From the author's description of the One Item Store:
> Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the final product, I think its actually really cool. But building it.. it was just a bit boring. There were lots of bugs, and I started to get a bit burnt out thinking about the endless list of things required for a good online store builder.
This is a fascinating observation. In a couple of weeks he's both built something from scratch and figured out that the work of doing it wasn't enjoyable. It takes some people years to get to that point.
To figure out what you want to do, you often have to sift through a lot of fool's gold - junk that looks appealing as an idea but isn't appealing as a part of your life. The tiny projects idea offers a way to accelerate that process.
But the key here is to finish. To have an end point in mind and then reach it. 20% completion may get you 80% of the functionality. But by god, getting that last 20% could be the hardest, grinding work you will ever do. It's going to be very difficult to finish unless it's aligned in some fundamental way with your life.
This makes a lot of sense, and I've recently experienced the same thing. You start out with a blank canvas, everything's easy, you can code what you want and you move fast. As your product evolves, so does its complexity. Suddenly you're no longer just 'quickly going add this', because the constraints of what you already built hold you back. This is especially true for supposedly small projects without a lot of planning.
There are a dozen articles a month on HN from founders or coders with websites that all say “know your customer before you write a line of code” or “find customers ready to write a check” before you start. “Sift through fool’s gold” - that’s what that advice is helping you avoid, time wasted coding a website that has no business validation. Adding features no one wants.
If the author pushed One Item Store and said “I’m going to market it cause it’s cool now, I’ll add features when people ask for them” then he might enjoy it more and be surprised to find people who will use it and pay for it as is.
GP said nothing about customers. They said to align your work with your life. I'd re-phrase what you said as: align your work with the lives of your customers. That might be fool's gold for somebody, nevermind how many HN posts assume otherwise.
My guess is that he had to deal with payment APIs (like Stripe) and it's really not fun to integrate with external APIs that take a lot of doc reading and understanding of a different field.
With all my love to Mr. Levels[1], I'm personally glad the author decided to approach this as their little "Tiny projects" rather than "Follow me as I build six startups in six months". I feel it nicely sets expectations to what I can get out of checking out each project and thinking "well, it's just a tiny project after all, why can't I have made something like this ever month too?". The 12 startups idea was also inspiring to me but I disliked how the term so frequently leads people to (IMO) somewhat pointless analysis of "Is this even a real startup?" around each individual project.
Don't pay attention to the negative nellies. Even these tiny "worthless" projects end up having value because they build a tool chest of skills and code snippets that make each subsequent project quicker and more sophisticated. Eventually you'll Frankenstein pieces of a dozen of these together into something big.
There is an old story about pottery students. A school split a pottery class into two groups. They instructed the first group to focus on making a few exceptional pieces. They judged the second group based on the number of pieces they created measured by weight. The result was that the best pieces came from the second group; those that focused on quantity.
There is value in the experience gained when focusing on quantity instead of quality. Early in ones career it seems wise to spend some time on increasing quantity.
Agreed. James Clear demonstrates this with a similar story. About a real professor’s photography class. The quantity students got a lot better at photography, than the quality group.
This isn't quite accurate. In that anecdote, those focused on quality did nothing but sit around and theorize. Had they spent their time evaluating their skills and improving them with an actual focus on quality, they would've no doubt had the better result.
Build to learn. I love it. One thing I think many engineers and founders discover is they like creating more than they like running a business. A lot of places will look down on that mentality, but you don’t have to be a CEO. You can just be a person who likes to tinker and makes some money on the side.
I remember the origin of this idea. Glad to see him plodding along. I wish I had the stamina. Although I've done 3 things in 6 months that are finished and shipped, I really dislike the "putting myself out there" part. I just quietly move onto the next idea.
Job well done. If anything, more people should build their tiny projects in public and document their journey like you did. Dribbble used to be this place for designers, where a community came together to show work in progress and get feedback from one an other. (then it turned into a marketing platform). There isn't really something like that for tiny software projects. If there was, I would be checking in on a daily basis.
This is fantastic! Do you know if there's an open source project/framework powering this site? Seems really valuable for powering inner-source and private developer communities.
IndieHackers is great for business ideas, but I don't get a lot of value searching for projects there. Seems like a lot of their content is either plain old consulting (writing Wordpress plugins/themes, coaching, etc) or newsletters. Great profitable businesses, but not really intellectually enlightening projects like Tiny Projects.
I love this, and I believe this is what so many more programmers ought to be doing. There's nothing like actually owning a product end-to-end to teach you about which engineering principles actually matter and when.
