I spent two years launching tiny projects

I started my professional life ~25y ago with a side project that by 2022 led to roughly 50 more side projects — The vast majority failed, some turned into 200 employee businesses, some others got acquired. In essence, I make a living out of side projects. Side projects are life.

That was actually a pleasant read. I especially like the conclusion to which I can relate.<p>&gt; If you&#x27;re stuck for ideas, I recommend just building something; anything; even if it&#x27;s terrible, and I guarantee a better idea will pop into your brain shortly after.<p>I have been working on a long project for a few years now and it will not be finished before another few years and I envy the speed at which the author gets feedback after he launches his products.

I also do the same as the author, but I only build websites with a clear monetization model. Every project I&#x27;ve done after my first successful one as been in an adjacent audience.<p>Doing roughly $700k revenue yearly right now over the 2 main projects. Hopefully with a 3rd coming this summer.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;siliconvict.com&#x2F;projects" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;siliconvict.com&#x2F;projects</a>

As someone who perpetually overscopes side projects and ends up biting off more than I can reasonably chew given my free time, I really love this idea. What happens with me is I start a new project, then add a new feature here and there (because coding is fun) and end up never reaching anything close to &quot;done&quot; then getting into analysis paralysis of what to do next because there is so much. Ultimately it gets abandoned and forgotten and put on the graveyard of all the other side projects - not that this is horrible, I do them for fun and not profit, but it would be nice to launch a few.<p>If OP is actually the author, a question - what was your approach in keeping the projects tightly scoped and not introducing feature creep? Deadlines or time-boxing? Pre-emptive deciding on what you will and won&#x27;t do? Lowering your standards for &quot;good enough&quot;? Just plain old discipline? Something else?

One thing I would have loved to read about is more about how they did market validation for these ideas. For a micro-bet strategy knowing which one (outside of really interesting projects that would trend on HN), it feels like market validation chops would be crucial.<p>The author seems to be batting an insanely high average for just building things and having them actually get some traction, and be exit-able.<p>&gt; When I started this mission, I had a big list of project ideas that I&#x27;d built up in my phone. Maybe you have one of those lists too.<p>&gt; Two years later, I&#x27;ve realised a lot of these initial ideas were pretty terrible.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s a paradox, but I&#x27;ve found that my best ideas now come from building other ideas.<p>Funnily enough, I went the other way and started sharing my large list of ideas with others (I send 3 non-terrible ones to subscribers every week[0]). Of course, running a mailing list and sharing the ideas was one of the ideas...<p>At this point market validation (and practice validating ideas) is starting to seem like the most important thing. Knowing you <i>should</i> take the month to build before you do, but reading the post it feels like maybe bounding initial development time sometimes can work in lieu of validating the market.<p>[EDIT] - please see previous discussion about the mailing list as well![1] -- it&#x27;s released every sunday night.<p>[EDIT2] - is anyone having trouble sending email to the author? I&#x27;m using protonmail and wanted to get in touch but I can&#x27;t -- email looks to be no bueno for proton mail. I guess I&#x27;ll either try thunderbird or twitter.<p>[EDIT3] - Looks like proton mail does not like emoji email addresses currently... Thunderbird happily sent.<p>[EDIT4] - Nope, nvm I&#x27;m getting a mail lookup error (hn strips the emoji)...<p>&gt; Delivery to tinyprojects@.gg failed with error: MX lookup error<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31388399" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31388399</a>

Does anyone let the tax implications of launching (several) tiny projects prevent them from even starting?<p>I know LLCs allow for pass-through taxation and you don&#x27;t have to file as a business, but I get frozen by the idea that generating a few hundred dollars in revenue from some silly side project means I have to spend hours&#x2F;days of my time the next Spring figuring out how to properly pay taxes on it.

