I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains
287 cesargstn 192 7/30/2025, 1:15:35 PM
I think I'm officially a side project collector.
I've had it all:
A SaaS for freelancers... that I never had time to finish because I'm a freelancer.
A revolutionary AI tool that I abandoned as soon as GPT-4 came out.
And the famous "anti-social media social network" (spoiler: it was just me).
I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.
My Google Domains look like a graveyard of unfinished dreams.
But honestly, I've never learned so much, nor enjoyed it so much.
And one day, I might release one that takes off. Or not. But I'll be ready.
Any other serial side-projectors here? Share your greatest fails/unlikely successes
In the end it was a weekend hack to make something simpler that turned into an app release, which a year or so after that turned into a business.
Sometimes people have a great idea, build it and feel entitled to success with it, but it's largely about relevant eyeballs. If enough relevant eyeballs find your thing and use/buy it then it's a success. It's quite easy to launch something that gets lots of views on launch, but there has to be a reason to come back (sticky apps/content).
I've also built several things that could have been good but I lost interest and ironically the thing I work on now is arguably one of the most boring topics conceivable, but perhaps that's why few people do it well.
At least you're actually doing the "I code for 3 all-nighters" step!
I've stopped too many projects at the "I buy a domain name" stage, and added an intermediate "I create a Trello board" step between that and starting to write code. No need to pull all-nighters, which are hard to do with family and a full-time job, if all I need to do is add a card to a feature wishlist. Maybe prototype a few key functions to see how they work, wireframe a unique piece of UI, or follow the tutorial to create "hello world" in a new framework, but it turns out that those steps are also optional.
The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it. I can give myself a similar cognitive reward for simply reading on HN about other people completing projects, and even (at my lowest) passively watching YouTube videos of other people building cool stuff. It's all the mental rewards of participating in a group project where the tribe accomplished something great, except I'm barely in a parasocial relationship with a dude on Patreon or Discord a thousand miles away who actually performed 100% of the work. Maybe he likes my comment "Nice work! I really liked how you did [thing], have you considered [alternative strategy]?". Maybe he even comments back. Bang! Neurotransmitter pump engaged, dopamine boost received.
It's a scary thing to realize that you're doing this, and very, very hard to train yourself out of those bad habits. I find it's important to write down and consciously review my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly goals, my productive and unproductive activity towards those goals, and my actual accomplishments. It's too easy to get addicted to fake reward loops, whether because they're engineered by social media companies who make money off my attention span or because brains are just vulnerable to low-effort high-reward stimuli. What did I do in July? X hours of Reddit, Y hours of HN, Z hours of Youtube... and a half dozen things I'm actually proud of.
(Note to self: Don't get too excited about upvotes or replies to this comment, acquiring HN or Reddit fake Internet points are not part of my actual goals and should not be considered real accomplishments.)
I currently have a little stack of index cards with in-play projects scrawled on them and at the end of the year the plan is to weed those and shut down any resources that aren't required for the ones still in the list. Hmm, maybe I need a domain name for that though...
One thing I will add is that it's ok to recognise that one enjoys some of these behaviours. There's no moral element to being a starter-not-a-finisher of personal projects so long as you're paying appropriate attention to your important commitments (family, the day job, etc.)
I struggle with the same thing -- I'm resigned to the solution that even (or especially) when you're doing hobby projects, you might have to resort to blocking HN or other distractors for a bit.
> I buy a domain name → I set up a bug tracker → I spec out a bunch of tasks → I let Claude Code do the coding
Seems more sustainable to me than working a full-time job coding, then adding another coding side project. Nice change of pace to just be describing what I want my app to do (during my work day), then letting Claude Code buzz away while I do my day job.
Since otherwise this is a solo side project I don’t need anything more complex than that, though I also use Linear for my day job and so I know you can automate it more if you need to.
I get this same buzz from talking about my projects. So today, I do not talk about anything I'm working on because I know I can drain myself of all motivation with one excited conversation.
