Spent last year working on a side project and assumed I would need this and that in order to launch. But after it was ready to launch, I found out there was no product market fit. I have known about the importance of quickly finding out pmf but still made the mistakes. knowing != doing. We just love building stuff and mistakenly convince ourselves that if I add one more feature, this thing would be ready for launch and take off. But in reality...
I remember the moment when in my last startup, the first invoice was paid - $5. A magic moment. I still remember the name of the customer. The last invoice before exit was $50.000. I remember that customer too.
TFA talks a bit about shiny object/library syndrome. I think there's another good reason to avoid new things: LLMs are better with old stuff.
I can sit down and essentially english-type an app together in javascript or an old version of bevy, but if I ask for new APIs it all falls apart until I have built up sufficient examples in my own code. I've tried giving documentation, etc. It's just easier to version pin something from 2022 and chug along using a less featureful but more productive assisted-coding paradigm.
Same here but I learned so much I think it was worth it, im literally 4y+ in. I made a platform for my own personal website:
then Ai education: https://pub.education
then Ai healthcare: https://codify.healthcare
I used to think my goal was to do this and that and change the world etc... I am starting to think that I just like building things and maybe thats OK.
One time I set out to write an accounting ledger application and towards the end realized I built an ORM framework.
Neither the application nor the ORM lived on. I now start from an existing ORM framework for any new project.
Good learning!
How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary.
Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.
2.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any accessibility specs.
Please don’t do this
I spent eight years and I'm around -$150,000 for my main webapp so you're ahead of the curve!
I wouldn't be who I am today without wasting years in the bike shed. Kudos!
Ah Riot.js, it was like Vue before Vue, yet it never took off for some reason, and it had component templates with locally scoped JS and CSS. I remember mentioning it to a few fellow devs when they were hyping up Vue and nobody ever even heard about it.
I feel like many would point at all of the technology migrations and view it as a cautionary tale: that if you don't stick with whatever stack you picked, then shipping will be a lengthy ordeal due to migrating between various sub-optimal choices all the time. For example, what if someone just picked jQuery for the front end and stuck with that and tried and rewrites or changes after the launch of the MVP?
On the other hand, this no doubt will let you learn a lot of useful things along the way and possibly make you a better developer, or at least give you an idea of which technologies are nice or easy to use, or suited for certain problems.
It's nice to have that sort of separation between the categories of what you aim to do - to study or to try and ship something, because without you see a lot of cases (especially in indie game development, for some reason) where people feel disappointed due to not shipping anything in the end. There's nothing wrong with unfinished projects that let you learn, or shipping sub-optimal code to get it out of the door and start generating value.
Good job, though!
This resonates with me. I've recently come out of retirement, and really gotten back into programming and product building. I've done this a few times before, but even with experience, I STILL find it hard sometimes to not just dive right in and start building. Mostly, it's because I enjoy it so much.
Now though, things are different. After a throw away project to get back into things, I realized I could very nearly just build first and find product market fit second if only because building is sooo much quicker now.
I decided that over the course of a year I was going to try building 3-6 separate projects, and assume at least one will be successful. My most recent project I realized very late that it's probably going to be very hard to ever make much money; so for now, I'm giving it away for free, just to see how people use it (https://seikai.tv).
I've not just started a new project and for sure this one is going to be a unicorn!
i've been making websites since 2000. i've seen the internet change and made couple of projects during my life, none took off. as time went, i realized this golden era of online businesses is long gone and everything has been monopolized and bought out by the big tech companies and that money for ads is what matters the most these days. right now i am finalizing my last project that i will ever make, for this reason. it will be 2.5 years of work in march, when i will be releasing it. the only reason i am going for it and i stuck with working on it full-time this whole time is because it is a type of business where customers will come on their own and will want to use it because it provides them with a new sales channel so competition is actually good for them. it flips the usual business model on its head. otherwise i would have quit a long time ago. my hopes up to get it going this year and make 1M in sales next year and hope to be able to focus on growing it for many years to come.
Light text on light background for max pain. Still I will read it though. Frankly, I commend anyone who is willing to work long-term on massive projects by themselves like this. I find it inspiring since all my projects are like this tbh.
Seems like frameworks were a major problem for the project. I get it. Sometimes if you're too early you end up having to build not only your project but a small ecosystem of things to support it.
Here's the software they ended up making which looks frigging cool: https://signal.vercel.app/
I spent 2 years making a web app and it's making about $4k per month now.
Surprisingly the cost to develop is fairly accurate, using scc's COCOMO
Estimated Cost to Develop (organic) $1,023,233
Estimated Schedule Effort (organic) 13.87 months
Estimated People Required (organic) 6.55
I built a deep search for financial research in 2023 and learned that 2025 would have been the year to launch it.
Really good writeup and insights, thanks for this.
A friend of mine convinced me to enable kind of "donations" if you will for a free macOS app I've made a some time ago. I was not really trying to sell it or anything as it's a simple tool which you setup once and then that's it. But I figured that some might want to support my work and so I setup a Gumroad page with a suggested price of $2.99 and kinda forgot about it. The first $1 email that came through that felt very validating
Previously:
I use boring stacks in all my software development including jQuery, also 5 years programming and not a dime of revenue. American software development not easy. Even though I offer free account, how messed up is that.
I love reading posts and comments like these, as it gives me better insights and questions what I have been doing wrong as I can relate to this shiny new attachment syndrome very much myself.
Seems like a solid app. I haven't evaluated online music software but this is a good first experience, for me. I appreciate that I can try it without signing in.
Technically they didn't put a price tag on the app, the $1 was github sponsor money, so the project was never really designed to make money.
The app itself (Midi editor with piano roll UI) looks great but is instantly made much less relevant if you just install Reaper (and actual DAW, free to try, available at the time all this was developed).
Cool thing, but the moral of the story is: release that toy thing you spent a few weeks on, it's as ready as it ever will be and maybe it'll grow with it's user base.
when I got my first apartment that had its own clothes washer and dryer, the first time I found a $1 bill in the dryer with my clothes, I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall!
This is a great post about learning JavaScript
The app is actually really good too.
Thanks for sharing, great result
yeah, GitHub Sponsors is non-existent, impossible to get any revenues from it
Thats cool.
I want to be as cool as this guy.
Cool to read. Thanks.
now just time travel to when $1 was $100
> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript.
> The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js.
> I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm.
> I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6.
> The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system.
> So I rewrote everything in TypeScript, including my own libraries.
> Anyway, I'll be replacing my own components like Button and Toolbar with Material-UI ones.
> It's time to rewrite everything to styled-components.
> It's time to rewrite everything to useXXX.
No wonder why these software projects (personal as well as professional ones) are 6 years late. It may be a good learning experience, but a terribly inefficient way of developing software.