[HN Gopher] Things I don't want to do to grow my side project
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Things I don't want to do to grow my side project
Author : wagslane
Score : 185 points
Date : 2022-05-01 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wagslane.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (wagslane.dev)
| CookieCrisp wrote:
| One of the books I read before turning a side project into a full
| time business talked about the importance of finding two good
| "A"'s - an attorney and an accountant, and gave some tips for how
| to do so that I no longer really recall. The reason behind it
| however was that both tasks done well will take up a lot of time,
| and there is a lot someone that isn't specializing in them could
| miss. It did take a fair amount of effort finding someone good,
| but they both paid off very quickly and now we have someone we
| can trust in both roles
| genewitch wrote:
| I needed two different sorts of attorneys about 5 years ago, so
| i asked my friends who have their law degrees and passed the
| bar how i go about finding lawyers for these two specific
| things. I was told unanimously to use the state bar
| association.
|
| I went to the state bar site(s) and did whatever was required
| to get a list/callbacks/whatever, and immediately started
| receiving spam calls and emails from "Law Services" companies
| where they wanted me to pre-load some sort of debit card, which
| would then be debited any time i had need for billable hours
| from "law services".
|
| It felt really strange and scammy, and i relayed this to my
| friends who told me to try that, and nothing came of it. I
| didn't even find the lawyer(s) i required, to mine own
| detriment of six figures of loss.
| Bella-Xiang wrote:
| "If I want to grow faster, I probably need to do more things I
| don't like" - that's so true~
| ourmandave wrote:
| Thought I'd see a "We're hiring!" link at the bottom.
| higgins wrote:
| I've heard this called "doing uncomfortable work" (by Michael
| Brody-Waite in Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts) and was the
| thesis of starting project (https://24HourHomePage.com, more in
| that thesis here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v8WFZ4b7s4Y)
|
| Maybe its because i haven't gotten to a place where i hate any
| one type of work. I recognize that i'm unskilled at it and there
| is probably some learning in at least trying the problem myself
| first.
|
| Without having much money to invest in contracting out the
| solution, its sort of a necessity too.
|
| I agree with the legal and tax stuff though.
|
| Interested in how you approach those grey areas where your
| skillset and interest align for the problem but might be better
| to contract out. How do you budget?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I really don't like plugging my side project/astroturfing in
| comments. It does work, I get a bunch of sign ups, but I feel
| really icky when I do it.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| As long as it's relevant to the discussion, there's nothing
| wrong with plugging your project.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Why don't you use show hn?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I tried it once, didn't get anywhere, and I'm too humble to
| keep doing it. Seems like you need to post it frequently--I
| look at the authors of front page Show HNs and they've posted
| it at least 5+ times.
| biellls wrote:
| I think a lot of people are in the same boat and wish there was
| a nice ethical way to promote projects that worked without
| pushing them hard on people. I hope there is.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I wonder about ads for this. For example Reddit seems a
| decent place to advertise to target a group of people with a
| common interest, in a way that is not obnoxious. Do an hours
| freelance work for someone else and that'll pay for a small
| test!
| influx wrote:
| I wish there was a thread in the same frequency as the we're
| hiring/i'm looking to be hired threads.
| biellls wrote:
| I didn't think of that, it sounds like a great idea. What's
| your project by the way?
| alin23 wrote:
| We think alike :) I've used the same strategy to turn Lunar
| (https://lunar.fyi) into a $5k/month business and to have the
| luxury of not having to sit through an interview or work for
| someone else in the near future.
|
| I like both coding, design and reverse engineering so I do those
| with passion. But I leave taxes to Paddle and promotion to happy
| users.
|
| I write rarely on my blog [1] and only if I feel I have gathered
| enough new information that could help other people with their
| endeavor.
|
| I've yet to hire people for something, but as the project gets
| more complex, I feel the need to do that:
|
| - some short frontpage animation that could explain the most used
| app features would be a nice addition but I'm no After Effects
| expert and I'm not keen on learning that
|
| - doing statistics on the monitor data [2] and finding the best
| sensible defaults for each monitor would improve the user
| experience, but cleaning up data and having to relearn pandas
| would take time
|
| It's hard to justify the price of paying someone to do that and I
| always feel I should do it myself. But in the life of every side
| project that becomes a business, there comes a day when we have
| to admit that it's not healthy to try to do everything.
