I Built a Completely Ridiculous Calculator: How Many Camels Am I Worth?
I've built a few small web projects over time, and I've noticed something about side projects.
The simplest ideas are often the easiest to explain.
You don't need a complicated pitch deck. Sometimes you just need a question that makes someone curious enough to click.
So I built one around a question that is difficult to take seriously:
How many camels am I worth?
The result is How Many Camels Am I Worth?, a small web-based calculator that gives you a completely unofficial camel score based on a few personal characteristics.
Why build something this silly?
Honestly, that was part of the experiment.
There are thousands of serious calculators and productivity tools online. I wanted to build something that had almost no practical purpose but was immediately understandable.
The entire value proposition can be explained in one sentence:
Enter some details about yourself and find out how many camels you're worth.
That's it.
There is no complicated onboarding.
There is no long explanation of the product.
There is just a strange question and a result.
The interesting part is not the calculator
The calculator itself is fairly simple.
The more interesting question for me as a maker is whether a tiny, slightly ridiculous idea can get people to interact with a website.
There are a few things working in its favour.
1. The idea is easy to understand
You don't need to explain a business problem or demonstrate a complicated workflow.
Someone sees the question and immediately understands what the site does.
2. The result is naturally shareable
If someone gets a result, the next obvious question is:
"What did you get?"
That creates a natural reason to send the site to someone else.
You can compare your result with a friend, partner or family member.
3. It has a built-in curiosity loop
Most people probably won't wake up thinking about camel valuations.
But once someone asks you how many camels you're worth, it's surprisingly difficult not to find out.
That tiny bit of curiosity is enough to get someone to click.
I think this is an underrated type of side project
As indie hackers, we often think about solving painful problems.
That's obviously important when you're building a business.
But there is another category of project worth experimenting with:
small products that solve curiosity rather than a serious problem.
They don't necessarily need subscriptions or complicated pricing models.
They can simply give people a reason to visit, interact and share.
That makes them interesting experiments for learning about distribution.
The challenge is getting people to care
Building the website is only part of the job.
Getting people to actually use it is much harder.
A simple tool can exist for months without anyone discovering it.
That means distribution becomes the interesting part of the experiment.
I'm trying to introduce the site in places where people might genuinely find the idea amusing, rather than simply dropping a link everywhere.
That's also why I'm interested in communities like Indie Hackers.
The feedback from other builders can be more useful than simply watching a visitor count.
What I'm learning from the project
The biggest lesson so far is that a product does not always need a complicated explanation.
A good idea can sometimes be reduced to a question.
"How many camels am I worth?"
You understand it immediately.
Whether you think it's funny, stupid or both, you probably understand why someone might click.
That is a useful lesson for building almost anything online.
If you can't explain what your project does quickly, you may have a positioning problem.
What's next?
For now, I'm interested in seeing how far a deliberately simple idea can go.
I'm looking at things like:
How people discover the site
Whether people complete the calculator
Whether they share their results
Which types of content bring visitors
What people say about the idea
Whether small changes to the experience affect usage
I'm deliberately treating it as an experiment rather than pretending I have everything figured out.
If the project grows, great.
If it doesn't, I still get to learn something about building and distributing a tiny internet product.
And, at the very least, I now have a website where people can answer a question they probably never expected to ask.
Try it
If you're curious, here's the project:
https://howmanycamelsamiworth.co.uk/
I'd genuinely be interested in hearing what you think.
Is this the kind of tiny project you'd build as an experiment?
And more importantly:
How many camels are you worth? 🐪