If I want daydream fuel I buy a Powerball ticket for $2. I get the same dopamine rush doing fictional estate planning as I did spending $10=$50 on a domain and fantasizing about the project succeeding. The Powerball ticket also doesn't circle back around next year asking for more money.
I've also found that having a small homelab that can support Dokku or similar is also very helpful when I want to be productive. Deployable from Day 1 and after every change is a game changer for me, and deploying to an internal host lets me be lazy in all the right ways, as long as I keep track of the sins I commit (you can go a long, long way on a project before you have to add the boring boilerplate that is proper auth, for instance).
I’ve only bought one domain name since then and got the project out!
I think the domain name is your reward for finishing your minimum viable product.
Me too. I learnt it after 6 expired domains
Personally, I'll snag a domain if it's really good -- like one word or a proper combo of words, spellable, etc... I won't set it to renew, though.
Here’s an easy way to test this: imagine your product suddenly takes off — it gets picked up on Reddit or Hacker News, you start getting lots of users and feedback. Would you still feel uninterested? Or would you find yourself energized, working late into the night to improve it?
That thought experiment reveals something important: there’s a gap between building a product and getting people to use it. You haven’t figured out how to bridge that gap yet, so you stay in “builder mode” — because it feels safe and familiar.
Another thing I do more, which I find hard as a developer but somewhat more rewarding, is talking to potential users. Sometimes it makes you realise your ideas are crap haha.
But it's a different thing to build for fun, which I tend to do less these days and want to do more.
And agreed on the learning side. Building full-on projects is the best way to learn. I've picked up so many skills that have landed me new amazing jobs, i.e. that's basically how I transitioned from a native iOS developer to a full-stack React/React-Native developer.
Keep building! and don't forget the user side :)
Before that, i only started them and lost motivation after ~2 weeks. The projects a wanted to do were cyclic though, so i often came back to restart things i had left unfinished.
It took me time to change that, but the main thing i did was starting with extremely limited projects, that i knew i could finish in 2 weeks. I did very basic things at the beginning, like hosting a pure html website (but it was by first website i hosted, with nginx and certbot). Sometimes i would get back to it and improve something, like styling, text, SEO,...
I say "finished" because the bottleneck is finding users, not the code. So i still work on these projects, but not at the same speed.
That's ADHD for you.
A former coworker of mine lamented this - "I start so many projects or hobbies, but just when I feel like I've learned a lot I lose interest". I had to point out to him that his hobby isn't - whatever, sheep shearing or book bindery or underwater basket weaving - but rather his hobby is learning things. That's a common thing for ADHD people, absorbing all you can in a rapid amount of time, devoting every minute of thought to something, and then suddenly completely forgetting it exists until you get the domain renewal notice.
At least you (seem to) have (some degree of) acceptance of the circumstance and recognize the benefits of this behavior rather than just focusing on the drawbacks; too many people have this behavior and think it's a personal failing, when really they just have a different hobby than they think they have.
I think in many cases, we fail to finish projects because it's so much easier to start than it is to finish. The first 90% is easy, as the saying goes, but the second 90% is much harder.
And I use the word 'fail' advisedly. I think it's fine to not finish everything you start, but it's not good to never finish anything, ever. Not if your intention was to finish it anyway. I think finishing things is a crucial skill, and we need to practice it in order to get good at it, and we won't do that if we tell ourselves it's about as good to give up as it is to keep going.
ADHD is a real diagnosis, but I'm hesitant to pathologize not finishing projects, since that will end up being an excuse rather than an explanation for a lot of people.
I have mixed feelings about finding this out late in life (early 40s). I do think there was a lot of value in not having it as an excuse when I was younger, to force myself to figure things out and get to where I am today. On the other hand, I spent a good 20 years looking everywhere to try and figure out what is wrong with me. Lots of time and money down the drain… and the YouTube algorithm is what ultimately pointed me in the right direction.