|
| [1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog
|
| [2] https://db.lunar.fyi
| nobody_nothing wrote:
| Quick idea: what might be nice instead of (or in addition to)
| an After Effects animation would be some interactive HTML
| sliders and buttons. When a website visitor slides them, they
| can see what effects the settings would have on their monitor
| -- potentially even applied to the website itself. Just a
| thought!
| lanecwagner wrote:
| does paddle make taxes a lot easier than stripe? I've been
| having issues with VAT taxes
| cube00 wrote:
| _> Creating videos might be the best way for Boot.dev to grow,
| but I don't want to make videos._
|
| Making videos is one thing, but making videos to satisfy the
| algorithm is another.
|
| - Like, comment, subscribe and smash that bell!
|
| - Make sure your video is 30+ minutes long with plenty of filler.
|
| I am disappointed to see established creators who never engaged
| in click-bait are (probably under duress) resorting to click bait
| titles and thumbnails now. Unsubscribed from two so far this
| week, and once I get down to zero I can quit YouTube.
| Beldin wrote:
| > _I am disappointed to see creators who don 't even really
| need to, are resorting to click bait titles and thumbnails
| now._
|
| Veritasium has a video on clickbait of itself - basically: it
| works and is more or less necessary to satisfy The
| Algorithm(tm).
|
| Don't blame your favourite content creators for catering to a
| wider audience than just you.
| cube00 wrote:
| Fair point. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
| dymk wrote:
| The Veritasium channel itself is clickbait much of the time,
| so of course it would defend the practice.
|
| I follow plenty of content creators that make good videos
| without artificially padding their runtimes, some long-form
| in the 20+ minute range, but also many that do low-minutes
| videos. Their channels are doing just fine.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It makes me wonder whether the need to pad videos was ever
| true, or at least as true to the extent that creators have
| made it out to be. Maybe it's just a meme? I too have
| noticed that channels with videos even less than 10 minutes
| in length do just fine.
|
| When it comes to my habits, I tend to skip videos that are
| < 4 minutes in duration because I feel like that's not
| enough time to go into detail with a lot of subjects, and I
| prefer much longer videos because I can put them on in the
| background and they have the time to sufficiently express
| ideas. But for a while I began discriminating against
| videos between 18 and ~25 minutes because I feel that those
| are usually the videos that are padded. It's a bad metric,
| but it works enough for me that I think I waste less of my
| time.
|
| Creators may think that the sweet spot is between 18 and 25
| minutes because quality content tends to be longer, but
| don't realize that the length of that content is a
| necessity because of the subject matter; they see it as a
| simple metric that is of the desire of the user alone and
| not based on anything else. They also trick themselves
| because their content naturally gets attention. As much as
| I like some of Veritasium's videos, let's face it, his
| content tends not to be super thorough or heady. They
| appeal to the masses without necessarily being "IFL
| Science". He would probably get a ton of views even if his
| videos were only 8 minutes long because he's charismatic,
| has good editing, and the subject matter doesn't go way
| over the heads of the average viewer.
| dymk wrote:
| I think channels that want their videos ranked highly on-
| platform, e.g. the kind of content that tries to make it
| to the front / trending page of YouTube, do need to play
| this game. Or in competitive categories, such as Lets
| Plays of popular games. The McDonald's of videos,
| basically.
|
| There's a different category of channel, the sorts of
| channels that focus on niche content, and have videos
| that would be long enough to qualify for midroll ad
| (which improves ranking) anyways, and/or the channels
| don't care about getting on the Trending page.
|
| It seems these sorts of channels depend more on being
| shared in external communities. They tend to be run by
| people who self-fund the operation out of love, and do it
| as a hobby / side-gig, or have something like a Patreon.
| dymk wrote:
| I apply a strong mental downrank to videos on YouTube that are
| between the duration of 10:00 to 10:30, knowing that they're
| only that long to satisfy the Algorithm (and get a midroll ad).
| They're all stuffed with filler to get them to exactly that
| duration. There lies a sharp valley of quality.
|
| Especially if surrounding "competing" videos are in the 1-2
| minute range (often the case with "How do I do <X> in <Y>
| software?" kinds of tutorial videos).
