Why my side projects failed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q99fEBytYEY

by pattle • 2 years ago

4 4 2 years ago

youtube.com

rrr_oh_man• 2 years ago

Appreciate the video.

Points for improvement:

- Almost dropped out due to the 1min intro.

- And: are you actually using your mic? It sounds like a built in MacBook/smartphone microphone.

pattle2• 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah I'm gonna get rid of that whole subscribe to the channel thing in the future videos, you're right it just make people drop off.

I am using a mic, although either it's not very good or the settings aren't optimised but a few people have said to me it sounds bad. I'm going to look into it. I also don't have the most exciting voice which doesn't help

Communitivity• 2 years ago

Kudos. Making a video like this is hard, because you bare your soul and discuss what you did that you could have done better.

In an effort to help you in the future, here are some things I noticed:

- 'just quickly fix this'. I cannot enumerate the number of times a junior dev has come to me bemoaning a code break because he 'just tried to fix this', because I've lost count. Anytime you find yourself using that phrase or something similar take a step back put down the keyboard and think through all your assumptions about why this is happening. Write one or more tests to verify each assumption. Once you've verified your assumptions (you will find some were wrong > 50% of the time in my experience) you not only know your assumptions (or revised assumptions) are correct, but also have a much better mental model of the problem. Now break the problem into small pieces, and possibly break each of those into small pieces. Address bottom up.

- Always have backups, and implement them with a backup plan that works. Don't just (I'll backup the data periodically as I think of it - this is the plan of many). I prefer nightly incrementals and a weekly image backup.

- The site was offline for two years. Uptime and adoption momentum are key. So is honesty. This is a hard situation though, and every person will address it in the way that suits them best. I think I would have put a notice at the top of the page that was only visible to returning visitors, saying "We are sorry for the inconvenience. We are suffering early growing pains. Our database is corrupted and our backups were insufficient, so past data is unavailable. We are working to ensure this does not happen again.", cleared the data, and kept going.

- The site concept is interesting but two questions seem unanswered (you maybe just left them out of the video. The first is how you intend to incentivize users to come back to the site (gamification, cash prizes, discounts, lots of options). The second is how to monetize. Without a way to monetize it this is a cool side project, not a side hustle. You might be able to build up enough adoption so someone big buys you (like Wordle) and then you don't need to worry about monetization. But you can't count on that, I'm not convinced that's a good strategy to plan on.

pattle2• 2 years ago

This is actually some really good feedback, thanks for taking the time to write it. In hindsight I definitely should have kept the site up and just put a banner up explaining what happened, I really like idea. I have learnt in life that people are generally okay with mistakes as long as your are honest and transparent about them.

I might allow you to create an account so that you can keep track of your current streak, view more stats about how your answers compare to others etc. I never really saw it as a business just a fun little project so I'm not that fussed about monetizing it, but all valid points.

Thanks again

Why my side projects failed

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