I used to think that these psychiatrists were just trying to diagnose the human condition, as so many of the things I heard just seemed like normal life for me. But I guess I now know why that seemed normal for me, but maybe aren’t normal for everyone.
The idea that there's a valid diagnostic test available sounds quite interesting.
But they never were in the first place, and being in a category doesn't change your responsibility to do the best with what you've got.
At least star signs don't medicalise you.
There are plenty of other ways of characterising this - Ayurvedic medicine or the Humours - in fact, those are so effective that they've been taken by business coaches and turned into "colour personality types". And they describe the same thing.
You have a deficiency of phlegm and black bile. Ask ChatGPT about how to treat it, and it'll essentially suggest a permanent dopamine fast.
Funny enough, when I told my dad about the diagnosis, within 90 seconds he said, “I think I might have that too.” Then he went off and did a bunch of research. He doesn’t feel it’s worth getting a diagnosis in his 70s, but is pretty sure he has it as well after the research. Funny how life works out. This actually helped me forgive some of the harder parts of my childhood, as I could better understand where he was coming from.
[1]: https://www.adxs.org/en/
I have dozens of projects that I will obsess over for a few weeks. When I was younger I would convince myself that what I was doing would change the world and I was going to make billions of dollars, but eventually I became more honest with myself: I do these projects because I want to learn about <<subject X>>.
I built a Icecast server recently because I wanted to learn more about audio encoding and streaming protocols. I built a clone of fzf because I wanted to learn more about Rust and diffing algorithms. I wrote a custom async scheduling framework for my Swaybar because I wanted to learn more about how async scheduling works. I started trying to prove the Collatz conjecture because I wanted to learn more about Isabelle.
I am ok with this being part of my life; I like learning new bits of math and technology, and the easiest way to actually learn a new concept (instead of nodding along in a book) is to try and do something with that knowledge. I think "learning for fun" is far from the worst hobbies one could have.
Maybe this is where a lot of my stress comes from. I need that outlet, but I suppress it to avoid collecting future trash or losing money selling a bunch of like-new stuff (and having to deal with the process of selling things all the time).
Similar problem for me.
Every project I've wanted to do, there's usually some technical hurdle I need to achieve, and once I've achieved it, I lose interest and have something that's not even enough to be considered a proof-of-concept, let alone an MVP.
For example, there's an arcade game called Killer Queen that I loved, and thought it was a travesty that there wasn't a PC version, since it's a 10-player game that's played on 2 cabinets, and who has that many friends going to the arcade at the same time? It needed to be online!
So I decided I was going to create a clone of it. The big hurdle I needed to figure out was how to make a realtime multiplayer platforming game that kept clients in sync while also compensating for latency. My implementation worked by having both client and server keeping copies of the last 60 frames of game state, and the client would merely send their inputs and a time stamp (Really a frame number) to the server, which would then go back to the frame state for that number and re-simulate the game with that input. It would also stream the current state (It was only ~300 bytes) to other players with their inputs, which would also do a similar re-simulation.
I even made it mostly cheat-proof. There's no hidden information (All players see the exact same screen), but I figured a modded client could simply see what other players have done, then send inputs with time stamps in the past to put themselves into an advantageous position, but I prevent that by making the server reject inputs older than 250 ms.
But...after getting all that working, and basic platforming working...I got bored. Never touched the project again.
EDIT: I've got another game I worked on and actually got to the MVP part, but it needs a heavy refactor and I just haven't bothered. Mainly because I hate writing and testing front-end code, and I feel like I've already written it once and don't want to write it again. I haven't bought a domain for it yet, thankfully. I'm going to insist on a .game domain for it, which is like $400/year.
I wrote a short blog post on this a few weeks ago: https://baduiux.de/posts/opportunity-fear-of-missing-out/
"My wife calls me a serial obsessionist"
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Okrent
I've rarely felt so seen.