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Re: Graphic Design and UX - you can get pretty far by using a
| component library (Material, Semantic, etc) and even buy full
| site templates for pretty reasonable prices. You can also
| contract out design to things like 99designs.
|
| To add to this list: marketing. I don't want to grow social media
| accounts or do cold calls/emails to start to get customers.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Similar but a bit different. I've had some cool ideas for some
| games that I'm 100% confident I could make a pretty neat
| backend for, but graphics, sounds, etc. not my forte at all.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Creative assets are what's holding me back from pursuing a
| lot of my game ideas too.
|
| Someone should make an AI to generate art and sound assets
| for those of us without the skills. That way I can just do
| something like spore where I feed it inputs and out pops a
| bitmap.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Someone I know mentioned wanting to do something similar to
| this. I guess the hard part is how to get the model to
| generate what you want and also generate it in the format
| you need.
| bemmu wrote:
| There are really good marketplaces for buying game assets.
|
| Especially if you adopt a low poly style, you can get very
| far with bought meshes.
|
| My go-to sites are CGTrader for meshes, SoundSnap for sounds.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'll have to look into it. If I ever put any amount of
| effort into one of these ideas, I don't think I'd mind
| paying commission for some stuff either, but at the end of
| the day I'm just a guy who can write code ok and has some
| neat game ideas. I don't have a massive budget for my side
| projects.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Regarding contracting, remember that there is a pretty large
| population of beginner graphic designers, UX/UI designers, and
| frontend devs who need portfolio projects, and might be willing
| to work for free or very low cost.
| Cerium wrote:
| Before following this advice, please read [1] first.
|
| [1] https://www.nospec.com/
| nerdponx wrote:
| That isn't at all what I was suggesting. I am talking about
| proper contract work, or pro bono volunteer work.
| lonk11 wrote:
| I used Material for my hobby project [1] and got this feedback:
|
| "Maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like the UI. It seems like
| a demo for a Material design app. I think the site has lots of
| potential, but without an original, personal style it might put
| off users. It doesn't have to be complicated, just something
| recognizable."
|
| So a standard component library can get you started quickly,
| but you might want to tweak it. A few things I changed - made
| icon buttons smaller (the default sizes are way too big),
| changed the pills to be white with black border instead of just
| grey background.
|
| [1] - https://linklonk.com
| ufmace wrote:
| I actually haven't had good experience with most of this on the
| graphic design and UI front.
|
| If I'm building, say, a Rails web app, I want my front-end
| stuff to integrate with Rails reasonably well. Which means ERB
| or HAML templates with common elements properly extracted out
| into shared views, maintainable CSS in SASS, that sort of
| thing. What most of these UI services and contractors seem to
| actually deliver is something quite different.
|
| 99designs output is literally just an image of what they think
| your website should look like. Actually writing all of the HTML
| and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to you. It
| makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture of what my
| site could look like that requires me to do all of the actual
| work?
|
| Most entry-level contractors seem to want to deliver self-
| contained HTML and CSS that are usually written with some tool
| that creates incomprehensible actual code. They have no clue
| about templating and extracting common elements out. This means
| that I have to basically rewrite whatever they deliver to
| actually integrate with the web app. Which again makes me
| think, why am I paying for this?
|
| IMO, if I'm going to pay someone for front-end design work, I
| want to be able to point them at my Github repo, with a
| functional site with ugly basic HTML, say basically "make this
| look pretty", and they open a PR with their work which works
| with my existing templates to add the appropriate HTML
| structure and CSS classes and IDs, and CSS, fonts and images
| all in the right places for the framework I'm using. I'm
| willing to help and provide advice and guidance, but I don't
| want to take delivery of something completely unsuited and have
| to integrate it myself.
|
| As a side note, if anyone's looking to get into web design, if
| you learn enough about coding to do the above and are also
| great at making websites look good, I expect you'll have
| boatloads of money thrown at you.
| lolinder wrote:
| The skills required to design something that looks good and
| provides a good experience for users are orthogonal to the
| skills required to build well-factored, responsive HTML and
| CSS.
|
| I've worked with marketing teams that tried to build their
| own HTML and CSS and ended up getting something that looked
| great... as long as you viewed it at the exact resolution of
| their designer's monitor. I had to go in and make it all work
| on mobile, which was a nightmare because their markup and
| styles were so badly organized. It took as much work as if
| they'd just given me PNGs.
