9+ failed side projects & businesses since 2001...and the 3 reasons my current project is doing well
Hey folks,
I'm currently building Beekeeper Studio, an open source database GUI desktop app. It's doing really well!
This isn't my first rodeo, I've made many side projects, many of them failures. I thought it'd be fun (maybe a little depressing?) to make a list.
My Background
I grew up in the midlands of the UK (Derby), and I was 'super into computers' until 17 when I decided to do an undergraduate degree in Law...because the dot-com crash was in full swing and everything IT was 'going to be outsourced soon'.
I course corrected after university.
Don't stress out if your project isn't doing that well
I've always had side projects. Some became real businesses with funding (see below), but many of them fail, stall out, or both. That feels like the way of things for side projects, many aren't super researched, and were really just started for fun.
It's a long game. Sometimes I get burned out, but if you enjoy building stuff, you'll find your thing in the end.
Ok, here they are.
Thumbtack - blackboard clone - 2002
Back in 2002 all my law classes handed out reams of paper. I thought it should be online. I started building a site and learned HTML and CSS.
How do you save data? I then found out that I needed PHP and swiftly gave up as I had no clue how to use it.
Revenue: $0
Online sports website - 2003
I didn't really like sports all that much, but I did like Ice Hockey, and the city I lived in (Newcastle Upon Tyne) had a small team. I made a site with HTML and CSS and even got free hockey tickets to go to a few games and report.
Turns out I was a terrible reporter and an even worse photographer. I have no idea how many page views I ever got.
Revenue: $0 (although comp'd tickets maybe $100?)
Online comic strips - 2006 - 2007
This was the height of online comics like the oatmeal (or felt like it to me), and I loved drawing, so thought I could make one of my own.
I made a few nice comics for my girlfriend (now wife), but my online comics didn't do very well. I had a lot of fun though, and really miss drawing as much as I did then.
Tip Top Tweet - 2007
I learned to code after graduating and landed a gig writing C#. Hashtags were becoming a thing on Twitter, so I made a site where you could #voteup or #votedown a link on twitter and it'd rank them on my website.
I thought it was amazing. I got co-workers to use it for a bit, but it never went anywhere. It was super fun to make and I learned ASP.NET MVC, which eventually led me to Ruby on Rails, which I still love to this day.
Revenue: $0
Hadoop Blog
I stared blogging with how-to's about Hadoop. I ended up with 6000 mailing list subscribers and 20k visitors a month to my website, but I never tried to monetize really (that was never the point). I learned a lot and it definitely landed me a job or two over the years.
Revenue: $0
Foursquare apps - Simple Check-in and Wi-fi Check-in
Simple Check-in is still live, although doesn't work on Android 11+.
I worked for Foursquare (which was super cool at the time), and wanted easier ways to check-in to places I visited, so I made my own android apps.
These became reasonably popular, and people 'upgraded' to support development, even though I offered no extra features.
Revenue: $5,000-10,000
Android Games
I made two android games after reading Beginning Android Game Development. They took forever to build and they were not exactly game of the year.
They got downloaded a little, and had ads on the homepage, so it made a little cash.
The biggest thing I learned is that games are HARD, and I did not want to be a game programmer. My wife enjoyed doing the voice for some of the characters though.
Revenue: $10 maybe
Beekeeper Data
I wanted to make reporting and data analytics easier with Hadoop, so I started building a web application to help people do those things.
I ended up accidentally pitching to a seed investment program, and eventually starting a company around it. I raised $800k+, and had a small team.
We had some customers, and we had revenue, but we struggled to grow the business past these initial folks, nor could we really compete with much better funded large companies.
Revenue: $100k+, still dead tho.
99Inbound
After burning out from the big data start-up I was in the mood for some Ruby on Rails, so I built a small form-builder app in order to teach myself Vue.js. I integrated with close.io (a CRM I used a lot), and that got me some customers, and a steady stream of signups (they featured us in their docs!). Ran the whole thing on Heroku for like $50/month.
One day, I got an unsolicited email from the owners of FormKeep, who ended up acquiring 99Inbound. It didn't make me wealthy, but I felt like I got a good price.
Revenue: $many-thousands
Snap Sentry
Snap Sentry was a small app for watermarking photos, I built it with a friend, and we outsourced development. Well that just ended up being more work. It's entirely front end (vue.js), and there are no payment plans yet.
It's still around, but gets almost no usage, and we don't put any effort or money into it.
Revenue: $0
Beekeeper Studio
This is where I am today! Beekeeper Studio is open source and has many thousands of active daily users.
Beekeeper Studio is a desktop app for database management and SQL querying. It's cross-platform and built on Electron with Vue.js (see, that came in helpful). It's MIT OSS.
I just launched the first paid addition, hopefully this is the first step of a real indie hacker business.
Revenue: We'll see soon.
Why is this project doing so much better?
Well firstly, it was something I really needed, and I thought others did too. I did some research on existing products. Most of the OSS projects were old-school Java Swing apps, with bad UX, and the good looking apps were almost all paid (not open source). That meant I had a niche (nice UX, open source).
Secondly, being open source is amazing for inbound links, we're on documentation sites, team wikis, and more.
Thirdly, luck! Right place right time, we got featured on Hacker News and Product Hunt without submitting the app ourselves, and that helped kickstart visitors and inbound links.
Thanks for reading!
Hope this was fun to read. It was fun to remember all my side projects, I may have missed some too, but that's not obvious to me yet.
Do you have failed projects?
Let me know in the comments what your failed projects are!
Hey Matthew! This was an awesome writeup. Thanks for sharing!
"It's a long game. Sometimes I get burned out, but if you enjoy building stuff, you'll find your thing in the end." I really appreciate hearing from entrepreneurs who acknowledge that it's a marathon, not a sprint. The stories about explosive success seem to float to the top of the pile much of the time, but I know that in my own life, persistence over the long haul has been the key to surmounting the most significant obstacles.
"I never tried to monetize really (that was never the point). I learned a lot and it definitely landed me a job or two over the years." I think this is awesome. Obviously, as indie hackers everyone is worried about creating a stand-alone revenue stream that will replace working for others... But I think your story demonstrates well that it's an iterative process, and sometimes working for others will be a necessary step. The fact that your side project skill sets have turned into lucrative employment opportunities just goes to show that even side projects that don't make money themselves can be time well spent because of the doors they open.
Looking forward to reading your posts in the future!
PS I see that you're in Dallas. I used to live in Colleyville. How'd you go from the UK to Texas?
Hey! Sorry for the super duper late reply to this. My wife is from NYC, we met there after college, and she got a job in Dallas, so here we are :-). Actually 3-4 other Brits within a couple of blocks, so I guess I'm in the right neighborhood, lol. Where are you now?
Dam dude, you hit 100K and still deaded the project? I gotta know more about that. Why did you end up shutting it down, was it just not profitable long term.
Wow, sorry for the super late reply here. We we doing about 20k/year, but having trouble closing any new sales. Really we did a bad job positioning the product, we should have started closer to the bottom of the market and leaned on open source.
What's your advice for learning Ruby on Rails and and what were the other languages that went into learning this? Also, what made you choose Vue.js as a framework instead of React? I hear so much hype about React, but I believe Vue is actually more used? Maybe I'm wrong there, long night on my end. This post is great, though, you've kept at it. I also need to learn PHP, didn't realize that allows a site to store data, and I too have started with HTML/CSS and always been impressed with what those 2 can do.
Sorry for the super-duper-late reply here. Leaning Rails? There are lots of tools, like gorails.com. Vue felt better than React because it's more friendly to single-page usage, and it doesn't hate HTML the way react does.