Far too often I build a project, only to get ready to deploy it, then struggle to think of a name/domain for it.
Then coupled with the thought of struggling to market the project, I end up fizzling out at that stage.
If I already have users of the project, then I'll deploy it as a subdomain and forget about it until a user complains.
That particular domain was going to be like a Netflix DVD style subscription product for Eurorack modules but I never even ended up trying to build that after buying the domain.
the whole too-many side projects is for indie-hacker influencers like levels who make money on notoriety. for the rest of us -- going deep helps.
I built the prototype in a weekend. I spent the next 8 months turning it into a product people cared about. As soon as people started using it, I realized I was going to spend the next 10 years beating around the bush on a product with a very low ceiling.
I eventually decided to build Phrasing [1]… and kanji plus just kind of disappeared. Dependencies updated, subscriptions expired, service providers went offline. I feel bad because I sold some lifetime memberships - genuinely expecting to just leave it on the internet forever - but man, apparently websites don’t do that out of the box anymore.
Luckily the entire product of kanji plus will fit nicely as a feature in Phrasing, and it’s written with the same front end tech so it should be a very simple copy paste. 2 weeks of work max (famous last words).
Still, I feel really bad that people paid me money and the service just went offline. I didn’t know I was being so naive just expecting things to work for more than 6 months unattended.
If any old kanji plus subscribers are reading this, please feel free to get in touch. I’m planning to give all my old supporters a free lifetime membership to phrasing once it’s ready to go! (a membership tier that will not be available to the general public)
[1]: https://phrasing.app/
Check back in 10 years though, Phrasing will still be running, and it will have had all the features of kanji plus for 9 years and then some :-)
https://archive.is/gnhIi
https://joeldare.com/why-im-writing-pure-html-and-css-in-202...
It offers searching in transcriptions of all Norwegian podcasts in (roughly) real-time. Also offers subscribing to alerts, for example if anyone mentions your business name. Launched some days ago
Apart from this I see myself represented in this post.
Except it never gets any users.
I suppose the plus side to spending months rather than days on projects that never go anywhere is I have fewer domains. Only 7 here. Sigh.
[0] https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Not having the "right" domain is never the blocker
Work on a side project because it's interesting (e.g. you want to learn the tech) or because it's useful to you (i.e. you want to use it). Not because it may make you rich.
In the former case, you may lose interest, but that's okay: you've learned in the process. In the latter, if you get to a point where you can use it, it's really rewarding.
And this is a couple weekends ago: https://www.danesh.app/
Let's be friends! I've hacked couple websites with other people before and honestly the learning itself is worth the time even if the project doesn't take off.
I’ve considered using this strategy after my 3-day bender (like op) and then three months of trying to gain traction. Instead of just letting the domain rot and expire, I could put up a for sale sign, like you did.
Stopped working on it because Mastodon is good enough for me.
I had a Handshake domain registry/registrar: https://neuenet.com
Stopped working on it because Andrew Lee tried to take over the blockchain.
An analytics tool: https://chew.sh
Gauges shut down and I enjoyed that service. My previous domain is now owned by someone who's last name is Chew, which is cool.
Forgot I just let https://design2code.me expire because I didn't put in the work to get my name/services out there.
---
I'm currently working on https://nickel.video and think I'll stick with it for awhile. I also registered https://neue.host a few weeks ago, with the idea that a lot of the side projects I had in the past would actually work as a collection of services.
Haha. Thanks this made me laugh. I also know the feeling of being rich in expired domains.
[0] https://www.tacavo.com/ [1] https://abrega.com
i have lots of ideas for fun little side projects that would never be revenue generating.
i'll go on a tear and start building it, but when it comes time to figure out how much it'd cost each month for domains/cloud services/etc I talk myself out of it. I'm not talking about big LLM bills here, just things like $25/month for the database, $10-50/year for a domain, etc.