|
| More recently I received a bunch of designs from a designer
| who worked in Adobe XD. The designs were great, and what I
| got from XD was an interactive template and some very rough
| auto-generated CSS (mostly colors, fonts, and border radii).
| This was the sweet spot for me: no breaking out the color
| picker or guessing what letter-spacing they're using, but I
| could make the code work with my templating engine and make
| it responsive without having to rewrite bad code that they
| charged me for.
|
| If you can find a designer that is great at both design and
| code, awesome! Keep them! But if not, chances are the most
| productive workflow is to let them do what they do best and
| just plan on doing the rest.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I've had pretty good experiences with TailwindCSS in both
| Rails and Phoenix. I did customize my auto-generated
| templates though, so perhaps that is why.
| hallomisky wrote:
| > 99designs output is literally just an image of what they
| think your website should look like. Actually writing all of
| the HTML and CSS to make it actually look like that is up to
| you. It makes me think, why am I paying money for a picture
| of what my site could look like that requires me to do all of
| the actual work?
|
| This implies that design is not work. Strange, on a tech
| website, to encounter someone who doesn't realize that design
| and implementation are two separate jobs.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| It's not so much that designing isn't work. Arguably it's
| much harder work than writing HTML and CSS.
|
| The problem is that a lot of that work is wasted when all
| you produce is an example image. A lot of important design
| decisions, like tracking and leading, doesn't show well in
| a PNG. I'm not saying all designers should know and deliver
| their designs in HTML and CSS. In fact it's probably better
| if they don't and instead focus on designing. But I do
| expect them to effectively communicating their design
| decisions in a way that makes them implementable in HTML
| and CSS by reasonable people.
|
| Chucking a PNG over the fence and calling it a day is just
| lazy and unprofessional.
| lolinder wrote:
| Agreed on PNGs, but the original poster that the parent
| was replying to was even complaining about designers who
| _give them HTML and CSS_ , because the HTML/CSS is auto-
| generated and isn't production-ready. They expected to
| hire a frontend developer who is _also_ a good designer.
| The parent 's point is that this is unreasonable: they're
| separate jobs and completely separate skillsets. (Not
| that such people don't exist, it's just not the norm.)
| snickmy wrote:
| Do you mind if I ask what's your monthly recurring revenue
| ryoshu wrote:
| Professional designers I work with, on some of the top brands in
| world, always have references on what they want to copy or steal.
| Don't feel bad about it.
| anderspitman wrote:
| I know this is in reference to a project that the author hopes to
| make money from, but many people start open source projects
| simply to scratch an itch and solve a personal problem. In these
| cases, I think it's worth asking if you _want_ the project to
| grow. Sometimes GitHub stars are empty calories.
|
| Once something grows beyond a certain point, it can be annoying
| for users to constantly be asking for new features that you
| personally will never use. And documentation... Not suggesting
| open sourcing things is a bad idea, but there's no shame in
| throwing some code up on GitHub and being clear about what people
| can expect from you.
| jchw wrote:
| I've not hit the point of being annoyed on any of my smaller
| side projects, but despite them being developer focused and
| relatively niche, they do bring in a bit of overhead from other
| developers sending PRs and issue reports.
|
| That said, while I generally do not mind fielding PRs or even
| trying to resolve bugs, the actual worst thing for me is having
| to close a PR because I simply don't want to merge it. I know
| it's the right choice, but it's not fun.
| oefrha wrote:
| > having to close a PR because I simply don't want to merge
| it.
|
| It helps to be upfront about it. For most of the reasonably
| popular stuff I put up, I clearly say something like "if you
| have a small change, it's probably best to talk to me instead
| of submitting a PR because I'll just do it faster without the
| tiresome back-and-forth review dance; if you have a big
| change or a major feature, definitely run it though me first,
| and unfortunately I'll likely say no in most cases" in
| CONTRIBUTING.md or the developer section of the website.
|
| Of course, lots of people don't read... But at least I feel a
| lot better closing big PRs I'll never get to.
| Fritsdehacker wrote:
| Maybe you shouldn't feel bad about this, you're not always
| hurting feelings.
|
| If I'm using an open source project and I need something
| changed, I'll usually just make the change and put the new
| code online, because I think that's how open source is
| supposed to work. Others can now benefit from my change.
|
| I'll also make a PR to the original project. But I don't mind
| if it's rejected. I made the changes for myself. If you can
| use the changes, fine. If can't, also fine.
