiny projects, which might make some money. Do you register a company for this? How do you deal with taxes if you made a small amount of money from them?

danvoell 4y ago
Work off an existing Llc. Spin it out if you have traction.

buf 4y ago

I also do the same as the author, but I only build websites with a clear monetization model. Every project I've done after my first successful one as been in an adjacent audience. Doing roughly $700k revenue yearly right now over the 2 main projects. Hopefully with a 3rd coming this summer. https://siliconvict.com/projects https://siliconvict.com/projects

keyle 4y ago
Wow, I love the honesty within that page. Keep up the good work!
nukst 4y ago
As someone who wants to be a software developer one day, I took notes from the 'How to hire actually good engineers' post. Honestly, I lack code and I'm gonna fix that.
RupurtMurloc 4y ago
Were you really a convict?
- buf 4y ago
  Yes, for 17 years.
FL33TW00D 4y ago
700k solo?
willemh 4y ago
I really like this basic list of all your projects and links to them. You've got quite the repertoire. It's inspired me to do something similar, thanks for sharing.

6510 4y ago

I did this for a while (most never shipped) but I had a different idea that I haven't tried which is to set a small monthly budget and have others develop and maintain the tiny project. That way you get a whole different game to play. Some tasks are much cheaper than others and hiring experience is a lot more efficient than learning a new skill yourself. 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.

krick 4y ago

How do I start coming up with all these actionable ideas? I mean, not that these are great, but it really doesn't matter for me, implementing them does. It just makes me feel ashamed for my lack of industriousness.

DantesKite 4y ago
The author addresses your question at the end. > 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.
- krick 4y ago
  It doesn't really address the question. There's no such thing as "something, anything". I mean, there obviously is for the author, but that's exactly the difference between our mindsets, which is exactly the problem. I know how to build a concrete thing, most of the time. I have no idea, how to build "something", most of the time. I mean, there always are exceptions and sometimes I can come up with something, but that obviously happens rarely enough, compared to the OP.
  - abrookewood 4y ago
    Why don't you just copy something he's already done? His point is that you just need to start.
MrVandemar 4y ago
The world is full of interesting people doing interesting things, who come with interesting problems, who don't even know there might be a software solution for it. 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.

dasz 4y ago

What I found interesting is the iterative process. Failure is simply experience you carry forward to inform future decisions. Its not necessarily a permanent judgement that cripples you.

textninja 4y ago

This is very inspiring, thank you! Having never done it, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get your ideas out the door. It looks like you found the perfect tempo and scope, tiny projects rock.

sagarpatil 4y ago

I’m interested in finding out how did you come up the ideas? I’m trying to come up with ideas and drawing a blank.

ngshiheng 4y ago
The author mentioned it in the conclusion:”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.”

yingnansong 4y ago

Many thanks for sharing your stories with us! Very impressive and inspiring.

corderop 4y ago

Haven't you have problems with emojis emails? They are supported everywhere?

corderop 4y ago

Always, when I see someone doing this projects I wonder how easily is to do legal stuff with projects that don't offer you a high revenue. 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?

newbie578 4y ago

Anyone got any tips on how you write down your ideas? Physical pen an paper, digital, excel sheet, or word?