Ask HN: Do you have a side project you're getting tired of?
Does your project make too little money and you're getting sick of maintaining it?
I don't need to make a full salary anymore and rather than work a traditional job I'd enjoy maintaining a few projects that were profitable but no longer worth the time of someone who had bigger hopes for them.
I like running the day to day of something that people use, and I'm not looking for any kind of unicorn potential.
Feel free to contact me at the email in my bio to discuss.
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I got this: https://red-bot.io
It's chatbot creation platform based on Node-RED (a low coding tool), basically allows to create a multi channel chatbot visually. It also has a backend for the bots (the place where at some point you might want to manage the bot's users, configurations, etc) and a good plugin system (the idea was to try to make it the equivalent of WordPress for chatbots).
It got some traction at some point, at least a couple of time it was cloned, rembranded and tried to resell as their own. But it allowed me to get my current job (the company got in touch with me for this open source project).
Why I'm tired:
- the only money were coming from consulting, most of the users were hobbyst, not really keen on paying for services - eventually ChatGPT was released and this changed everything, so I stopped developing to see what would happen (and now there are some opportunities actually)
guido.bellomo@gmail.com
I got tired of mine in the sense that I want to stop improving upon it and not worry about writing it such that others may use it one day.
The project is basically a script that scrapes events from various Eventbrite organizers and Meetup groups I am interested in, filters them down by a variety of parameters, and writes them out to ICS files that Proton Calendar can read from. Its been an interesting project because it really reveals how much detritis these sites throw at you in spite of your preferences, and it has helped me basically have something to do with my evenings no matter the day of the week.
What I'm tired of is trying to make it flexible so I can open source it. Screw that! As soon as I gave up on flexibility, the number of lines of code dropped significantly. I occasionally update the code when I discover something new that I want to filter by, but otherwise it can now just exist and I can just run it manually every so often.
Typically I get tired of a side project when I stop learning from it. There's a honeymoon period at the start when you're rapidly prototyping things and figuring it out. Then you get to the point where you've explored the problem domain, figured out what works, and have a clear path ahead - the rest of the work being to just implement the vision. This is the part I get bored.
Something switches in my brain when I've figured out how to solve a problem, it starts to seek a new problem because it considers that one "done", even though most of the work remains. Perhaps it's because that work is more "painting by numbers" after the problem is figured out. Does anyone else experience this?
I've been looking for such a product/project but I don't think it'll be easy to find such a thing. The process from $0 to $x where x > 1 is the most challenging part. x -> x * 2 is much easier as going from 0 to any number, you are essentially breaking the PMF barrier. Someone who did that probably understands business enough to be able to monetize the project into profitability or sell this baby at significant premiums (ie: 5 figures or more).
Most of what I found on Flippa and other markets:
1. AI drivels.
2. Suspicious customers. (ie: probably fraud).
3. Hype driven.
4. Real customers but more like consulting than SaaS.
5. Insane premiums for the value.
I've shot you an email.
I do have a side project that I'm working on since May 2023. I do software, and two partners work on biz dev. We bootstrap in our own time so it's painfully hard to get any progress. Both on biz end and on tech end. We have 3 customers, and a few prospects, and the market we evaluated is big enough to sell to. With people who actually want to buy. But time does not want to stretch, and I don't have it in me anymore to work until 5am :) I'd probably get heart attack if I tried. I'm not tired of it, I'm tired of not being able to push it, it seems $ can buy you time to work on a thing, but we don't have it.