4 ms·

There is a thriving community / ecosystem of people doing side projects. It is big enough to support conferences. I'm making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to

by patio11 11y ago

There is a thriving community / ecosystem of people doing side projects. It is big enough to support conferences. I'm making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to Vegas to attend Microconf, where ~600 people selling software over the Internet are going to be shooting the breeze and talking conversion rates, email marketing, and Slack integrations. As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.) It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around. It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20. Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment. Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)

herval 11y ago
I think comparing the "web 2.0" era (2006+) with magazine distribution is a bit too distant - but imho, things have really been getting too competitive as of late, and that explains a bit of a reduction on the number of side projects. My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since 2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness (is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very addictive gatekeepers. My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field (QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why. It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.
- eloff 11y ago
  I think in mobile apps there's no doubt it has gotten very crowded with people tripping over each other in a race to the bottom. Mostly free with some freemium/ad based/in-app pruchase based models now.
svmegatron 11y ago
I agree 100%. It has gotten easier to turn a side project into a business. My take is that it has gotten easier enough that fewer folks are pursuing VC, opting to bootstrap instead. It's not that fewer side projects are happening - more side projects are happening. Fewer of them need VC money to succeed/scale/generate meaningful revenue, so VCs are seeing fewer side projects.

by patio11 11y ago

herval 11y ago

I think comparing the "web 2.0" era (2006+) with magazine distribution is a bit too distant - but imho, things have really been getting too competitive as of late, and that explains a bit of a reduction on the number of side projects. My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since 2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness (is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very addictive gatekeepers. My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field (QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why. It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.

eloff 11y ago
I think in mobile apps there's no doubt it has gotten very crowded with people tripping over each other in a race to the bottom. Mostly free with some freemium/ad based/in-app pruchase based models now.

svmegatron 11y ago

I agree 100%. It has gotten easier to turn a side project into a business. My take is that it has gotten easier enough that fewer folks are pursuing VC, opting to bootstrap instead. It's not that fewer side projects are happening - more side projects are happening. Fewer of them need VC money to succeed/scale/generate meaningful revenue, so VCs are seeing fewer side projects.