8 ms·

All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier

by herval 5y ago

All these have a thing in common: he gave up because they weren’t immediate successes. Some even had traction: 5 users in 3 months isn’t the incredible outlier story you hear time and time again, but it’s 5 people you can talk to, listen to what they want (and why they signed up anyway), then you gear up from there. We’re too conditioned to believe in the stories of immediate success and MVPs making tens of thousands of dollars immediately. Those are exceedingly rare, and you might be able to pull it off when you have a massive audience. Jumping from project to project won’t net you that audience, so you end up spending time in circles… and earning $0.

martincmartin 5y ago
Reminds me of "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it." by Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-takes-ten-years-get-used-to-it/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...
- tppiotrowski 5y ago
  https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/06/Notes-Installed-Base.gif?resize=341%2C220&ssl=1 https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/... This chart is a good example of having no traction for years and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an overnight success.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    "no traction" lol. After 2 years that chart shows 35k users. That's only no traction in relation to the final outcome. Imagine this was money instead, where the final result was $1B and after the first 2 years it was only $1M. $1M is only "no traction" in relation to $1B. In absolute terms it's pretty damn good.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  This has been my experience. I'm working on an app that will be released in the next few months (we don't have a definite ship date, yet). It's based on two servers that I wrote. One, I wrote eleven or twelve years ago, and has become a world standard; but only in the last three years. Since it's a specialized demographic, the numbers are quite small, for "world standard." The other server is one that I wrote, about four years ago. It took me seven months. It's a very good general-purpose application server. I wrote it for practice, but it's also ideal for the app I'm writing. I've been working on the frontend app for over a year. It's really, really good. I deliberately took my time, because we went through a lot of "MVP" stuff, during its development. The rest of the team seems to think it will take the world by storm, when it's released, but I don't think it will. That's fine with me. I don't mind a slow burn. I've written software that lasts decades.
  - pm 5y ago
    I'm working on social software at the moment, and when I explain it to potential users, they seem to love the concept (which gives me confidence), but truthfully I don't know if will live up to expectations. I've found it best to downplay any potential success in my own mind so that I'm not disappointed if it doesn't take off. I hope your launch goes well; your comments are always insightful and glad to have someone of your experience around the traps.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Thanks. I think that the general Quality of the app will be phenomenal. I spend a great deal of time “polishing the fenders.” This is stuff like making sure that popovers are pixel-perfect, Dark Mode is supported, it’s localizable and accessible, and has various fast animations for “flourish,” etc. We know the target demographic well, and all indications are, that it will be well-received. But I don’t think it has much monetary potential, which I feel is fine. We’re a nonprofit, anyway. It will be funny, because a free app will have a level of refinement that leaves many money-making apps in a cloud of dust. Time will tell. More will be revealed…
    - tpetry 5y ago
- Gigachad 5y ago
  This seems true of small scale things but companies like google have been able to release good software on the first try. I don't remember it vividly but I used google docs and drive on the first year and I don't remember having a single issue with them and I can't even think of anything it does now almost 10 years later that I would have wanted back then.
  - kahon65 5y ago
    Wtf your pseudo dude, "Gigachad"?
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gigachad https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gigachad
- xunn0026 5y ago
  It would be an absolute disaster if people would stick to their dead-end side projects for 10 years before calling it quits.
ezekg 5y ago
Completely agree. Good ideas are abandoned too often because of bad advice from influencers and unrealistic expectations. I actually wrote about this a few weeks ago ^1. ^1: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/ https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/
ChuckMcM 5y ago
So much this sentiment. I ask people I mentor "why do you measure yourself in dollars?" and they often respond with something like "all the successful people I admire are rich." or something along those lines. Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator. Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.
- rahimiali 5y ago
  > Money is a 'first derivative' of success Does that mean that even if my success stagnates at “quite successful”, I make no money at all? That doesn’t make sense to me. How would that work?
  - Buge 5y ago
    Yeah I think it would be the other way around: money would be the integral of success.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One the one hand, I'd observe that most people's side-projects, aka hobbies, were never expected to make money. Short of opening a shop your pottery or whatever wasjust something you did. On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
  - jabl 5y ago
    Well, it's also kind of privileged to expect to have such a "side hustle" that you enjoy doing, and that generates income. Sure, people used to have side hustles back in the day, but maybe more like weeding your potato plants after a back-breaking day at the factory.
  - 5y ago
kjksf 5y ago