I don't think it's just that I'm being cheap, it's that I don't like the idea of having to pay for something in perpetuity. Because that leads to me thinking about how long I plan to keep it active and when I'll sunset it. And once you start thinking about that before you've even launched, it's pretty easy to conclude it's not worth the time to build it given its limited shelf life. If I could just do a one-time upfront payment I'd probably go through with it.
The solutions to this are either buying a server and self-hosting (no thanks) OR making peace with having a recurring 'goofy computer stuff' monthly bill.
So... how much do yall spend each month on your side-projects? Having some numbers would help me contextualize and justify this
I ran a paid business app on a $5/m VPS. No complaints.
If your $5/m VPS cannot handle some load, then that's when you upgrade it. And, TBH, at the point that your $5/m VPS is at 80% load on a paid product, you're already getting a few thousands of dollars of revenue from it anyway.
but my problem is that my fun project ideas are usually some variant of "theres a huge dataset, lets build some fun dataviz on it". which is a problem because a) i need a big db to store that giant dataset and b) the db size doesn't scale with usage, so i can't just put it off until later
$5/m droplet + $10/m storage gets you 100GB of storage that you can put a PostgreSQL (or other) DB onto.
The storage situation is not quite as expensive as it used to be.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/block-storage
I ran many projects in it
I have saved so much money over the years just not having to pay $20/mo * IDEA_QTY. The Mac mini doesn't take much power and is dead silent.
[1] https://dokku.com
As a learning project, copy a successful project and mind map it, program it and find customers. You will learn so much that you can apply to whatever project you come up with. You'll get frustrated because you will need to go out and learn a lot but power thru it. You'll be better off for the hard work. Good luck!
[1] Lacking Any Major Excitement
> I think it’s part of the procrastination cycle; buying a domain name feels like progress towards the goal, but is incredibly low effort, and thus feeling like I’m making progress I wander off and get attracted to the next shiny thing.
So, yup, except that it sounds like you typically make more progress than me!
Edit: Context is https://paperstack.com/hntags/
One the other hand, I have a great idea for CI and it's an itch I am currently suffering...
[1]: https://github.com/elkowar/eww
But, I'll likely come back to build another some day when the mood strikes me.
https://retroclones.com/
In 2025, with new vibe-coding projects being pushed every second, I think it's not even worth the time unless you have $$$ upfront for marketing (and/or a massive audience). Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
I first remember reading this phrasing here on HN and I've been using it for years to explain to others that what I am doing is not "work", its just a hobby.
By the way the link is broken on your website.
side project, business partnership, personal music streaming site, serverless blog.
It's hard to do if you have a regular 9 to 5 and also some other hobby(I'm into motorcycles :D).
Only remaining domain is of my name pusparaj.com (but it's in auction mode)
I have also lost ownership 2 times or more i think, because i tend to rotate registrars and forgot to renew it.
now 3 domains are remaining, will let them expire.
It helps devs build parallel agents from the cli. (think claude code, gemini, aider)
And simplifies the git workflow for testing and accepting the best solution.
Check it out: https://github.com/sutt/agro
I keep a little text file pr.txt and try to link my project to HN / X / other aggregators once a day...
This way I spend a few hours each day coding, and a few minutes each day promoting and refining me message.
Haha we are building one too!
Got any advice for us?
Here's the waitlist page with all the features: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev
Email is in profile if you want to connect.
Thanks in advance!
I myself have left 6 domains expired over the last 4 years so you are not alone! 3 are from this year alone
Now a days I don't buy the domain until I have actually set up the server with the codebase. Project might get dropped just before that. It has happened
Edit: I feel validated after reading the replies. I am not alone!
Looking back, how do you think you did on the marketing/sales front? I don't mean the results of the efforts but I mean the input front.
Curious if those pivots were caused because the problem addressed wasn't painful enough, the solutions didn't address that pain well enough, or if it was simply distribution.
If the former two, I imagine it's only a matter of time until you strike gold. But if it's the final third, there's a chance one of the 17 could have worked out well.