| Aulig wrote:
| Yea, I can relate to this article a lot. I'm hiring people for
| everything that I dislike doing at https://webtoapp.design In my
| case those are namely accounting/taxes, customer support and
| other repetitive tasks. I should probably also hire someone to
| write blog articles - currently I almost exclusively write about
| how customers can use feature X with webtoapp.design, like
| documentation.
|
| Hopefully at some point I'll be able to hire someone for sales
| too.
|
| The thing I really enjoy is coding and strategizing. I have no
| problem thinking of growth channels, but actually following
| through with the execution (which is often just writing emails
| all day) is what I dislike.
| cheschire wrote:
| This feels like a question of motivation. What is driving a
| person to have a side project, and potentially want to grow it?
| First, I need to take a step back and talk about my perspective
| on work units in a holistic sense.
|
| The larger the company, the more I feel I can specialize. The
| smaller the company, the more I'm expected to work outside of my
| defined box. As a company expands, at some point it breaks up
| into multiple units. Those newly formed units are typically too
| small, and people in them are expected to work outside of their
| defined boxes again. This is a pain point of growth. Eventually
| those units expand until the pain stops. They sometimes continue
| their expansion until they must again split. Obvious correlations
| to cell division and growth abound. A side project is the single
| cell organism, and it will eventually evolve and grow; or it will
| achieve equilibrium; or it will die.
|
| I feel like I'm an equilibrium-oriented kind of person. I don't
| want to grow and evolve beyond the resources of my immediate work
| unit. If my work unit fails to meet my needs though, I move on
| towards a unit that will better help me achieve my equilibrium.
| People who enjoy working on specialization might better enjoy
| overemployment[0] with multiple pre-existing work units rather
| than turning a hobby into a venture. Alternatively some companies
| offer work at internal innovation groups, and those efforts
| sometimes offer rewards beyond the base compensation.
|
| I also feel like some people are more like viruses in the Agent
| Smith sense that they never achieve equilibrium and have an
| insatiable desire to expand. Unlike the movie, I don't think
| viruses are inherently bad, it's just another form of life. It's
| tough to discern boundless ambition from a significant deficiency
| in workplace satisfaction though, and that can lead people to try
| to expand a hobby into a side hustle.
|
| I think first a person has to identify whether they are motivated
| by boundless growth or are simply no longer achieving equilibrium
| at their current workplace. Moving to a new company or division,
| or even moving to a new career altogether, may be preferable to
| trying to evolve a hobby into a hustle.
|
| 0: https://www.overemployment.org/
| _pdp_ wrote:
| The things you don't want to do are often the things where you
| will grow and learn new things.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> I always start from someone else's design. Sure, I end up
| tweaking it to fit my site, but I search around until I find a
| version of the component I want online and then steal the design.
|
| I take it that your side project has nothing to do with
| cellphones.
| dushan01 wrote:
| "...marketing, sales, taxes, content creation". Other than taxes,
| I enjoy everything else on this list more than programming. Am I
| a bad programmer :D
|
| Joking aside, excellent article. Once I've read the rest of it, I
| realized I could not agree more with everything you've said.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I've always done my own taxes, by hand. I like the annual
| reminder of the insanity of the process, in a masochistic sort
| of way. But a voice is slowly getting louder, telling me to
| just turn this over to someone who likes doing it enough to be
| doing it for a living.
| nomilk wrote:
| Keep an open mind. I was horrendous at and didn't enjoy design,
| kept trying and trying but was still utterly horrid. One day I
| noticed the work of much more talented people was not better than
| mine, in fact, it was worse, this was perplexing.
|
| The constant practice which seemed to have no impact _had_
| actually made me better. Basic things: tinkering with bootstrap
| layouts, taking 2 hours to feebly make a mediocre background
| image, curving edges on an image, tinkering with margins and
| padding, removing unessential elements. It all added up.
|
| This skill has also helped me in ways I never expected, like
| being able to put together a nice looking slide deck (~25 slides)
| in 90 minutes, where previously it would take days.
| genewitch wrote:
| I like this comment; and i have a similar thing with "indie
| music" or "jingle creation"; lots of podcasts and such have the
| listeners submit music and jingles to go with the theme of the
| show, and while a couple over the years have been really
| fascinatingly good, 99% of it is not. I produced and wrote
| several electronic albums over 16 years, to no fame, fortune,
| or recognition. I changed my workflows and software almost a
| half dozen times in that time frame; but the thing that did not
| change was the passion of creating something new that no one
| had ever done before.