I don't think "just stick with it" is a good advice in general and especially not for his projects. He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal metronome and jobs website. BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5 people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of non-existing product. Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first place. With jobs websites you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites. Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for. They are also extremely competitive. The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing. There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid. High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Yep! You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your ideas)! I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then file them away, however. Things can change. Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't have any more to work. Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that. Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate more capital to "do it right". You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products because of high competition you won't likely match.
- redisman 5y ago
  Yeah the first step if you want to be successful on some metric is to type “time tracker” into AppStore search and see that is completely hopeless and pick something else that doesn’t already have 100+ professional and commercial implementations
codegeek 5y ago
Yea if you read the article, it is actually more like 5 side projects in 4 years (took a 2 year break). That is way too many projects to try for real results. Nothing to take away from the effort and learnings though. I commend people who try to build anything. However, most people give up too quickly. It takes months or even a year or 2 to really get traction on any project if you want to be serious and I am not talking VC funded but bootstrapped. Yes the risk of doing something for 2 years is big but you need to do a lot more customer discovery/validation than just 2-3 months before you give up. If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5 projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few months on it. That is why software developers are not all entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff, we don't know what to do with it.
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  Also, only one of the side projects actually broke any ground at all. Mostly they were abandoned after less than a month. A couple of weeks of part time desk research is not a side hustle. It’s simply due diligence. Disappointed that the game didn’t go ahead as it’s something I’d definitely play. Reminds me of x-battle.
pytlicek 5y ago
Absolutely agree with you, 5 users here, 5 there and you will have hundreds in 1 year, 500 after 2 years and so on... This happened to me with my side project hostbeat.info. I have started it bcs some of my friends wanted this kind of service. Then I have realized that I can do it as a multi-user SaaS. I was expecting thousands of users in the first month, still don't know why :) (perhaps I made it free of charge?) Made a post on 3-4 forums/discussions, etc... scaled my server to handle load almost to 10.000 daily active users. And.... 2 registrations happened in the first month. This was not expected and hit me hard. But later on, as you write, it started to gain some traction. One user per week, 2, then 3 users. Sometimes 2 new per day, the other day or week or month nothing. Sometimes I am surprised that some big player on the IT market has registered and is also actively using it (2 largest telco operators in DE and AT fe.) I don't care anymore about profit or userbase. I'm happy with it as is and sometimes users are sending me emails and thanking me for such service.
- conradfr 5y ago
  So, do your friends use it? :)
  - pytlicek 5y ago
    Yes, they do. I did admin work a long time ago and mostly it was planned to have information about the connection, in case they have a dynamic IP. It works reliably to this day.
soylentnewsorg 5y ago
I think the common thing here is not giving up w/o immediate success. That is a very good idea sometimes. Homer Simpson built a goofy car, people were exposed to it and he got negative feedback, and he rightly abandoned it. Some projects are a bad idea, you don't know they are, and once you find out they are, you absolutely should not keep wasting resources due to the sunk cost of wishful thinking. His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses. He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar. The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons. It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group. So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.
Dylan16807 5y ago
After a certain amount of work I think it stops really being a side project, even if it's not where you make money.
jhoechtl 5y ago
The question is if he created any public value with this side projects. Another example for UBI? [UBI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income)
tasogare 5y ago
Also contrary to what is often professed here, a landing page is not a product. If you lure me to your website and there is no download and only a textbox to extract a personal information from me to spam me in the future, you just lost my present and future respect. Don't waste people's time like this please.
pjc50 5y ago
This makes me feel better about 0 side projects earning $0 in 20 years: I've come out ahead of people who are "underwater".
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
When it comes to the time management app, he did exactly the right thing: created a mailing list, found out there is no market, left it alone. Generally 'just making an app' does not produce a business, and has not for the past 10 years at least. Games are a very special business, and there is no science as to what makes a game compelling: flappy bird was created in a weekend and made millions, some million dollar projects make nothing. I think that you have to be very passionate about games and have deep understanding of gameplay to even compete.
silexia 5y ago
Counterpoint: He is trying to compete in sexy, very competitive industries. I launched a landscaping business with a partner four months ago and we already have over $100,000 in revenue.

