Just one thing like that ruins the enjoyment of the whole project for me. It moves from "oh, cool, someone wants to freely share the stuff hey like" to a suspicious attitude of "what is their real goal here"....
Tricky thing about side-projects to me is they often start as "itches" that I scratch by developing something for my use. The something may be useful to others. However, to make it useful to others requires 10x the amount of effort to "productize" it.
A site like this could be handy if minimally viable side projects could be get feedback to gauge interest in further development.
In my experience, the most consistent way to get useful feedback on side projects or prototypes is to engage with people where they already are (Show HN posts for instance, or certain subreddits). My intuition is it would be hard for this kind of site to maintain enough traffic over the long-term for the average submission to actually get feedback. For OP's sake, I hope I'm wrong though!
If this were to take off, I could totally see myself use it to discover new shiny things. It's pretty difficult to discover novel gems among the vast amount of Github repos.
My issue with following a site like this would be burn out from new products. I followed TechCrunch years ago and ended up signing up for so many start up sites. I'm sure 80% of them don't even exist anymore. When I look at cleaning up my password manager it just seems so daunting. I eventually had to remove it from my RSS reader so I could wait and see what might actually hit crucial mass before jumping on board.
> side-projects to me is they often start as "itches" that I scratch by developing something for my use. The something may be useful to others. However, to make it useful to others requires 10x the amount of effort to "productize" it
This mentality provided a breakthrough for me and has helped me follow through on a side project that I'm now using daily. I don't care at all whether it makes sense for other people. I know what all the buttons/fields/etc are for and it's serving its purpose for me.
Which is why it's a perfect reason to post it on a place like SideProjectors - https://www.sideprojectors.com - for someone else to take it and productize it!
Login with Twitter uses an Oauth scope with more permissions that may be necessary. Do you really need to be able to read my private tweets? Identity should be sufficient. Also, Twitter was the right choice for identity provider for this kind of site.
The first project I looked at [0] reports "[author]" has not shared the story of their project yet. Ask them in a comment " However, the sole comment on the project is by the original author, posting a project description. This suggests that the posting workflow is unclear.
That project also has an associated Kickstarter [1]. As a reader/voter, it would be helpful to have pointers to the various websites that are associated with the project. Make it easy for my to find the official Kickstarter / GitHub / Indigogo / Shapeways / etc
Any idea what happened under the hood there? Do you think you just accidentally guessed an existing username/password combo? Or something more troubling?
The success of these side projects is extremely low so people tend to create multiple of those. But the truth is that a lot of these have great value even if they don’t generate any revenue. It’s kind of like unused real estate.
If anyone has any side projects they want to sell, you can reach out to us and we would be happy to help you find a buyer for them and get rewarded for your efforts even if you didn’t succeed the first time.
I’ve been a serial builder myself. Just building things on weekends, on holidays, every downtime available. Part of the reason is because I just like developing stuff and testing out new tech, but the other reason is because I like living an indie life.
Problem with this is that it is not sustainable, if you are coming from a somewhat wealthy / safe background you can pursue that with ease. But if you are a person with my background (little resources available) you can see that there are a lot of risks that come with that life. I know there are a lot of people that can relate to this and I also know a lot of people will be tempted to open and read this discussion.
Now I will be unapologetic in the fact that I indeed plugged my own project here but I am also presenting an opportunity to people similar to me. People who are risk takers, people with skills that believe they can start small and make a change to the world from zero. I want to help and reward those people.
If you are not one of them that’s fine but I would appreciate if you could keep your criticism more constructive less hostile.
Thanks for explaining. On HN there tend to be a lot of mindless, low-effort hucksters who paste their links without connecting it back to the discussion. As a reader, this is annoying.
You could have made a mean response to 'snap back' but you really turned it into an opportunity that made me want to check out your site. Thanks for that, I hope it works out for you.
Awesome seeing you here, I remember checking out your site when I was doing R&D before I actually started building!
We heavily focus on the tech of the products and actively hunt the ones with great code quality. That’s also the reason we have a few people that do code reviews and generally stay away from no code stuff or outdated projects. So we try to keep things low quantity but high quality. That makes us pretty niche.
The buyers we want to attract will most likely be people that want to save development time and costs by buying existing products and iterating on them with their own team (or themselves)
Another thing is, we actively go out of our way to attract buyers for our sellers. We use all our available channels to find a buyer that might fit a project. This is pretty hard to do but we are doing our best.
d) Please do whatever you can to keep the "i made an amazon reseller blog site" type off of it. Every "buy my business" web site seems to devolve into hundreds of listings for those.
We actively pursue quality when scouting for projects. There is a fine balance we must maintain in order for our goals to come to fruition. Quantity but not clutter, quality but not scarcity.
We want to promote the fact that projects do indeed have value even if they are not generating mrr, but not to the point that people waste resources (their time and expertise) building half-assed projects. To do that we have to actively avoid becoming a d) type marketplace.
It's awesome that you already found something interesting! We have a few communication channels on our website, so if you have any questions I encourage you to reach out to us. In fact I'd be happy to jump on a call with you if you want to learn more about us!
My side project is to generate ideas for how I want computing to be and try implement algorithms that do so. My vision of computing is so far away from how computing works in this era, it's more like Xanadu and The Mother of All Demos. I am a DevOps engineer interested in parallel programming and distributed systems amongst other things, see my GitHub.
I posted my idea pages. I figure they are sources of inspiration for this clique of software engineers and makers.
I logged in using my Twitter profile, however when I go to the "profile" section, the fields appear to be read only? Not sure, but I couldn't seem to update my name.
That is a dark pattern and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Tell me upfront that I need to create an account. Not in small font, on the first page.