Ask HN: How long did your last side project take?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2014 where @alixander convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 8 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 16 comments
http://www.TrendsFormer.co took me 3-4 days.
I created the site as a hobby project to show the trend of something over time, starting with restaurants/locations from Google Places and Yelp.
It started as an idea after I had a really bad quality food and service from a restaurant rated 4 out of 5. So with TrendsFormer, I'll be able to see whether the restaurant's quality has gone down over time through a "trend line".
The first version of my side project (http://www.kopyscreen.com/) took about 8-10 hours, but somehow my interest level went down after showing it to my friends.
I want to add few more features to complete it but for about 6 weeks, I did not do any work on it :-(
http://teamsite.io - Over 6 months working evenings and weekend and am almost done... It's an existing space so I needed to have all the features of my competitors upon launch.
6 weeks. very loose working hours and very relaxed coding. if i were working on it during my actual work hours it could have taken 2-3 days.
fetchtext.herokuapp.com
Took me about 3 hours, because the library it is based on is wonderful :)