I started doing the same but with macOS apps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowtechguys.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowtechguys.com</a><p>Reading about the author&#x27;s projects in the past is actually what inspired me to do it.<p>I used Windows for a long time before as a power user (living my life in FarManager and WinAPI), then switched to Ubuntu with i3.<p>After finally switching to the Mac, I loved its simplicity and how it freed my mind from micro-managing the system, but I also noticed its shortcomings and how some things were better on Windows&#x2F;Linux.<p>Nowadays I&#x27;m making small apps to overcome those macOS shortcomings, and help others find their carefree macOS setup where the system doesn&#x27;t get in the way of real work.<p>And it&#x27;s going pretty well! I&#x27;ve also shared the source of the framework [1] I&#x27;m using for these apps, so that I don&#x27;t have to constantly reimplement payments, licensing [2], SwiftUI styles&#x2F;components and utility functions on each new project.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FuzzyIdeas&#x2F;Lowtech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FuzzyIdeas&#x2F;Lowtech</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FuzzyIdeas&#x2F;LowtechPro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;FuzzyIdeas&#x2F;LowtechPro</a>

I&#x27;ve been following these, and it seems like such a fun thing to do. He seems to have been lucky that he caught on to his real product on day 1 -- semi-viral blog posts.<p>Still I imagine it&#x27;s hard for most people to go 2 years on a few thousand of sporadic revenue.

Ummm. Interesting about mailoji. Not actually legit according to ICANN to use &quot;non collating&quot; punycode or multiple languages in an ICANN-controlled domain: you can&#x27;t register them.<p>But, it&#x27;s a CC TLD, in fact it&#x27;s .kz who I still carry a scar or two from when they issued some domains starting with &quot;-&quot;: you know what happens when you &quot;dig -yo.tld&quot;? OWASP applies to domain names.<p>However, the RFCs for the actual _protocol_ declare a label can contain &quot;any octet&quot;, so you can use and abuse this in FQDNs under your control and the internet police won&#x27;t come to get you. &quot;poop&quot;.example.com would be fine if you control example.com (either as a quoted string or as an emoji), so would &quot;rm -rf *.example.com&quot;.

I really like this idea of creating small projects instead of just building a startup as it would be too much work for me. Can you guys give me more examples about projects that generate money or least a lot of people use it for free.

As someone who has written down probably 100&#x27;s of little ideas over the years, and never built even a single one of them ... I applaud you

&gt; Previously I&#x27;d used this code to buy facebook.网站, only for Marky Z to snatch it back from me. Cheeky bugger.<p>LMAO. The emoji emails is really cool though. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyprojects.dev&#x2F;projects&#x2F;mailoji" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyprojects.dev&#x2F;projects&#x2F;mailoji</a>

While I want to execute the idea I am always put off by the essential administrative stuff such as user management, payment gateway linking, subscription management.<p>Are there any open source plug and play options available out there which can take away this tedious but important work?

Same here, and one of them made it into an actual business: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;murmel.social" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;murmel.social</a><p>One of these days, I need to sit down and write th origin story of Murmel, and how I came to it.<p>Cheers!

General Question for people who do these tiny projects, which might make some money. Do you register a company for this? How do you deal with taxes if you made a small amount of money from them?

Loved this! Being able to limit scope and just build is a skill that too often gets lost

Have you written anywhere about the technology you use underneath - from languages to libraries to hosting?<p>I’ve got a few ideas somewhere between just started and half-written, but I often grind to a halt when it comes to figuring out sensible hosting. As an amateur, the world of AWS vs. GCE vs. Azure vs. Heroku vs. many, many others is difficult, and there are scary stories about out of control costs abound.

How do you get people interested in your projects both from a consumer and production standpoint? Basically I am wondering what the best ways you have found to SELL whatever project you are working on (even if say the project is technically free to the end user) and also how do you sell someone else on collaborating with you?

I feel like having a bunch of tiny projects is probably a great way to learn a ton. I&#x27;ve slowed down on personal projects since graduation, but focusing on something tiny might be what I need to hear&#x2F;do to get back into learning some new stuff. Good on the author&#x2F;OP!

There&#x27;s an undercurrent of subversive genius here, which is awesome. Great read!