It helped me a lot that every time a have a new idea or want to start a new side-project that I wait at least two days before I dig deeper and get really started. Only then I really know if I really want this or if it’s just the initial hype/momentum.
Then it came down to producing customers not artifacts and I ran out of steam. I posted on Product Hunt and a few other places but never took it further. I'm glad I did it once as a solo dev, but now I know how far I'll go on my own.
And, I bought my last domain less than 10-days back. Built a landing but left it to research further and talk to customers. :-)
But I have a decent half-baked AI based investment portfolio manager, one month of hard work (nights/weekends) dreaming of selling it for a bank. Projects of such complexity are impossible for people stuck in the ordinary life (job/family). PS: I'm not complaining - I love my family. But it demands energy.
"Vibe coding" has actually been a boon for me on this front. Fewer than 10% of my side projects are serious and 95% of it are static pages, so there's no big security concerns to worry about. Most of them are joke pages anyway, which I've started calling "Sht Coding," as in Vibe Coding + Sht Posting.
A tip to everyone: subdomains are free, and you can set up a 301 redirect once the project gets some traction. As others have mentioned, I only buy a domain once there is some traction, or when I start getting organic/indirectly referred traffic.
I’ve done the same , bought many domain names, got super hyped, coded for a few nights… then lost interest. Now I’ve got a bunch of random projects that never saw the light of day.
But honestly, I learned a lot from each one. Even if they didn’t go anywhere, I got better at building stuff. And who knows, maybe one of them will work out someday.
Glad I’m not the only one doing this.
ALWAYS, it comes down to one thing. If you built the best thing in the world, and no one visits it, then it's a "failure" at least in terms of earning anything.
Vibe coding actually helped me get a few projects out of the door finally! But even now I can't resist the urge to buy a domain when I get an idea for a new side project.
Okay, there were some beers involved...
I however have a similar but more expensive problem, I develop side projects to an MVP and leave them up for literal decades with no one but myself using them, paying for the domain and hosting. I can't let things go.
I rewrote a number of things in Go recently so they could scale down to zero on Fly.io and save me some money.
For example though I have been developing a note keeping SaaS for fifteen years. It fits my own needs perfectly and I use it every day, but everyone I have ever had try it has bounced in a couple minutes. I literally removed the sign up after GDPR scared me in 2018 and never put it back. I should put it back, everything is client side encrypted and I don't keep any PII.
I have an ad free emojipedia-esq tool, a tool for making API controlled README badges, a tool for converting MIDIs into print outs of colored sheet music for children's keyboards, a joke API, so much more.
I did accidentally let the domain expire for my Wordle knockoff where you guess the soup based on the ingredients. It never worked very well anyway.
I'm paranoid that some squatter can tell which domains i'm searching for and they'll swoop in and get it as soon as they know there's one interested party
And FWIW, your (our) paranoia is justifiable. As mentioned in another comment, GoDaddy is historically-notorious for front-running domain searches. ICANN tried to make that a bit less practical, but I just assume that they (and other sketchy registrars) still do it.
If you search directly through whois (i.e. from the command line), you should be OK. That's been my strategy, and I think it works.
That said, I often have project/product ideas at times when I cannot work on them. In fact, always. But I enjoy noodling on names and branding, and if I come up with a really good name that's available in .com, I register it.
I have revived project ideas 15-20 years later, and have been happy to have a great domain for it which would absolutely not have been available "now".
Of course I have many more domains that are patiently awaiting their prioritization.
The registration fees add up (and I do feel bad about reserving them for myself, although I've given a few away to persuasive requesters, and I've sold a few which, in aggregate, more than cover all of the registration fees).
Don't search on GoDaddy. I read somewhere GoDaddy raises the prices of high value domains by choosing them from searches
What if we started with a product idea for which we know there is demand for: things people are already paying money for. For example: apples, or tires, or etc. something you know people are paying money for. and then try and either build that product or another product that makes building the product easier.