That is going to be my 2021. Definitely not a launch per week, but aiming to launch a new project every 2 months. I suspect some will even generate something like $1.60!
I'm jealous of what Ben is doing. That's the correct mentality when you're a young, full stack developer, full of energy, with nice ideas and with plenty of time to "play" and showcase your skills. Wondering if he's open to new tiny project ideas ;-)
P.S. He is available for hire over at https://benstokes.dev
All of these projects (even the failures and the flameouts) are 100% fantastic. Some I look at and think "That looks like shit!" Some I look at and think "I don't see the point." Some I look at and think "Wish I'd thought of that." But every single one of them, the shit ones, the pointless ones, the really neat ones, they all have value. Massive learning opportunities, the fact you published something, the fact you experimented. I cannot commend you enough for what you have achieved.
I get involved in "weekend projects" (sometimes they go a little longer than a weekend), and I find that without the pressure to deliver something useful it lets me explore whimsical ideas and learning opportunities I don't get in my day job.
Really cool. Most people wouldnt post if they were 6 for 26 but honestly this is so insightful. I was planning on doing something similar with having 4 weeks to finish 4 upcoming projects. I knew they would probably take longer than the time allotted. This is helpful feedback.
That's really cool and inspiring. I began the year with a similar idea of creating small projects weekly, although my goals were less ambitious. In the beginning of it I already felt in the "insane schedule" hole and realized that it wouldn't work, so I changed plans to at least creating a blog post each week. With that, I could create a better habit and manage to (almost) handle it.
This approach didn't block me from creating small programs/game clones in this period, which I'm keeping in my blog[0] as well, but seeing projects like yours motivates to push harder for bigger projects.
I would be just to afraid for certain ideas like the shop thing.
One credit card fraud going through my system and i might in a big dept if i did this under a company format which doesn't protect me from personal liability.
While i like the idea very much of getting exercise in this way, i'm wondering what the main motivation is?
I would like to earn money through my own company but only with my product i like and find 'worthy'. Trying out small concepts over and over again, might not bring any fruit in finding the thing you are passionate about and then the question arrives if it wouldn't be much more beneficial to optimize your own career instead.
If you're using a reputable payment processor (like Stripe), they should be handling fraud detection and remediation for you. The real thing to watch out for is using your marketplace to sell illegal things. It was even mentioned that there were people for sale... I'm guessing that was done as a joke but it also happens for real.
I've considered many ideas like that One Item Shop and turned away from them because I wasn't sure how to keep people from listing and selling things that will get me sued out of business or thrown in jail. And at £1.63 in revenue, I'm not hiring a lawyer.
I do think its possible to become passinate about things over time.
If you ask me if i want to work on x or y, i will tell you quite easy what i would prefer which i would relate to passion?
Wikipedia would agree on both ways of seeing passion:
"Passion (Greek πάσχω "to suffer, to be acted on"[1] and Late Latin (chiefly Christian[2]) passio "passion; suffering" (from Latin pati "to suffer"; participle: passus)) is a feeling of intense enthusiasm towards or compelling desire for someone or something. "
But i think what makes it more interesting or more motivationg for me is that one thing might have something special in comparison to other things i wanna do.
Like if i work on a product which helps the world vs. a product which is 'just a normal product' i might see more reason to work on the first product.
I probably need to ask you what makes you invest in a project.
> I'm anxious for the month I can't find any new social platforms.
I doubt that'll be an issue for some time, there are so many startups out there either trying to be the next big one or specifically to address the needs of a niche set of users.
Once the project hits a certain level of public awareness new social projects will be contacting the author to ask to be included, there will be no "looking for them" involved (though perhaps some due diligence checking to make sure the platform isn't in some way a project they'd rather not be associated with).
imo I don't agree with the "buy domain name right away" since it may cause you to lose motivation/drive. Having the thought "build it first then when it's done buy a domain" is my thought. As I often buy domains and end up not using them/not finishing the project... still I can see the issue of securing a nice domain name.
I think that would be great to make some project that has returns even a seemingly low sum of $200/mo. That's like a fifth of what I need to live a month, not bad.
Facebook ads for market interest check is an interesting thought albeit maybe expenisve.
edit: the other thing stories like these(pertaining to EarlyName) seem to gloss over is the legal aspect. It is easy to throw up a payment form but who is it paid to and say you're sued for whatever reason... does the few hundred a month justify an LLC sort of thing. That's the part that sucks/part of a business I guess. Some options like fastpring I think. Maybe general ToS/Privacy is enough
It is funny it's like a "solve that problem when you actually have it" sort of scenario. But I do wonder about creating some general LLC that can be an umbrella to random micro saas projects.