|
| Now, when someone says something offhand or funny, i can
| usually bang out a 10-30 second jingle or music clip in a
| couple hours using rudimentary software (my go to for extreme
| speed is OpenMPT - https://openmpt.org/), and i think the
| quality and listen-ability, as well as the fidelity of
| speech/singing is light-years ahead of whatever the common
| submissions are.
|
| Now, I'm generally a cantankerous cuss these days online, so
| even my best stuff doesn't get a lot of play; but 2 decades of
| being "in the scene" and trying to get plays kinda washed the
| desire for fame out of me, so i find myself not caring.
|
| If you find yourself looking at other artistic things people
| have done and the thought "train-wreck" comes to mind - maybe
| you've learned enough stuff to be able to talk about it
| legitimately in a critical way?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| There's no shame I'm just noodling and jamming. In fact, I
| find it meditative.
|
| Sometimes just twisting a few knobs on a symthesizer and
| making a boring four-to-the-floor loop can take you away for
| a few hours
| javajosh wrote:
| Very cool! I like to characterize practice as exercising your
| degrees-of-freedom in a domain (your "basic things"). This
| exploration gives you an intuition about what your future
| choices will be, allowing your current choices to be made with
| more confidence, and in greater harmony with your later ones,
| so things go faster and better. It's certainly a human's
| greatest superpower.
| zer01 wrote:
| I echo this, I come from a highly technical background
| (security) and the 1,000 hours thing is true - I think most
| people can do most things that have a large group of humans do
| them if they're able to find a way to make the time investment
| and willing to fail a lot as part of the journey.
|
| I've built a lot of shitty frontends and done lots of bad
| design work, but now I like to think while I'm no color
| theorist or UX expert that I can build products that are
| intuitive and look good.
|
| A side effect of this is also that it's seeped into the rest of
| my life and I now unfortunately spot design faux pas everywhere
| and laughing about bad font kerning (or "keming" -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/keming) usually gets me a sideways
| look from my friends and family lol.
| nicbou wrote:
| My side project grew into my only source of income. I still
| decided to do everything myself. After all, this project teaches
| people how to do many of those things.
|
| The biggest thing I won't do is sell out. I put that on a page
| and point advertisers to it when they start to annoy me.
|
| tl;dr: my readers get the same advice as my best friend, even if
| it makes your product look bad. Live with it.
|
| Here is my list of things I won't do:
|
| - Sell out to advertisers
|
| - Cover current events (way too much work)
|
| - Moderate comments or manage a community
|
| - Give interviews or draw attention to myself
|
| - Cause harm to my community (with unethical advice)
|
| - Give moral advice
| la6472 wrote:
| I agree with the author. I think one thing to try and do is hunt
| for cheap outsourcing of these non core items like marketing
| sales can be done via ffiliate marketing.
| kfk wrote:
| There are many things I don't want to do... which is why I prefer
| to work on things I can sell at high margins. Those high margins
| help me hire people to do things I am not good at nor I like. But
| it is also a question of velocity, picking a side project that
| can generate money in a matter of weeks is better because it
| frees me up from things I don't like faster. I worked Corporate 9
| years, I understand Finance is not popular here, but eventually
| it's all about good margins and predictable cash flows.
| hu3 wrote:
| would it be something like B2B SaaS [1]?
|
| [1] to those uninitiated: Business to Business, Software as a
| Service. Basically renting Software.
| pellmellism wrote:
| like?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| he drew the circles :-)
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| For me it's just the marketing and sales. I hate it so much. But
| to succeed it's essential. And I'm so lost and I don't know what
| to do. I feel helpless
| marssaxman wrote:
| You could just open-source your code and give the program away.
| Then you get all the satisfaction of developing it and sharing
| it with the world, without having to waste time on all that
| obnoxious business-development stuff.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| None of these are a big deal. Did you consider that maybe
| spending a week figuring out design is not a bad idea?
| altdataseller wrote:
| Spoken by someone who's just a designer and never had to
| balance 10 different things in a startup.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I'm a designer?
| joshwcomeau wrote:
| Yeah, this stuff is tricky! On the one hand, successful
| businesses require a whole set of skills, and so if you're going
| to go the solo indie hacker route, you need to wear lots of hats,
| and you probably won't like some of them.
