Side project endeavours - typeofjust.in

Finding other people who love the products you build brings great joy. And that's what led me to create side projects. I do not deny all the glitters of entrepreneurship, the MRR, ARR, etc.. impacted me, but the passion for building things was the driving force, always.

I've built a few products, some were paid, and most were free. But all of them have something in common. None of them really took off.

Sharing all the projects I've released (there are more, which did not see the public light), and what has happened to them.

PaperOak, a free RSS reader, for web and Android

I came across Feedly, an RSS reader. I found it very useful, articles from multiple blogs in one place. But one problem, the search in Feedly was limited. If you need a better search, upgrading to premium was the solution.

Inspiration

Simple things like search should not be a paid feature. This is not a strong enough reason to build something, but sometimes, this is enough as well. There are products out there that provide free services to their paid counterparts.

Launch and growth

With the help of my friend, we started the development. We decided to take Laravel PHP for the backend, React for the web app, and the android app on the side.

After developing for a couple of months, the app was released in the play store, and a PWA (Progressive Web App) also. Things went smooth for a while, we had about 2000 users in about 7 months and we even pitched the idea to a local startup accelerator (we didn’t get that though 😀).

What happened then

In the next 2 months, we received an email from Google talking about paperoak violating Google’s privacy policy, and our developer account was terminated, taking our app offline.

That was s surprise, and chasing Google‘s team for what policies we violated was futile.

It didn’t make sense to continue without a native app. And that was it, Paperoak was dead.

Lessons learned

Big companies can screw you. Businesses that are built on top of third-party services (Google Play, App store, Facebook games, etc...), these providers have the capacity and capability to modify the rules, pull the plug, and offer no real justification.

Raileo, website monitoring tool

Raileo is a tool that does monitor different aspects of a website. It was a feature-rich product with capabilities like

Uptime
SSL validity
Pagespeed scores
Keyword monitoring
Team-based billing

Inspiration

I was working as a Front-end developer at Stayabode. We started measuring the webpage performance impact after each release, using the lighthouse tool. We maintained this in an excel sheet for about 2 months, and it was not easy to maintain. So, I decided to build something small to tackle this challenge.

Launch and growth

I started working on pagespeed scores, using lighthouse API, a neat dashboard was built to measure the performance, accessibility, and SEO and it worked well for us. To offer a complete package (website monitoring), I decided to add more features (that would bring users they said). While introducing features like keyword monitoring and status pages, I started a complete rewrite of the codebase, considering maintainability and as a startup. Within 2-3 months, launched it to the world.

What happened then

Raileo had about 800 users on the free plan (in 1 year), and none of them upgraded. I forgot to mention, that I’m so bad at marketing.

As an A/B test, I removed the free plan and moved to a 14-day free trial. And in a month, Raileo got 1 paying customer ($10/month), and I couldn’t be happier.

I continued working on it, improving the UX, and bringing various settings into modules. But after about 1.5 years of working on it, I realized that I cannot make this a success. The product was solid, but no one to sell it.

I decided to put Raileo for acquisition in microacquire. Surprisingly I got 30+ requests. And I went with the one where they had a team to maintain the project and I’ll not have to support this any longer. And I got out.

Raileo will have a special place in my mind. Raileo helped me to think from a user perspective, to build a better and mature system, to build a system that does about 5000+ URL monitoring every 5 seconds, a journey that I’ll never forget

Lessons learned

Release sooner. Roll out the basic features that your product requires and see if that raises any interest among users.
Go lean. Stop adding features you think someone needs. Unless you have users, spend your time marketing instead of adding new features.

PWA inside, a directory of Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web app are websites that behave more or less like a native app. Users can install them, access them offline, etc...

Inspiration

We have a marketplace or store for android apps and iPhone apps. PWA has been around for a while, but they have not gained that much visibility. A store/marketplace that lists all these PWA sounded useful, a place where people can find apps that can be installable.

Launch and growth

I started building a solution. Started collecting PWAs from other directories and added them. Slowly gave the power to users to add their own PWAs. PWA Store had around 1000 submissions and minimal daily visitors.

What happened then

There was some manual work in adding new submissions. And I couldn’t (didn’t) spend any time marketing this, except for the Product Hunt launch. And most of all, I started losing interest in the idea (how typical). I stopped adding new PWAs and that was it. After a year, I discontinued PWA Inside

Lessons learned

Unless the process can be automated, the tasks become tedious and less interesting.
I think there's an education gap when it comes to PWA. Definitely, developers and tech enthusiasts might know about it, but not everyday users.

Stats PH, Product Hunt launch statistics

Product Hunt is a community where makers/entrepreneurs/indie hackers launch their projects/products/side hustles (there are a lot of names).

By the way, I'm not very happy with the name (Stats PH) I came up with 😀

Inspiration

This was a fun project, not with a business idea in mind. I wanted to see the launch data, trends, and statistics inside the Product Hunt platform. If you search the internet, there are lots of articles sharing "tips" on how to do a Product Hunt launch. I thought some backing these claims would be nice to see.

Visit StatsPH here

These are a few of the projects rolled out to the public. There are at least 5+ other projects which are fully built but not rolled out for various reasons (I have the developer-entrepreneur curse. Diving right into code whenever you get some project idea, without doing any idea validation ).

I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own. — Naval