by herval 5y ago

martincmartin 5y ago

Reminds me of "Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it." by Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-takes-ten-years-get-used-to-it/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...

tppiotrowski 5y ago
https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2003/06/Notes-Installed-Base.gif?resize=341%2C220&ssl=1 https://i1.wp.com/www.joelonsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/... This chart is a good example of having no traction for years and then growing exponentially. We usually hear about a company once it hits the inflection point so it seems like an overnight success.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  "no traction" lol. After 2 years that chart shows 35k users. That's only no traction in relation to the final outcome. Imagine this was money instead, where the final result was $1B and after the first 2 years it was only $1M. $1M is only "no traction" in relation to $1B. In absolute terms it's pretty damn good.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This has been my experience. I'm working on an app that will be released in the next few months (we don't have a definite ship date, yet). It's based on two servers that I wrote. One, I wrote eleven or twelve years ago, and has become a world standard; but only in the last three years. Since it's a specialized demographic, the numbers are quite small, for "world standard." The other server is one that I wrote, about four years ago. It took me seven months. It's a very good general-purpose application server. I wrote it for practice, but it's also ideal for the app I'm writing. I've been working on the frontend app for over a year. It's really, really good. I deliberately took my time, because we went through a lot of "MVP" stuff, during its development. The rest of the team seems to think it will take the world by storm, when it's released, but I don't think it will. That's fine with me. I don't mind a slow burn. I've written software that lasts decades.
- pm 5y ago
  I'm working on social software at the moment, and when I explain it to potential users, they seem to love the concept (which gives me confidence), but truthfully I don't know if will live up to expectations. I've found it best to downplay any potential success in my own mind so that I'm not disappointed if it doesn't take off. I hope your launch goes well; your comments are always insightful and glad to have someone of your experience around the traps.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Thanks. I think that the general Quality of the app will be phenomenal. I spend a great deal of time “polishing the fenders.” This is stuff like making sure that popovers are pixel-perfect, Dark Mode is supported, it’s localizable and accessible, and has various fast animations for “flourish,” etc. We know the target demographic well, and all indications are, that it will be well-received. But I don’t think it has much monetary potential, which I feel is fine. We’re a nonprofit, anyway. It will be funny, because a free app will have a level of refinement that leaves many money-making apps in a cloud of dust. Time will tell. More will be revealed…
  - tpetry 5y ago
Gigachad 5y ago
This seems true of small scale things but companies like google have been able to release good software on the first try. I don't remember it vividly but I used google docs and drive on the first year and I don't remember having a single issue with them and I can't even think of anything it does now almost 10 years later that I would have wanted back then.
- kahon65 5y ago
  Wtf your pseudo dude, "Gigachad"?
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gigachad https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/gigachad
xunn0026 5y ago
It would be an absolute disaster if people would stick to their dead-end side projects for 10 years before calling it quits.

ezekg 5y ago

Completely agree. Good ideas are abandoned too often because of bad advice from influencers and unrealistic expectations. I actually wrote about this a few weeks ago ^1. ^1: https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/ https://keygen.sh/blog/5-things-ive-learned-in-5-years/

