I built it to get email reminders about things that expire, such as passports, free trial cancellation dates, Covid antigen tests, travel reward and free night expiration dates, etc.
My real sob story is that my passport unknowingly expired and I didn't notice until I was checking in to an international flight. I really don't want that to happen again, especially now that I have more passports to keep track of in the family.
It's built with blitz.js, Go, Postgres, and runs on a tiny VPS. I use it for myself and haven't marketed it much.
I can relate to almost every part of your post. I have ~13 years of professional software development experience and have also wanted to build a side project with nice-to-have extra income.
In the past, I have tried a lot of silly ideas. Recently, I shipped a web app but marketing scares me so I currently have 1 user other than myself. Here are my unsolicited tips that a younger self would have found useful:
- Stick with building software, since that's something I am good at. Not e-commerce, podcasting or becoming a Youtuber.
- Build something that fixes a problem that you yourself have. At the very least, you have one customer after you ship.
- Build small bits of features every day or at a semi-regular interval at your choosing. I did this and was amazed at the progress made after 1-2 months.
- Keep the infrastructure simple in the beginning. For example, rather than paying $x/mo for an email with my custom domain, I use an email alias such as forwardemail.net or simplelogin.io. Use as many services with generous free tiers as possible.
- Stop worrying about similar products out there until after you ship yours. I personally have stopped trying to look for similar products (or tune them out when I see one) and focus on my own instead.
I'll plug an idea if I may - I have been thinking about starting a chat group with other developers working on side projects. I myself am a solo dev looking for support (while also working a full-time day job). If this is something that you or others in this thread are interested, please let me know. My contact info is in my profile. I have tried searching on hn for such support groups without much success; there have been interest in the past but they are many years ago.
I built it to get email reminders about things that expire, such as passports, free trial cancellation dates, Covid antigen tests, travel reward and free night expiration dates, etc.
My real sob story is that my passport unknowingly expired and I didn't notice until I was checking in to an international flight. I really don't want that to happen again, especially now that I have more passports to keep track of in the family.
It's built with blitz.js, Go, Postgres, and runs on a tiny VPS. I use it for myself and haven't marketed it much.