ROUNDTABLES ★ 4 upvotes 2020

Ask HN: Old side project sites still online that you're (secretly) proud of?

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @rikroots on Hacker News:

For New Year, I decided to 'audit' my personal domains for old sites that can be scrapped. One of the sites I found dates back 7 years - a small, interactive site I built to help promote my first novel[1].

As a promotion tool the site was a complete failure, but I remember spending weeks building it - using lots of shiny new-to-me libraries like Moment, Raphael and Cufon (for fonts) - and having great fun doing the work.

So question: what personal sites do others have which, when they stumble across them again, brings back lots of fond memories?

[1] - http://vreskiwards.rikweb.org.uk/ - I even built the alien font myself!

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @rikroots convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
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.

HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 4 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 0 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: