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Show us your very first side project!

I'm curious to see your first side project.

Is it still alive?

What have you learned from it?

I started selling presentation templates on Zlides in Aug 2019. It's still alive and have been supporting my coffee budget.

I learned how to develop a small brand in the red ocean and maintain consistency in marketing communications.

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      We need to celebrate the 20th anniversary 😉

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        Kinda wish it was still live, that would be amazing 😀

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      Wow, 2000 is a long time ago. Congrats to over 20 years side-projects!

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        Thanks, been at this a long time!

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    Built snipper.io in late August 2018, built it in a few days to easily share and collaborate in real time on the same code snippet.
    Launched on PH (featured, 140 upvotes) and HN (reached the first page), didn't make a penny out of it 😂 but it was worth the experience.

    It is still live today, with around 1000 users per month, i'm very proud of it 😄

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      1000 users a month is big. Very happy for you. No plan to monetize or upgrade it? @redChili

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        Thanks! I did started working on it last December, i was planning to add some premium features but i got super busy working for my startup.

        I am monetizing a bit with some ads, just a few buck a month.

        Now i started working on another side project ( Splitstack ) , once i finish this i will continue working on snipper.io 😄

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          Smart solution! Make sure you launch strong 🙌🏻 Would love to try! Ping me

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            Sure! We are planning to launch first MVP in a couple of weeks 😄

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    here.

    colorsandfonts.com

    it has rain a lot since then...

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      It's a good one man. Always enjoy reading your story @Michael_Andreuzza

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    Let this Rest In Peace 😆

    buildfaster.co

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      No way - are you not working on Buildfaster any more?

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        Yep 😐

        You can read a post from a few months ago here https://dev.to/braydentw/i-m-dropping-my-side-project-here-s-why-2h2d

        Just wanted to explore other paths and come up with a more solid idea.

        BuildFaster didn’t have the set target audience, problem, or solution right out of the gate. All I wanted to do was make HTML templates and that’s about it. It wasn’t good enough to scale.

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          Sorry to hear that Brayden - hopefully you were able to take a lot of lessons away from it. Looking forward to seeing what you build next!

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            Yes I have. Thanks for your support!

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    Mission Control Plus still brings in a cool 1k$ a month in passive income 😎

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    I'm building Hoppscotch.io - an API testing tool.

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    https://remoteleaf.com is my first ever side project ⚡

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      It’s a good one. How’s the performance so far?

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    I'm still on my first one (I'm pretty new to the community :D). https://tweetpop.app/

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      Smart project! How’s the performance so far? @subg

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        Thank you! Admittedly have been trying to perfect things too much and not getting the product out there as much I should. I'm focussing on promoting it from now so fingers crossed :)

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    famijam.com - I am working on relaunching from scratch.

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      Go for it. let us know how to support ;)

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    Apparently my first side project was a quiz. This originally was a classroom assignment written in Basic and I ported it to Python.

    https://github.com/pkafei/Quiz/blob/master/quiz.py

    What happened to the class? I enrolled in a computer science certificate program at a local community college and dropped out when the instructors didn't know what git was. After dropping out, I joined a startup working with scikit-learn, and the rest is history.

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    Todoo - I guess it's still alive, but I've long since stopped maintaining it.

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      That’s awesome! When was it and how many active users @hessel

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    Fun question!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3y8lY9vSMU a real-time GPU-based path tracer.

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    I have been working on my first and only project as of now i.e Backgroundcut.co . I am about to launch it on few platforms by next week. This project has made me realize how tough and time taking it is for solo Indiehackers to get a polished product out there. 🙏🙏🙏 to all the people who single-handedly made a project to success.

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    I built a website that lets restaurants to create a QR Code based digital menu for free.
    Live at: https://www.qr-menuu.com

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      Great one @DirtyRonin ! Big fan of Notion too, this is mine: https://virtualmojito.com/

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        Aye you made it a website so cool

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    eventhunt.io - dead - Launched on 19th January 2015 on PH, made it to #2 that day.

    I guess I can say this was my first real side project. :)

    I have learned a lot from this project, since it got quite a large exposure. Over 30k people signed up for newsletters for specific cities and community based (volunteers) moderation for events. Built in couple of weekends.

    Then two years later, Meetup changed their API and there wasn't enough time for upgrade. :)

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      Awesome product. You should definitely consider a re-launch @sotak

      Btw I’m behind https://virtualmojito.com/ - I like events too :)

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    Yes, live. www.Annoup.com

    I've learned that initial user acquisition is extremely tough, especially driving stickiness to those users. Also it's tough to build a 2-sided-type 'marketplace' where users pay other users for content-like substack.

  16. 1

    Launched a blog called Gold Ink which uses writing to trailblaze change: https://goldink-blog.com. It is new and well alive!