I find it best to deploy something as soon as I buy the domain. I try to setup the CI/CD pipeline from day 1 with the framework of my choice and an ugly landing page. That first deploy is a fairly easy early win. And then I’m motivated to keep iterating.
Not sure if I read it (or if I was just thinking it), but if I were him I'd also use Earlyname as a sort of PH type of service. Social (media) websites want to be promoted and get users. Having an influx of early users via Earlyname would help with that. So on the longer term, I'd focus on framing the message to new companies as well. It also means he wouldn't need to search all the time for new social (media) sites.
One Item Store actually solves a real problem that a lot of people have.
I know nothing about web development, and spent days getting a "one item store" WooCommerce/Wordpress site set up a couple of years back.
The performance is woeful and I've been hacked multiple times. Your sites are so snappy and I'm assuming secure-by-default as they're static.
On the other hand, though, your sites look more like Craigslist ads than actual eCommerce sites. The font choice is ugly, and the lack of things like logos, contact/about pages don't exactly fill the user with trust.
If you polished it up a bit, I think you could have a real winner on your hands.
Wow, OneItemStore is awesome. Any chance there's a way to peak at the source? I'm just starting to dip my toes in front-end anything and simple projects like OneItemStore still seem quite daunting.
Impresive! I am also interested in the time management done to achieve this projects.
As someone wanting to have time for side projects I am having a hard time dealing with time.
I work 9 to 5, and want to have time for a lot of essential activities like: reading, jogging, be informed, visit family, hangout, play some games with friends online and sleep well (aka 8h).
I am starting to assume that it's impossible to cramp all these activities in 24 h so I should organize the activities in a week.
>> 1-2 months is a more reasonable tiny project timeframe. It gives you enough time to build something with substance, and test the idea thoroughly.
This is a similar timeframe that Basecamp uses for internal initiatives. I've been pushing for us to switch from 2-week sprints to something closer to 6-week features. If you're building on existing product or a brand new one 1-2 weeks is just not enough time for meaningful progress.
While the article says one week is insufficient to make something meaningful, I've found personally that you can write useful software even in a single day, as long as your feature scope is finely targeted. Actual real life needs of real people are also more interesting to write software for.
It's a blessing to see that there are people who can just build things instead of whining around like: ohh it's not a business... ohh it won't make any money... ohh it's not so simple to build a product... mkay
Thanks for sharing this, you've inspired me to make some tiny projects as well :). Will Earlyname be your last project for a while, or do you plan on continuing at this pace?
If anyone is thinking of replicating this challenge, I would recommend focusing on building tiny projects within a specific domain or set of customers, to boost creativity.
I find this inspiring and think I might do this myself. I have a huge list that makes me anxious to work on, but doing so publicly might force me to do some of them.
The gist of the article is: The OP created a tiny project, launched it on Product Hunt/Hacker News, and moved to creating another project. I'm glad he acknowledges the problem with this:
"A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing".
Here are some tips to help with this:
1) Explore more "steady" acquisition channels. Yes, PH/HN are "spike-y" channels and they're often not enough to have a business generating sustainable income. Read "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg (I'm also doing some research on this topic [1]).
2) Maybe flip the script and do the opposite? Choose 1 or 2 promising projects, and do "six months of exploring user acquisition". Test SEO, FB/Google Ads, partnerships, affiliates, appstores and so on.
+1 for Traction. I reached out to Gabriel on Twitter about creating an app companion to the book to guide you thru the process. He was supportive and it's on my side project list for December or early next year.
I don't understand why the other comments are being so negative, this is awesome. There's a Jony Ive quote along the lines of "when you build something, you get the actual thing, but even more valuable is how you've grown and changed from building that thing.
Best of luck on your future projects, great on you to make awesome stuff and grow as a person!
I think those negative commenters tend to miss what in my opinion is the most critical ingredient of what being a true "hacker" is – doing some things just because you want to, because you're having fun and because you want to see where it may lead. It breeds creativity and original ideas.
A silly idea in the beginning may turn out to not be so silly in the end.
I've been doing a similar thing where I build lots of different SAAS type projects, lots of them will go nowhere, but what I have learned about design, abstraction, and trade-offs is enormous. Definitely worth the time to do something like this. One of my first priorities in hiring someone is to see if they have side projects where they learn things unconstrained by the normal grind of daily professional life.
