A year ago i completed my first sideproject, a digital course on how to "cold email a chief information security officer". I thought and think its a great course, but of course I fell into all the traps (didnt verify a need, i thought id make it and everyone would buy automatically), i tested google ads but hated nerding on that, so i decided to find a marketing person to partner up with! But i knew no one! That got me thinking how many people with relevant knowledge that isnt connected to others who need it, so i started gathering these people in an excel doc with what they know and then we created a slack channel for this etc! (fenomener.framer.website). Suddenly now we are 400 people sharing about our projects and collaborating! But if there is one thing ive been missing its "profile pages", that doesnt work well in slack. Id love to see an awesome project but then lurk a bit on who this person is before engaging in anything. so thats when we made the common decision of: what the heck, lets just build the thing we want.
So I partnered up with a fullstack (from the community!!!!!) and built relentlessly.no. we have like 50 users now and 17 projects and just finished our Minimum Lovable Product. Its not good enough yet and we are working on adding notifications and at least optimizing for first the product leader flow, then the builder flow. (we often get product leaders with a demo joining that are HUNGRY for devs, or we get builders hungry for anyone with an idea! its a god damn marketplace maybe!)
I actually think this might become 1000x more important than YC, because its place and time independant, and no one or no org has taken a place in the important space of sideprojects, where actually "everything begins". SIdeprojects sound so naive and not important, but after nerding on this a year i kinda see them as the most powerful thing we have. And this feels exactly as counter intuitive as a great idea should feel. So if we can let relentlessly resourceful people around the globe bump into each other, then the next gen of startups will be born here. Thats freaking meaningful stuff. And the hidden gem in all of this is something that didnt strike me before i had been working on it for a year: The point isnt to find someone to collab on your current sideproject. The whole value is the relationships that get formed. Because now after a year in this space then sideprojects have come and gone, but i have like 8 new "cofounder ready" relationships formed, where i actually trust them and "know" them and can build in the future with them. So i guess we are sortof solving "cofounder matching" without the akward "cofounder meetup night", or the slow "you HAVE to go to school with them for four years.
business wise this is my passion project for life I feel, and the ethical founder friendly direction im pursuing is just adding this on the site: "if you met your cofounder here, like the product and youre raising money with another confirmed investor: please invite me to your round <3"
I dont have money but maybe that will sort itself out, so this just makes me the worlds poorest investor with the most original investment product ever :D
It makes me think the projects arent organic but placeholders, because how are people posting projects without accounts? I would love if the account creation process was fixed so people could post interesting side projects i could browse through
You cant post project without account, so the ones that are there were made before we now tried to fix the email confirmation stuff. we are on it!
If the problem we have with modern professionally developed software is that its become soulless and treats its users like resources to exploit rather than partners to work with, in exchange for dangling polish and convenience in front of their faces, then the alternative is this: hobby devs who sometimes mess up and rely on community feedback
I think this is healthy