|
| On the other hand, if you spend too much time doing stuff you
| hate, you'll burn out, which can sabotage the business even more
| quickly than skipping the tasks you don't like.
|
| I've approached this problem by trying to weave the things I like
| into the things I don't. I enjoy coding more than I enjoy writing
| blog posts, so why not create interactive blog posts? I wind up
| doing a fair amount of coding to create the dynamic widgets.
| Here's an example blog post, so you can see what I mean:
| https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/css-transitions/
|
| I also try and stay focused on the outcome. I don't really enjoy
| filming video lessons, but I enjoy the feeling that comes from
| teaching someone a valuable skill. So I try to keep that in my
| mind when I'm doing the filming/writing.
| polalavik wrote:
| I run a local aggregator website for things to eat, drink, and do
| in Los Angeles. I'm not a designer, so I opted for the Craigslist
| approach, but a little more polished. I went super minimal with
| it and it seems people are responding well to the design.
|
| I didn't use a style framework under the philosophy that
| everything on the web looks the same. I wanted the website to
| kinda shock people with how, uhh, handmade it looked. Like there
| was a real person behind it because there is.
|
| I guess this is all to say you don't always have to worry about
| design, UX, SEO, etc. Sometimes you want companies to look
| polished and professional, but sometimes you just want them to
| solve the problem for you as fast and efficient as possible.
|
| Tangentially - the project got me excited about building "quiet"
| websites - mostly text based, no database, no comment section
| with people to moderate. Just unique information in a simple,
| accessible format. I don't want people to be checking my website
| every day looking for emotionally charged SEO packed news to
| react to. I want people to check out my site and then go into the
| real world and have fun with the information they found.
| canyon289 wrote:
| Can you share the website? This sounds very interesting to me
| as someone from LA, especially as most other sites are ad
| filled and annoying
| polalavik wrote:
| sure! its veryla.io - would love to hear your feedback
| groffee wrote:
| Love the link about hidden oil wells, had no idea!
| wdr1 wrote:
| Do you have an RSS feed?
| adventured wrote:
| I like what you've done, nice job.
|
| Without making the page too cluttered, you've got room to
| expand the design in terms of width and I think the entries
| could benefit from a timestamp of some manner (Thursday
| 5/12).
|
| Basically let people know that it's fresh, beyond the
| slogan at the top.
|
| Then snapshot the page weekly (pick a date to do an end of
| week snapshot), and provide archives for browsing /
| searching. That could either be all historical weeks, or
| merely recent (a month or three deep).
| Tade0 wrote:
| The fact that it loads essentially immediately is a major
| selling point.
| _tom_ wrote:
| I ran a quick test, averaged 268 milliseconds. Yep,
| that's "essentially immediately.
|
| We forget how fast the web can be, because of all the
| bloated sites out there.
| genewitch wrote:
| to go with sibling, i ran a few tests, and 73% of the
| site is jscript, which contributes to half the load time.
| The tracker uses 40% of the load time.
|
| Remember when sites used to serve requests based on the
| browser identifier rather than trying to
| contemporaneously display and format text with jscript?
|
| This site is "fast" - it fully loads in 1 second, sure.
| one of my own purely nodejs + jscript site also finishes
| rendering content in 750ms, with 480ms of that spent
| decrypting into the drag-resize container. Meanwhile, Dan
| Luu's site completes rendering an entire blog post in
| 300ms, first byte to fully rendered.
|
| this doesn't mean anything, really - i just expected it
| to waterfall differently based on "how fast it felt".
| amelius wrote:
| Real estate -- perhaps show also a bunch of average houses
| sold?
| robocat wrote:
| I didn't look into why, but a long press on a link should
| open a menu on an iDevice (e.g. to be open a menu in the
| background). [About] works correctly. [Dingbat Apartments]
| does't work.
|
| Your "veryLA" heading could perhaps do with a trigger
| warning for fontheads: the kerning looks erratic even to
| mine engineer type eyes;
| perardi wrote:
| As I said upthread, love this design, but I sure did see
| that, and sure did get mildly triggered.
|
| It would be more cohesive to have it in a monospace font
| to match the rest of the website. And probably not on an
| arc, as that's going to be relatively difficult to
| manually kern using CSS transforms. Maybe a little bit of
| a perspective distort instead, give it an almost
| isometric style.
