Something I’ve learnt to appreciate over time is that not all projects will work out as expected.
With that in mind, It’s not a bad idea to share your successes and failures as well as your reasons for trying our a new project and what you learnt along the way. Maybe one day I’ll have 50 failed projects and 1 hit. Who knows. In any case this is my list of attempts at building a profitable side project.
Still going:
2024 - Start Screen a simple Chrome extension which shows an image with business/finance news on every New Tab screen. A simple extension I’ve wanted for a while which other New Tab extensions do not provide.
2023 - Simple AB Test is once again me “scratching my own itch”. Too many A/B services charge crazy amounts or make something that should be very simple very complicated. Reliably tell me which variant is performing best and let’s just leave it at that.
2021 - Inboxes App is a project I created to solve my own problem. I wanted to create long-lasting disposable emails that I could use on websites without getting spam to my personal email.
It seems a lot of people also have this issue and the browser extension is doing pretty well, with 4.8 million emails processed and 2.5k users. Sadly, it doesn’t look like people really want to pay for this sort of product (or I’ve not pushed hard enough on this front and should spend some time focussing on this). In any case, it’s been great to learn about SEO, Chrome extensions, the SMTP protocol and Go as well as A/B testing.
Shut down:
2023 - Phonetic Alphabet was an experiment in programmatic SEO. I built a simple tool to turn a word or phrase into its phonetic counterpart and created pages around each letter of the alphabet.
2019 - I created on an events recommendation and ticketing startup with a partner. It’s an interesting space to work in and made use of a ios app which pulled data from an API we built which stored user interactions within the system, as well as did a whole lot of data scraping. The recommendation algorithm was cool, and would show you similar events based on other similar users. It worked well and I personally discovered a lot of new venues and bars around London.
We tried to raise a seed round and got some dubious terms just as we were running out of money. Probably best it didn’t work out in the end as the pandemic would come by a year later and end the live music events industry.