There’s an opportunity here to transmit wisdom from now (age 36) to when I was 20-something (you). Normally I don’t explicitly mention age; I hated when people did that to me when I was younger, and maybe it’s a rite of passage that you only "get it" when you’re older.
Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.
Both parts are important. Step one means that you won’t take it personally if you fail. You won’t be disappointed because you weren’t hoping for anything to begin with. Step two means you’ll actually put in effort where it counts, by analyzing the situation dispassionately. Do those things that people say are important. Market your work. The best marketing I’ve found is to make entertaining HN and Twitter posts (seriously; 100% of whatever small amount of notoriety I have stems from these two sources). More importantly, design your apps to be gathering money. That means doing something that most people would call "a dick move". Perfect example: I just tried a 3d scanner app called prodAR. There was no tutorial, some of the interface was broken, it didn’t support screen rotation, and it demanded $30/yr before it allowed me to save my scan. I paid the $30. Why? Because it yields the best scans of any app I tried. It delivers quality where it counts, and wastes zero time anywhere else. This is the essence of being effective.
Personally, I’m terrible at step two. I can’t bring myself mentally to be ok with shipping a 3d scanner that doesn’t e.g. support screen rotation. That’s also why I haven’t shipped anything that generates passive income, and why I’m trying to steer you the other direction. It’s really ok to ship crap, as long as it’s crap in areas that aren’t the core value proposition of your product. It’s arguably necessary to ship crap if you ever intend to make money. Even pg would admit his initial v0 of startup news was (very) slightly crappy in areas that didn’t get in the way of the essence of what became Hacker News.
That’s the best I’ve got. Good luck, and I hope you make a nice passive income stream for yourself. Don’t underestimate the effects of growth; even $30/mo should impress you, not disappoint you, as long as you focus on exactly one thing: make that number go up over time, superlinearly. https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
>Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.
Like the Stockdale paradox:
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/Stockdale-Concept.html
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”
By the way, I was always pretty good about step one. The reason I’m decent at raising money for various causes is because I never have my hopes up to begin with. It always astonishes me that people are willing to, and I end up feeling grateful and take the responsibility seriously. This turns out to have protected me from the worst effects of seeking money: when people end up feeling entitled because you worked so hard and therefore you deserve it. I’ve seen this firsthand in various people in my life (especially one particular extended family member) and they ended up feeling crushed when their hopes didn’t work out. Don’t do that either.
"a 3d scammer app" this one sounds like the real money maker :p
Thank you! I ducking hate iPad autocorrect. Lately it feels like you fight it more than it gets it right. LLMs can’t come too soon to crash this party.
LLMs tend to come with ducking content filters, though.
I used to ask people if they’d be ok with a keyboard manufacturer restricting what you were allowed to type, in hopes of illustrating how absurd safety filters can be. Now I’m bracing for keyboards actually doing this once LLMs get involved with helping us type less, aka completing our thoughts. It’s a tossup whether they’ll just not show the offensive completions, or whether they’ll go out of their way to remove offensive language as you type it.
Imagine fighting with a keyboard AI to let you sling a fuck-you when you feel it’s warranted. Yet it’s easy to imagine the whole paragraph getting reworded by the AI to remove the whole basis for you saying fuck-you in the first place. I don’t know whether to feel grateful it toned me down, or upset that it’ll get in the way of what I originally wanted to say, bad idea or not.
Sorry for the tangent. It’s just interesting to imagine the weird world we’ll be in ten years from now. It takes about a decade for huge effects to become apparent, and the battle for language itself is one that I don’t think many people realize is coming. Being prevented from swearing vs prevented from voicing improper thoughts is too close for comfort.
But, market forces will prevail in the end. I still have faith that we’ll see a pushback from people fed up with safety filters, and that a startup can capitalize on this as an initial target market. Grok was the first of hopefully many.