ChuckMcM 5y ago

So much this sentiment. I ask people I mentor "why do you measure yourself in dollars?" and they often respond with something like "all the successful people I admire are rich." or something along those lines. Money is a 'first derivative' of success and a lagging indicator. Measure yourself by what you learn not by what you earn and you will be sticking to projects longer because the payoff will be in what they are teaching you. Everything you learn gets you that much closer to a side project that brings in money as well as experience. Why? Because you'll know what is important and what is not, you will know how things waste money and how to avoid them, you will know what metrics are important and what they mean.

rahimiali 5y ago
> Money is a 'first derivative' of success Does that mean that even if my success stagnates at “quite successful”, I make no money at all? That doesn’t make sense to me. How would that work?
- Buge 5y ago
  Yeah I think it would be the other way around: money would be the integral of success.
ghaff 5y ago
One the one hand, I'd observe that most people's side-projects, aka hobbies, were never expected to make money. Short of opening a shop your pottery or whatever wasjust something you did. On the other hand I recognize it's somewhat privileged to just shrug off making money with "side hustles."
- jabl 5y ago
  Well, it's also kind of privileged to expect to have such a "side hustle" that you enjoy doing, and that generates income. Sure, people used to have side hustles back in the day, but maybe more like weeding your potato plants after a back-breaking day at the factory.
- 5y ago

kjksf 5y ago

I don't think "just stick with it" is a good advice in general and especially not for his projects. He was smart to abandon his minimal time tracker, minimal metronome and jobs website. BTW: he didn't get 5 users for minimal time tracker, he got 5 people who signed up for a mailing list based on screenshots of non-existing product. Even smarter would be to not do such projects in the first place. With jobs websites you need a giant, unfair advantage over all other job websites. Metronome and minimal time tracker are both vitamins, not pain killers. They don't solve a painful problem that people are obviously willing to pay for. They are also extremely competitive. The only idea that was somewhat viable was time tracker, but only if he managed to stand out from all the other time trackers and masterfully execute both the product and marketing. There is no recipe for a successful projects but there are plenty of giant red flags that you should notice and avoid. High competition is a red flag. Low value to potential users is a red flag.

xyzzy21 5y ago
Yep! You have to learn how and when to KILL YOUR CHILDREN (your ideas)! I typically come up with a dozen ideas a week - most of them don't pass hurdles of basic physics or economics, or once you research "the market" you discover there isn't one. So you plunge a knife into the idea and kill it quick. You have to learn how to do this. I do minimally document them and then file them away, however. Things can change. Then you absolutely may need to spend YEARS at the few that survive. But you are always checking, setting hurdles and milestones and being ready to kill off the idea that doesn't have any more to work. Or you discover YOU aren't the one who can take through that jungle and then you have to decide what to do about that. Sometimes you find someone who can and take a minority venture stake in what they can do with it. Sometimes you have to wait until ideas or technologies become more mature. Or you need to put it on the back burner as you can accumulate more capital to "do it right". You do need an incumbent in most cases to prove the market exists but you want to shy away from the "popular" products because of high competition you won't likely match.
redisman 5y ago
Yeah the first step if you want to be successful on some metric is to type “time tracker” into AppStore search and see that is completely hopeless and pick something else that doesn’t already have 100+ professional and commercial implementations

codegeek 5y ago

Yea if you read the article, it is actually more like 5 side projects in 4 years (took a 2 year break). That is way too many projects to try for real results. Nothing to take away from the effort and learnings though. I commend people who try to build anything. However, most people give up too quickly. It takes months or even a year or 2 to really get traction on any project if you want to be serious and I am not talking VC funded but bootstrapped. Yes the risk of doing something for 2 years is big but you need to do a lot more customer discovery/validation than just 2-3 months before you give up. If you just want to learn how to build stuff for fun, sure do 5 projects that quickly. But if you want to build anything to make money (even if small), you must spend more than a few months on it. That is why software developers are not all entrepreneurs because even though a lot of us can build stuff, we don't know what to do with it.

doctor_eval 5y ago
Also, only one of the side projects actually broke any ground at all. Mostly they were abandoned after less than a month. A couple of weeks of part time desk research is not a side hustle. It’s simply due diligence. Disappointed that the game didn’t go ahead as it’s something I’d definitely play. Reminds me of x-battle.