The thing is that figuring out how to realize an idea is the fun part. Making it into a polished product that others can easily use with proper documentation is as important as it is tedious and exhausting.
After 1 or 2 failed side projects, you should have learned roughly 80% of what you need to know. A few more might get you the next 20%, but 17 failed projects is likely not teaching you anything you couldn’t have learned before, you’re just wasting time at that point.
The optimal amount of failures before a successful project is probably about 3. After that, you need to seriously consider that maybe you just don’t have what it takes and move on. Otherwise you spend your whole life chasing something that will probably never happen, and avoiding better opportunities.
I'm also have a decent graveyard of domains. I've all but accepted that I'll never create anything of value in my life or even anything awesome.
But the dark side of that is now there's no point to being alive, so I'm planning to die. What are these better opportunities you referenced? Anything that will make a life of mediocrity bearable?
By definition most people lead mediocre lives — few doing anything extraordinary. What makes it ‘bearable’ are the simple things: family, friends, work, hobbies, helping other people, contributing to society, etc.
Planning to end it because life seems pointless is depression. Please get professional help.
I've heard these things and have thought about them previously, but then I think, "How can I meaningfully contribute to society?" And then I get stuck in a loop realizing my contributions will not be anything of merit. And then I think, what would cause a lasting impact and be achievable? And then I realize how mass shooters are born.
A life without side projects seems pointless, but at the same time the projects are probably ultimately pointless or of too slow progression to merit career leverage.
I seem to have found a path too late in life. Catchup or die seems to be transforming solely into die.
The question is then reduced to the expected value of success achieved at some point, discounted by how close it is to my stastical life expectancy. Is it positive? Seemingly not. Then I ask what's the point of a life with negative expected value?
It seems like lots of people believe that life itself is a positive, so even a mean existence is worthy. This isn't something I'm able to accept for whatever reason, as I consider life to be EV+ only when it is one, if not two, standard deviations above the mean.
I've got way more than 17 failed projects, and that's fine, because the project was never the point.
https://www.mallardgames.com/
Maybe some of them could make money, with more polish and marketing. Who knows! I have never tried.
I just make whatever I feel like.
i have a lot of cool ones i tried to give away or at least start the conversation w a few relevant sites but i guess that seems weird to randomly get
(Most recent example: I made an unreleased browser extension for HN, the MVP feature of which is to let you block annoying users, such that any of their comments are replaced with poop emoji. But since I can't put an AI spin on that, to attract funding or job offers, I'm better off selling the domain names, and not spending any more time on it.)
i know how to start. i know how to ship. i don’t know how to pick what’s worth staying with.
and i still don’t know what my next thing is.
i’ve shipped real SaaS apps.
– https://truereviews.co // OAuth-based verified customer reviews.
– https://refersend.com // Referral tracking via email for non-digital industries.
– https://postpov.com AI-powered content machine for professionals with AI content simulation.
if you’re also in that “smart but tired” phase, DM me or reply. maybe we can get out of it together.
here’s the pattern: i sprint hard. i get it live. i stall.
not because I’m lazy. b/c promotion/selling burns me out way more than building.
i’m not some weekend hacker. i’ve been a Chief of Staff, a founder, a fixer, a builder. i’ve managed up, down, and sideways in a real company. i’ve coached teams. i’ve been coached. it’s helped friends escape the corporate treadmill.
i still don’t know what my next thing is.
i’m not writing this for pity. i’m writing it because i see myself in this post, and maybe someone else sees themselves in mine.
niklasbabel.com
Describes me perfectly. Engineer with 7 years exp and can build anything. Let me know if you'd want to chat.
My most recent project: deepswe.io
that's all that matters. it's important to enjoy the process of making things.
So does my github or the 5 rack servers in my homelab lol. At least the servers aren't running and consuming power 24/7
I have my own graveyard here moralestapia.com
It's a hobby, like any other.