    I am learning a lot about marketing techniques as I work to grow my various social media techniques as well as how to create digital products!

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      Awesome progress @ErykahY - how can the IH fam help you more?

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        Thank you! My monthly goal is to grow to 100 followers on Instagram as a way to get greater exposure. Any tips on growing social media accounts and/or sharing Gold Ink with your network would help greatly!

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    LOL -- I cant believe I still pay for the hosting and domain. Of course, looking back it is a bit embarrassing, but I learned a lot.

    It is supposed to be simple directory of all the startup and tech events around in your city (about 65 or so to date).

    https://www.3cosystem.com

    It was super useful (and might still be to some people) for a happyhour or wanting to just see what was going on in a local tech scene.

    Lessons / learning:

    1. First Django project. Yay
    2. First touch with minimum CSS framework (purecss.io)
    3. First touch with Docker. Wow
    4. Seemingly simple tasks can be incredibly complex if you want it to be stable.
    5. Use sentry.io or some other exception catching tool. You really get to see how your app can fail in real-world scenarios.
    6. Long-running tasks can be hard if you make them hard. While True looks FTW!
    7. Consuming some-times broken JSON off a firehose HTTP streaming API is more difficult than it sounds.
    8. Many meetup.com organizers have no idea how to use the platform and spam their events all over the space (evidence is in my data).

    This project is open sourced here: https://github.com/undernewmanagement/3cosystem

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    You are asking me to embarrass myself! My first side project was selling cheap Android tablets when I was 14/15 - I sourced them on one of the wholesale platforms, waited about 4 weeks for them to arrive, then flogged them online. Made about £100 profit. overall so nothing groundbreaking 🤣.

    I called it quits once I sold my stock of 10. Thought I was going to sell them overnight and become a millionaire. It didn't work out.

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      Definitely not embarrassing :) sounds like an interesting experience! I don’t have the same courage 😉

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    College made clothing company is still limping along! 😂. I love it too much to let it go, so it will never die!

    https://www.thestokedcompany.com/

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    My first side project ever was Scoold.com, which I started back in 2008, and I'm still working on it! It is very much alive and even profitable. I know it's crazy but I guess I'm kinda lucky.

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      Big congrats man @albogdano

      13 years!!! What a journey. What’s your biggest takeaway?

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        My biggest takeaway was that I realized how pivoting a failing project can actually save it and even turn it around to make profit. I don't know if this works for all projects but if you have a failing project always try to modify it so it fits the market better. Try to find what similar thing people are looking for and move your project towards that thing. Never scrap your work! I believe there is something valuable to be extracted from every failed project. Reuse everything you make - it saves you tons of time in the long run.

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    My first side project was writing C++ and building a moderately successful sports management sim in the early 2000s. This was back when you needed a publisher to actually reach people with physical products (besides shareware). It was really fun to see my product on the shelves in the local Game store :)

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    Ahah great thread!

    My first project was a site for sharing content about the game Animal Crossing ^^ It's still live! I think I used Gatsby (I'm mostly on Next.JS now).

    https://www.acnhpattern.com/

    It was a great experience and I learned a lot :)

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    https://seorankingchecker.com
    tool for everyone, who wants to optimize website pages

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      Great one! How long have you been working on it? Very useful tho @moneyroad

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        not very long, now in kinda "marketing" phase :D

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    Lol just found my first web-based side project still lives on (kinda) in Wayback Machine from 2014:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20141217171202/http://hypedup.net/

    Built in my free time during my first internship, running on some really gnarly LAMP stack and started out a purely jQuery drive SPA. Got a whopping 0 users but I learned a ton about web development and haven't stopped building since.

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    Definitely not alive anymore! Although I guess if you still have any devices running iOS 4 you could still download it: http://trially.com/.

    Taught me how to do a little development, build a little website, and promote something. I'd like to think I've come a long way since then :-)

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      I can tell you had a great journey and learned so much. What are you working on now? @heytherebuddy

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    Hi Felix!
    I have started building tiny projects every week since the beginning of this year and I have made a couple of side projects! I actually just wrote a blog post on the tiny projects I have created and the journey so far. The projects are all still up and running currently! I learned it is hard to find an idea that solves a problem while also providing enough value to have someone pay for it.
    https://www.markstinyprojects.com/blog/one_month_tiny_projects.html

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      Oh woah @BostonIndieHacker you're killing it!

      Which project is your favourite so far?

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        I really enjoyed Hedwig Newsletter due to the No Code aspect, but think that the Dividend Tracker was cool because it was the first web app that I built from scratch!

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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      This is extremely important. Say no to spam!

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      We’ve love to support. Let’s eat healthier @abraham

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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