5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0

I'm one of the folks who took part in The Quittening that the last year has made for us. I left a demanding, unfulfilling startup job in July. The main factors in why I was able to do this was:

* a large nest egg due to nearly a decade of investing as much excess income as possible into index funds (If you're in the FIRE community, I suppose you could say I'm in a state of "Lean FIRE".)

* being married to someone who had the understanding to support me in pursuing this, as well as help me purchase affordable health insurance thru her work. (Love you, Emma!)

I took a few months off to not work on anything, at all, except for some very small pet-projects - programming for fun kinda stuff. Starting about a month ago, my focus shifted towards launching a job board targeted to a pretty specific niche in my main area of expertise. It's been my full time thing for about a month, and I'm getting some appreciable traction in the form of newsletter signups. Hasn't made me any money yet. I'd tried launching a few small websites before as part-time endeavors; all of those have ended exactly like the author's posts have.

Given all that meandering context: one of the things this project has taught me is that it is INCREDIBLY HARD to launch a side business with a day job. I'm not a web developer, so I've had to spend a lot of time learning HTML, CSS, JS, and all the LAMP stack stuff as I go. I had to spend three or four whole days just figuring out how to deploy this fucking thing to a cloud service. That's supposed to be easy! Or, at least, all the cloud providers' websites would have you think so. At least two of those days were trying and failing to set up AWS instances. (Thank god almighty for PythonAnywhere.)

I used to think I was stupid or unskilled for not being able to launch websites and software businesses in my spare time. Nope! Turns out, it's hard work, and it can easily take up all of your working hours! It's easy to think, being an HN netizen, that there are tons of people who can do this as a side hustle and make bank doing easy work, but I simply don't believe that's true. I think the folks who do succeed at this are some combination of:

* lucky,

* very attuned to a niche market with money to spend, or

* blessed with exceptional product sense for a software utility that doesn't exist yet.

OP - I'm sorry that none of your efforts have yielded monetary success, and I admire your perseverance for continuing to try. It's easy to beat yourself up over trying so hard, so many times, and being rewarded with nothing back. I just wanted to say that what you are trying is harder than most folks on HN want to admit, and to try to hang onto your positive attitude towards continuing to learn. Your opportunity will come.

I launched 5 major software projects over the last 15 years. The first one was a failure; the big lesson I learned from that failure was that I couldn't salvage or re-purpose any of the code; aside from educational value, all that work had been wasted. After that experience, I tried to build all my projects in such a way that I could always salvage/re-purpose my work.

My second project was a software development framework which I tried to sell it as a SaaS platform. The platform was a commercial failure but the open source framework became popular and I was able to convince the founders of a popular blockchain project to use it as part of their P2P layer.

Although that project was a technical success, because I didn't own any meaningful stake in that blockchain project, I wasn't able to capitalize on this opportunity so it was a commercial failure for me.

So then we (me and some open source community members who joined along the way) used that blockchain as a base to build a Decentralized Exchange and 2 new blockchain projects. Although these projects have not yet succeeded commercially (still working on it), I managed to secure passive income as a blockchain validator on the base blockchain. Securing this passive income was my first hint of commercial success after 10 years of trying. Anyway, it's an ongoing story but if my current 3 active projects don't succeed commercially, I have already planned for the next projects to build on top...

The goal is to just keep building stuff on top of this blockchain ecosystem, welcoming new contributors along the way and keeping everything open source.

Maybe I have a different definition of "side project" and/or it's somehow a HN-bubble about articles like "I earned 100k with my side project", but for me a side project is exactly the opposite of what seems to be the target is the author: I have side project in my free time, because it is always about stuff I don't get paid for but I need somehow. Is it about software to use for me and my friends or to learn about something. But it is always under the premise of not gain any cent from it. And I understood articles about making money from a side project exactly about being lucky to start something without financial intension and gain money anyways. If course I would love to get money for my side project, but worth noting, that I don't get any attention on it anyways: for example I build esp-ena, a covid hardware tracker to be compatible with exposure notification framework. I don't want any money, it was I side project, but it was still a failure because it didn't get the attention I hoped for (that maybe someone starting to make this professional). So of course it was not about money, but I had bigger expectations than just being for myself. I'm the end I think, side projects should always stays something you create just for you and maybe it goes bigger, but when planning to make more than that out of it, you shouldn't make it a side project and start a business instead.

Oof. I have something similar as other stories posted here.

I have about 30 pet projects from the past 10 years or so, not released to the public and I treat them as utterly private. A few of them have gotten me through job interviews when I would have failed otherwise. I think some of them exist as a form of therapy. I can probably "productize" 2 or 3 of them but then the world will be the judge of my work. The code I write at home is much different from what I do at work, where we supposedly follow best practices and at home.. I just express myself. I'm so utterly pleased with some of the things I've come up with that would make development easier (not a new framework, don't worry) but I cannot take it to work since it would mean blasphemy and it would most likely make our architect have another meltdown.

My favourite project of the bunch is a code/platform generator. After that one it is probably the small storage engine I've built cause I got frustrated with sql + object mapping - it works so nicely but the entire community/industry will take a dump on it, as relational/sql db's are supposedly god.

I maybe want to share some of my work with the world, not as side-projects to earn money, but perhaps just for the fun of it and to contribute yet another shape of doing something - even if it is to educate how not to do something, that is fine too.

Maybe I'm just old and cranky and this is a generational thing, but when did "side project" become mixed up with "side hustle"?

I think the dead horse has been beaten already in this thread, with what the author "should have done" in terms of market research, A/B testing, MVP, etc. No need for me to pile on further there.

But what strikes me is that the author really seems to draw no distinction between personal side projects, done for the purpose of developing new skills that you aren't learning at your day job (e.g. iOS development, Ruby on Rails, etc)... versus entrepreneurial side hustles that you pursue for the dream of financial independence.

I think the the lesson here is, "Pick one". If you're trying to get rich, then that's not the time dive into some completely unfamiliar tech whose learning curve will slow down your velocity. You should be leveraging whatever boring tech you already know and are already most productive in, so you can focus on the marketing research and business side of things. Conversely, if you're trying to dive into an educational side project to learn new skills, then it's rather naive to expect that to be a path to riches. It won't be, and that's okay!