Well it’s inevitable that the culture of a community is going to drift as it grows. We even have a name for the effect in the hacker community: Eternal September.
I also think the negativity may be reflective of the mood of society overall. This has been a very tough year for so many people. When people are having a tough time I think they can latch on to one of their pet peeves and use it to blow off some steam. We just need to be careful as a community that we don’t allow the discussion to devolve into a toxic flame war. Our tireless moderator dang has been tremendous at that thus far.
The first posts in a thread are usually negative because negative reactions are the easiest to feel and fastest to write. Also, most internet comments are objections to something, and when the thread is blank, the only thing there to object to is the article.
After that, other comments show up to object to the objections. These tend to get upvoted, and that explains the paradox of why so often the top comment says something like "I don't understand why everyone here is so negative".
The main thing to understand is that this has nothing to do with the topic! It's a generic effect of the forum mechanism and group psychology.
In one comment you said that the contrarian dynamic works on HN threads and to internet comments in general.
I just went and opened 10 random Reddit threads on the front page to read the top comments, and found only 2 where this was true, and 8 where this was totally false, most notably [1].
The main reason for negative comments here on HN (IMO) is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People have learned that usually the #1 comment is a negative one, so you have a bunch of people "competing" to be #1 by trying to nitpick whatever is wrong with the original article (even if there is none) in hope to win the popularity contest.
This is why I've seen some friends recently leave HN (their exact words: "couldn't hand the toxicity"). I hope that you, as a Head of Growth, can actively work to break this cycle.
I agree, This was a fun read. I also think this is a really excellent way to gain some experience, do something fun, and potentially hit on a big idea.
I can definitely see the excitement of creating something small but semi-viral on the internet
It's good that he built some side projects and seems like he learned a lot. And the process and write ups are entertaining, but I understand some of the negativity. He comes off as peak tech bro, instead of talking about how he's making the projects for fun or for learning everything is about monetizing or getting views on (admittedly!) poor quality hackathon projects. Dialing down some of the tech bro and the focus on making "products" and I believe the negativity would go away. It doesn't help that his idea process seems to be "what can I make that is like something else, but significantly worse" :). I think it's a great achievement in rapid development, however
What is your definition of “tech bro”? The post comes off to me as someone who is humble, introspective, interested in technology, interested in testing out new ideas, and interested in getting better. Not sure what’s “tech bro” about any of that, but maybe that means I’m a tech bro, bro! /joke
You're right, it appears that tech bro is insulting to the HN audience. Too late to delete or edit my comment, but maybe future readers can ignore the offensive parts of the post. I still stand by the focus on product and selling for projects that were largely about learning could lead to negative comments. I attempted to get some balance in my original comment but it seems like using tech bro negated any of that
No offense taken here! I asked from a place of trying to learn what you meant. Part of why I like HN is because I can find posts that go deep in the technical aspects of things, posts that delve more into the product/business side of things, and lots of stuff in between. I think I understand the spirit of your original reply better now!
> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses
These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.
While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business. I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
This is one of the most disappointing comments I've read on HN. The patronizing negativity is bad enough, but it's not even accurate. Read the article about Earlyname. The author absolutely understands marketing, advertising, and customer acquisition. Oh, he also owns a real-life ice cream business with two locations and (as of 2018) three non-founder employees (https://rippleandroll.com/), so I assume he knows about cash flow and legal matters too.
I never said he didn’t know these skills, I said if he’s not willing to put the time to marketing and advertise each of these websites, then they’re not businesses. There’s nothing wrong with having a hobby of building web apps, I do it too. But a business is more than tech.
Please keep in mind that we may not all share the same idea of what a business is, what a meaningful amount of money is and what success looks like.
When you repeatedly make sales and profit, you’re past the hurdle of not losing money on the operation. It’s a nice milestone on the entrepreneurship journey and worthy of a bit of celebration.
> we may not all share the same idea of what a business is
The IRS has an opinion [1], and its a really good list! Make a copy of it and put a recurring appointment in your calendar to revisit it, think about it, and write down your comments.
Out of curiosity, who do you worry is "pretending this is the path to a successful web business?" Because the author certainly isn't doing so.
If you scroll down just a few paragraphs from the sentence fragment you quoted, the author says:
> "My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects.
A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing. There's this whole other level afterwards called "sales & marketing" that I want to master."
The author is extremely explicit throughout the piece that these are not built to become large businesses—hence the constant use modifiers like "tiny" and "micro." He also makes it clear that he treats this as a training routine for getting better at idea generation, shipping products, etc.