| thestepafter wrote:
| Very well done! This was a breath of fresh air compared to
| most sites these days. How often do the links change and
| how much time do you typically spend each week curating?
| polalavik wrote:
| Thanks! I typically do a complete refresh on Sunday night
| / Monday morning and will pepper in a couple links
| throughout the week (not always though). I have a bunch
| of stuff I've saved through the years so that helps, but
| sometimes curating can take 4-8 hours a week.
| mwint wrote:
| What does that curating process look like?
| metadat wrote:
| Clickable: https://veryla.io
|
| Nice design, I find it refreshing :)
| soared wrote:
| I share the same idea! I pretty much always use this template
| for my blogs because its obviously not wordpress/etc, just a
| blog with the content you want and nothing else. Content
| writing is the same thing, I just toss a word doc in a folder
| and its now a blog post. No nonsense, no thoughts to ux/etc.
|
| https://preview-of-blog-on-david.blot.im/
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I really like it! Just a heads up, on my iPhone, the image
| below this text appears to be making the page horizontally
| scrollable by accident:
|
| > While I was in the mood for XML I added a file so Google
| can index your posts easily. Here is while I was in the mood
| for XML I added to each blog and file so Google can index
| your posts easily.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's very nice on mobile. Just... perfectly readable text on
| a page. That's better than half of websites out there.
|
| I think the UX is fantastic.
| r3856283 wrote:
| > I went super minimal with it
|
| > sometimes you just want them to solve the problem for you as
| fast and efficient as possible.
|
| Your site displays a blank page without running javascript. You
| are a long way off from efficient or super minimal.
|
| For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing they
| did was try to require that there be some main content which
| displays without any javascript.
| OJFord wrote:
| > For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing
| they did was try to require that there be some main content
| which displays without any javascript.
|
| That's absolutely not my experience? It needs
| googleusercontent.com scripts or something? I get blank pages
| from amp stuff, and 'de-amp' it for it to load.
| awhitty wrote:
| The page loads within 500ms for me without cache, fonts and
| all. It doesn't show animations, flashing content, mailing
| list modals, etc. Navigating between pages is near-instant.
| The site isn't collapsing under its own weight.
|
| Compare the site to sf.funcheap.com which I unfortunately use
| to learn about things to do here in SF. Yes, it renders
| without JavaScript enabled, but the two pages take the same
| amount of time to load in my browser, and Funcheap still
| tries to load resources from two domains blocked by uBlock
| Origin even with JS disabled (15 with it enabled). Is that
| really any better? There are so many miserable experiences on
| the web, most made particularly maddening by poorly applying
| JavaScript in the hopes of driving conversions on some
| metric. This site ain't it though.
|
| Sure, the first load could include the initial brush of
| content in its markup. In 2022, this is a trivial change to
| sprinkle onto a front-end.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| > Your site displays a blank page without running javascript.
| You are a long way off from efficient or super minimal.
|
| This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does javascript
| have to do with efficiency or minimalism?
| _tom_ wrote:
| Would you care to talk about how you build it? I assume static,
| but do you use something like Hugo?
| polalavik wrote:
| I might get laughed at for this (because it's extreme
| overkill), but I use Vue. I'm not a web developer at all by
| day. One time I dabbled in some react and some vue and I wish
| I had chosen react for this tbh. However, I had previously
| built something in Vue that sort of looked like this so I ran
| with that template and now there is no looking back.
|
| While a huge framework is overkill, it will let me expand in
| the future if I want to do that. It will also allow me to
| build more dynamic minimal things - for example I'd love to
| have a web version of [1] for our local sports teams, but I'm
| still trying to figure out how to get free sports data.
|
| [1] https://github.com/paaatrick/playball
| oliv__ wrote:
| Looks really cool. Wish you had one in NYC
| [deleted]
| perardi wrote:
| I don't know how consciously you did so, but this high
| contrast, all-caps monospaced typeface aesthetic ends up being
| fairly similar to a lot of design trends I see in the EDM shows
| and events I go to.
|
| Which, purposeful or not...good job. This kinda Brutalist kinda
| punk vibe ends up feeling totally appropriate for a very local-
| focused website. My immediate thought was "hey it's listings
| for upcoming shows at Smartbar".
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