Does anyone else have a joke product/sandbox?
Hello, fellow IHers!
For a while now I've been toying with an idea to make a mostly joke product with no real ambition or goals to make it a passive income stream or a side gig, the idea is really to have a sandbox that I can use to learn and develop different aspects of managing a full-fledged application, over-engineer as means for learning, include as many features and test tooling, possibly making it open source to grow some portfolio.
My idea is a location-based, foursquare-like app where you could rate public and private bathrooms(such as restaurants, museums), including information(such as cleanliness, fees, customers-only, etc) so that people could choose a place to go when in need, I call it Poopsquare ;)
Does anyone else have any projects like this? Would love to see more like it.
PoopSquare is awesome, I say build it!
if it works out, you can monetize it by sending notifications to the venue owners.
I wouldn't say joke because they solve a problem, these are tools I built to test/learn a framework.
https://www.ubiqwerty.site/ - Geo consistency, testing out google cloud functions
https://www.typeprofiles.com/ - testing out Netlify
Yes, I've been working on a project like this as a continuation of a "game" my friends and I play where we ask each other to rank things. I've learned a bunch of stuff in the process of making it, and it sure feels better that the whole thing is mostly a joke when I go back at something I wrote months ago and see how sloppy the code is.
For example, please powerrank these lunchmeats: http://beta.powerrank.io/rank/q-HTTFQo
Yes definitely, bierbord.nl has become a playground for me to test out new technologies, while it does have users they are all friends so if something does goes wrong it's no problem usually. Somehow this sandbox/playground vibe has caused it to have excellent code quality, good tests and superb stability while being 100% free to host. I guess there is not much to go wrong after the 3th redesign...
I've had multiple ideas that I have treated as "sandboxes" for learning, though my intention was to create passive income. I talk about some of these ideas on https://www.wantrepreneurblues.com/ideas.
Regarding Poopsquare, this is the second time I have heard this idea this week. I even pondered it briefly a few years ago. While I agree that this solves a real problem, adoption may be difficult. I personally only want this information when I am on road trips. Clean truckstop bathrooms are about as rare as unicorns. Maybe truckstops are your angle.
I created Turo/Uber for cats, just to see what this new platform is capable of doing:
https://rentacat.bubbleapps.io/version-test
You definitely should build poopsquare.
It has the dual purpose of helping people find the closest bathroom too.
You could even add "toilet trivia" haha