How do I start coming up with all these actionable ideas? I mean, not that these are great, but it really doesn&#x27;t matter for me, implementing them does. It just makes me feel ashamed for my lack of industriousness.

I was going to ask how your host your projects since lots of small hosting fees can add up. I saw a guide on your site where you use Firebase, which would explain how you keep things cheap. Is that still your strategy?

I did this for a while (most never shipped) but I had a different idea that I haven&#x27;t tried which is to set a small monthly budget and have others develop and maintain the tiny project. That way you get a whole different game to play. Some tasks are much cheaper than others and hiring experience is a lot more efficient than learning a new skill yourself.<p>I imagined myself [silently] looking at such projects to see how they progress. I had a lot of fun looking from afar after explaining to folks how to do websites in html.

This reminds me of Don Lapre’s placing tiny classified ads verbiage.

I&#x27;ve seen your projects before, and I am like you where I don&#x27;t like projects that depend on me creating content but I rather like technical challenges. Great write up!

Very cool that you&#x27;re launching projects!<p>I endeavour to do this as well.<p>Out of curiosity, what do you do to generate food to eat though? The projects don&#x27;t appear to bring in much bread.

I love this post. Thanks Ben. It&#x27;s especially generous to share pageviews and revenue numbers which are so frequently kept private. I didn&#x27;t though understand this point from the post:<p>&gt; One other weird downside is that .. I sometimes catch myself thinking &quot;should I build something just for the upvotes&quot;.<p>Is the author saying the attention from social media sites like Hacker News sometimes seems like motivation enough to build the next project?

This is awesome and what I initially set out to do but always found a way to talk myself out of it. I dream big. I found a project to stick to &quot;completion&quot; but it took me two years to build alone. I&#x27;ve only lost money but it&#x27;s been a wild ride of an experience. This tiny project approach sounds like a lot of fun and conveniently my project will help me down that path while I try to market my work.

$18000 off of emoji email in kazakhstan? what the hell?

I remember seeing snormal on here a while ago. I played around with it briefly because the idea was refreshing, but ended up not coming back for a while because the scrolling was really painful in Firefox on Android.<p>The premise really resonates with me. I&#x27;ve often struggled with maintaining a presence on any social media, and barely ever post because everything&#x27;_s normal_.

Always, when I see someone doing this projects I wonder how easily is to do legal stuff with projects that don&#x27;t offer you a high revenue.<p>How do you pay taxes for a international business? Do you have to pay in every country that you have s costumer?<p>Also, how do you make sure everything is legal in every country that it&#x27;s accessible?

I believe this is a good way to quickly filter through a bunch of ideas that may or may not work and stick with those that have potential. Luckily these days launching new ideas is easy. You don&#x27;t need to invest too much money and time as long as you keep it simple and to the point.

This is very inspiring, thank you! Having never done it, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get your ideas out the door. It looks like you found the perfect tempo and scope, tiny projects rock.

What I found interesting is the iterative process. Failure is simply experience you carry forward to inform future decisions. Its not necessarily a permanent judgement that cripples you.

Anyone got any tips on how you write down your ideas? Physical pen an paper, digital, excel sheet, or word?

Properly want to vet ideas a bit before executing.

I’m interested in finding out how did you come up the ideas? I’m trying to come up with ideas and drawing a blank.

Great projects, has already kicked off some ideas for myself. Thank you for the inspiration!

I enjoy building stuff, but rarely have any ideas. Congrats on mastering the art of both!

Haven&#x27;t you have problems with emojis emails? They are supported everywhere?

I loved this post. Congratulations, really cool tiny projects, I&#x27;m jealous.

Many thanks for sharing your stories with us! Very impressive and inspiring.

How do you even find ideas for these?

what&#x27;s the fastest tech stack or other way to go from idea to product...

What&#x27;s the main advice you can give to a newbie, wanting to start more tiny projects himself?

Amazing advise, always been thinking of my next great idea and never have time to complete it