In my opinion he’d be better off focusing on 1, maybe 2, projects and seeing those through to “completion” (whether that’s positive MRR or closing). Which 1 or 2 products? Well he should have done his market research ahead of time and known from his list which ones were most viable. Better yet, he should have found customers ready to hand over their CC information.
I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
The narrative would change and it wouldn't be getting called a "micro-bet" anymore if it did though, no? ;-) We used to just call these "side projects" which I prefer as a term for any sort of cheap experiment you throw at the wall to see if it sticks. I've had several, had two acquired for non-negligible amounts, and another has been my full time business for 10 years now.
You are too negative. "tiny businesses" implies that the author himself does not believe these to be fully fledged businesses, for probably the same reasons you are listing.
I applaud this initiative, instead. It's commendable that someone decided to build not just one, but several things; for fun, and perhaps some profit.
Then, if one of those ideas turns out to be very promising, the rest of the "business" can be quite trivial to setup, at least initially.
> These aren’t businesses. These are websites. [...] Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.
Incorrect. The word business is defined simply as "the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce." or "a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade."
A kid with a lemonade stand has a business. My dad ran a plumbing business that did zero marketing or advertising and had no regular lawyer. According to your definition neither of these are businesses.
Gee, you know come to think of it - Knowing who your customers are is marketing, talking/blogging about your business (however small it is) is advertising, accepting cash and knowing what's in your bank account is cash flow management and avoiding breaking any laws is legal. So, whichever way you look at it - you're wrong.
It is easy to mistake “business” with “being incorporated”. This is terrible because it assumes economic action requires a kind of social legal structure, which is totally false. Viz. jails, war times, very small business...
While there is a danger of spreading yourself too thin (as the author notes, one project a week was far too intensive) there's mileage in the idea of "throw a load of ideas at the wall and see what sticks". It helps you validate an idea quickly and, if nothing else, builds a portfolio you can show to potential employers or clients.
> let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business.
I disagree. There is no point in setting up legal and marketing and advertising if the business is not functional. This is a perfectly suitable path to a successful web business. Obviously he would need to expand on those areas you mentioned if he wanted to make one of these his career but this is the first step on that path.
> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses, and then sticking with the ones that become successful.
The full quote changes the context. From what I understand, he sees it as a way to validate business ideas with small amount of effort.
Small amount of effort? He put 6 months into this. That’s not small. We see sooooo many articles on HN saying “know your customer before you write a line of code” or “find people who are ready to write a check”. Like a dozen of these articles a month from coders who are writing a post-mortem or telling us lessons learned. It’s like we all forgot those important lessons when we read this article.
> That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management
The most projects mentions involved at least a few of hese things, and the last one, Earlyname[0], had them all and has been more profitable than many many "businesses" in SV right now...
But sometimes this is what it takes to find something that sticks or find some meaningful spin-off that generates hundreds and thousands in revenue.
This is the best approach starting out to see what the audience responds to, but the next critical step is to stick with what works for at least 5 full years doing all the things you've mentioned plus SEO (which is a big big).
My main business started as a side-project. Not as tiny as the ones in the article, but it wasn't meant to be my main source of income. And yes, it took years of marketing to reach a mature state, but the essence is that experimenting is what usually brings the real money.
You kind of make my point. You turned your website into a business by spending the time to convert it. Experimenting is fine and it’s fun to build websites and web apps, I do it too. But if I’m not willing to spend the time to listen to clients, figure out what they want and what they’ll pay for, then to me it’s just a hobby.
> I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
That's the whole point of micro-bets. You acknowledge the fact that a small % of them will generate any meaningful $, so you deliberately minimize your losses by making the bets small.
Reminds me of the book "The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work".
Just because you are a good engineer, does not mean you are a good entrepreneur. Most engineers think it's just about building a good product. This is not true.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the final product, I think its actually really cool. But building it.. it was just a bit boring. There were lots of bugs, and I started to get a bit burnt out thinking about the endless list of things required for a good online store builder.
https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store
This is a fascinating observation. In a couple of weeks he's both built something from scratch and figured out that the work of doing it wasn't enjoyable. It takes some people years to get to that point.
To figure out what you want to do, you often have to sift through a lot of fool's gold - junk that looks appealing as an idea but isn't appealing as a part of your life. The tiny projects idea offers a way to accelerate that process.
But the key here is to finish. To have an end point in mind and then reach it. 20% completion may get you 80% of the functionality. But by god, getting that last 20% could be the hardest, grinding work you will ever do. It's going to be very difficult to finish unless it's aligned in some fundamental way with your life.