Interesting, I actually was making a competitor to Email Engine but also open source, similar to Nylas, because I didn't like the latter's opaque pricing and I didn't like the former's self-hosting, I wanted it to be in the cloud.
I even got a YC interview based on this idea for last summer's batch (rejected primarily for being a solo founder, they seem to like solo founders only if they had a previous exit), but ultimately I gave up on the project because I realized I didn't actually like the problem space, it seemed too boring for me after a while and I wanted to concentrate on building things I thought were interesting.
I had a side project which was basically this (at least this was my [company] for [x] summary of the project) a couple of years ago. I always wondered why StackOverflow weren't doing it, and after years of wondering this I just built it myself.
I tried to publicise it a bit (not a lot, in fairness) and didn't generate much buzz. I even speculatively applied to YC with it, with the beta written and running, and got no call for an interview even. After that I lost enthusiasm for the idea, and moved on to other things. Seeing this has reminded me of it.
What do people think of this? Useful product? Would you pay for it?
I had this idea back in 2014 but because I'm a coder, not a business guy I just sort of moved on despite it being a little popular for a while. https://adamgrant.me/development/mailtoninja
It seems an interesting project. Don't you think you ditched it too early? There weren't many functionalities, but the premise I think was pretty cool. BTW, I am about to launch a website builder myself and your post is a nice read. Thanks
I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn’t make it to YC. I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an MVP, but couldn’t get any paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to find a paying job to make ends meet after many months on it.
I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as BaseDash or popsql. It’s MIT licensed.
I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them.
Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others.
I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow.
I built https://feedmail.org because I wasn't satisfied with the existing RSS-to-Email services available.
I figured I would really just be making it for myself but decided to make it a product and have made a few hundred dollars in the first months. It pays for the hosting costs and gives me some motivation to work on it. It's also been surprisingly stable and my monitoring is good, so if I am not actively working on it I can just walk away and forget.
I built a few in the past, typically with a friend or two, but they were dying together with the initial hype/interest.
So, lately I tried to focus on bigger challenges and set up companies to handle the os project. My passion is security which I think should be more open. Cryptography is pretty much open nowadays (meaning everything we use crypto-related is likely open), but many other areas in security are not, e.g. authentication.
Almost a year ago, I posted my open source side project (an AWS security scanner): CloudSploit[1]. Since then, I have kept the open source version, but built an entire web service around it with paid plans. It's gotten a good amount of traction and I've enjoyed adding new features, as well as the process of learning to start a new business (it's all new for me).
I learned web development while volunteering at a charity, where I did a lot of work on open source software. I worked on some Rails apps called FatFreeCRM [1] and Errbit [2]. I got my first contract with a YC startup that was providing hosting for open source apps, including FatFreeCRM (unfortunately they shut down.) My open source contributions were also included in my O1 visa application, so that I could come to the US and work for a startup.
About five years ago, I released a tiny open-source project (my first one) of about 10 lines. I kept building on it, for personal use and for the fun of it. Eventually it got to be quite full-featured and attracted a sizeable user base.
Since then, all my client work comes from businesses that use it. So, by sheer luck I'd found some kind of product-market fit, with no marketing. It's an on-going story though, I'd like to develop it more as a business in itself, with other related products.
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This is a fascinating thread, by the way. It's been a learning experience just to read everyone's stories.
Glanced over this yesterday, came back to it today when I saw it was by jashkenas, who has done some real innovative work over the years. @jashkenas -- is this your primary project now? Are you building a business around this or is it more for fun/open source?
I will be launching the big one at the end of this month. It's different kind of review site called Review Signal. I work full time on it (including most weekends). I've been working on this project for ~1.5 years with a few small breaks. I outsource small things like PSD slicing/coding. I work with a talented designer on the UI.
It's not sustainable in the sense it's making money now, it's made a small amount off the beta but nowhere near livable. I've got other income sources and keep expenses to a minimum. Burnt through most of my cash building this and committing full time.
Motivation: joined Affinity Lab (coworking space in DC). I have a hard time getting work done outside that space now. Why I end up there til 1am on a saturday night. It surrounds me with awesome people who understand what I am doing and we help each other constantly. I don't think I've been there a day where I haven't been helped in some small or large way and helped someone in a small or large way. It plays a large part in what keeps me going.
Validation: I had a private beta in march, the same coworking space was a great place to start getting users. I also have been reaching out to people who I think would benefit from my service and having them try it. It has worked pretty well and the feedback really helped. I built a tool to help automate this process as much as possible. Which leads into...
Automation: love it. I've built a lot of tools to reduce the amount of time I spent doing things which are repetitive or semi-repetitive. As a solo founder everything is competing for my bandwidth. There is a lot of high value, repetitive things (hustling) which I think can be automated to some degree. I've built some infrastructure to help me do that. Trying to constantly watch myself and figure out where my time is best spent is important. However, this often conflicts with motivation: doing some valuable things suck. You need to find a balance or simply will yourself through, I don't have a good solution for this, yet.
hey your product looks good! any way you could share some info on how long first version took and if you made any money with it (or how long it took to start making money etc)? I find these side project cases very inspirational.
for example my friends brother created http://www.mailaletter.com/ and its always great to talk to him about it. (it was not making him much for the first year or so, but then it kind of exploded when people started using it in a way that he has not predicted. I forgot what it was exactly but something to do with companies needing to mail letters internationally and it being cheaper for them via his site)
I'm building this whole platform with tens of thousands of lines of code, which (in my opinion) is pretty unique, I use it every day with a couple of people that visit, but it's designed to handle much more. I'm not getting anything in terms of money out of it, if anything I'm losing money by hosting and stuff. I'll leave the link here: https://github.com/madprops/Hue . Also there's other successful open source solutions that are having a big impact right now, like Mastodon, it's a very active Twitter alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
TL;DR: I ended up yak shaving a tool for conducting a card sorting online, and wanted to share it because I couldn't find one myself. Also I don't have to maintain or host it so it should stay up for a long time, hopefully.
https://github.com/indigane/cardsort
The long version of why:
I wanted to conduct a quick, one-off card sorting for a side project, but after spending hours looking at the available commercial and open source solutions, I couldn't find one that worked for me.
The commercial ones either had too restrictive free tier with only 20 cards or so, or they lacked basic features such as open sorting vs. closed sorting, or they would have cost me upwards of $100/month.
The open source ones would have required me to self-host them, which I wasn't too excited about, and after trying docker-compose up on one of them and hitting errors after errors, I was even less excited so I gave up on that. I also looked for demos of open source projects that could have worked for the one-off use I needed, but no luck there.
I wanted to avoid spending time developing my own solution, as I already had the side project I was supposed to be working on. I also especially wanted to avoid spending time on maintaining and hosting. If I could get away with a static site, no database, thus no need for me to host it, and get it done without spending too much time on it, it might be worth it, and maybe someone else could benefit from it too. And the result was this.
The lack of a backend has some obvious trade-offs, but the benefit is that it is fire and forget, and I can hopefully come back years later and use it again for some other one-off thing.
I have been working on a side project for going on 12 years now. In that time a bunch of competitors popped up. I gave up on the idea several times. All the competitors shut down their public APIs though, which is why I started up on it again about 5 years ago. I've got it in a place I really like. I use it daily.
The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme.
I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that.
The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted.
The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.
I even got a YC interview based on this idea for last summer's batch (rejected primarily for being a solo founder, they seem to like solo founders only if they had a previous exit), but ultimately I gave up on the project because I realized I didn't actually like the problem space, it seemed too boring for me after a while and I wanted to concentrate on building things I thought were interesting.
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