pytlicek 5y ago

Absolutely agree with you, 5 users here, 5 there and you will have hundreds in 1 year, 500 after 2 years and so on... This happened to me with my side project hostbeat.info. I have started it bcs some of my friends wanted this kind of service. Then I have realized that I can do it as a multi-user SaaS. I was expecting thousands of users in the first month, still don't know why :) (perhaps I made it free of charge?) Made a post on 3-4 forums/discussions, etc... scaled my server to handle load almost to 10.000 daily active users. And.... 2 registrations happened in the first month. This was not expected and hit me hard. But later on, as you write, it started to gain some traction. One user per week, 2, then 3 users. Sometimes 2 new per day, the other day or week or month nothing. Sometimes I am surprised that some big player on the IT market has registered and is also actively using it (2 largest telco operators in DE and AT fe.) I don't care anymore about profit or userbase. I'm happy with it as is and sometimes users are sending me emails and thanking me for such service.

conradfr 5y ago
So, do your friends use it? :)
- pytlicek 5y ago
  Yes, they do. I did admin work a long time ago and mostly it was planned to have information about the connection, in case they have a dynamic IP. It works reliably to this day.

soylentnewsorg 5y ago

I think the common thing here is not giving up w/o immediate success. That is a very good idea sometimes. Homer Simpson built a goofy car, people were exposed to it and he got negative feedback, and he rightly abandoned it. Some projects are a bad idea, you don't know they are, and once you find out they are, you absolutely should not keep wasting resources due to the sunk cost of wishful thinking. His common issue is he expected to invest time to make money. You need to invest money to make money. This is why I sometimes laugh at a guy who can't get a good job, has no savings, is borrowing cash from friends to pay the rent and maxing out credit cards for food. Sometimes that guy's solution to being poor is "I'm going to start my own business." When you build on a foundation of nothing, your house collapses. He ran an ad campaign - it clearly worked. He needed to run it more, and bigger, and yes, eat the cost of it from personal savings. In a business, you first spend money, then you make money. There are no freebies just because you have an idea. Stories of that happening are like self-learning guitar because you plan on being a rockstar. The reason people don't want to pay for a new project from a new person? Because there's high risk of it being dead within a year - like all of this guy's projects. It's the same reason I don't start watching any new shows till they've had a few seasons out. Don't want to invest hours into the plot just to have it cancelled and left w/o closure in after two seasons. It's also a reason no one joined things like google plus or used any of their other now dead projects. They proudly declare they try many things to see what sticks and kill the rest. Well, I'm not willing to give my time for free to their unpaid focus group. So what he needed to do was save up, spend those savings on letting people know about his product, take the risk of loosing that cash, and give the product away at first. Then when the paid product comes, there is a huge user base he paid for, and people see the risk of it being killed as minimized.

Dylan16807 5y ago

After a certain amount of work I think it stops really being a side project, even if it's not where you make money.

jhoechtl 5y ago

The question is if he created any public value with this side projects. Another example for UBI? [UBI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income)

tasogare 5y ago

Also contrary to what is often professed here, a landing page is not a product. If you lure me to your website and there is no download and only a textbox to extract a personal information from me to spam me in the future, you just lost my present and future respect. Don't waste people's time like this please.

pjc50 5y ago

This makes me feel better about 0 side projects earning $0 in 20 years: I've come out ahead of people who are "underwater".

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

When it comes to the time management app, he did exactly the right thing: created a mailing list, found out there is no market, left it alone. Generally 'just making an app' does not produce a business, and has not for the past 10 years at least. Games are a very special business, and there is no science as to what makes a game compelling: flappy bird was created in a weekend and made millions, some million dollar projects make nothing. I think that you have to be very passionate about games and have deep understanding of gameplay to even compete.

silexia 5y ago

Counterpoint: He is trying to compete in sexy, very competitive industries. I launched a landscaping business with a partner four months ago and we already have over $100,000 in revenue.