

Show HN: Marketplace to sell and buy side projects - sideproject

Do you have side projects you created in the past, but no longer working on?<p>We are creating a simple marketplace for developers to sell and buy side projects.<p>Currently, we are finalizing the last minute details and we will be launching quite soon.<p>We would love to have you signed up for the early access to get feedback.<p>Link is here<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sideprojectors.com&#x2F;project&#x2F;hello<p>Thank you.
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peteforde
Countless posts and comments here on HN strongly suggest that it's precisely
the vision and passion of a founder that brings life to a startup which is
itself just a hypothesis; the only reason to exist is to prove or disprove
that hypothesis.

If you place stock in the notion that ideas are worthless without execution,
paying money to inherit someone else's unsuccessful idea that they lost
interest in will only appeal to software developers that have no ideas or
inspirations of their own.

You'd have a hard time convincing me that buying someone else's codebase of
unknowable quality is going to be (or feel) any definition of "better" than
designing and building your own MVP. At least your code will be familiar and
not constrained by another dev's [aborted] vision.

~~~
rohamg
> If you place stock in the notion that ideas are worthless without execution,
> paying money to inherit someone else's unsuccessful idea that they lost
> interest in will only appeal to software developers that have no ideas or
> inspirations of their own.

Actually, paying $x to acquire someone else's product, try your hand at
marketing it, and failing fast for yourself could be an absolute god-send for
non-technical founders who waste months/years trying to outsource development
or find technical cofounders to execute on a mediocre idea that has been done
100 times before. Now that I think of it, just having this marketplace and
being able to see _what 's been attempted before_ will hopefully increase the
quality of startups that make it to the product stage in the first place. That
will be welcome: a lot of talent / energy today is wasted building things that
are _doomed to fail_ from the get-go.

We kill most of our ideas when they should be killed: as ideas. Paying
$20-1000 to buy a packaged product that lets us test some of our hypotheses
immediately is a nice option to have. Thumbs up from me for this reason.

I could also see brilliant developers who love building things using this as a
means to connect with brilliant hustlers looking for things to sell/market.
Maybe it will be a long time before any individual side project bought from
here gets to itself be a major product (and maybe not!), but there's an entire
spectrum in between that still adds value to the ecosystem: this could be a
very interesting way for cofounders to serendipitously connect based on mutual
interest, and of course it's a gold-mine for potential employers and head-
hunters.

Edit: I think it's disingenuous to suggest that a side project is a "baby" and
should not be abandoned, or if it is it should necessarily be open sourced. A
product may be of commercial value but someone doesn't want to pursue because
they have no ability to market it, or their interests changed, or they
stumbled upon an even more profitable idea that is taking up all their
attention, or they got a job at Google, etc etc.

~~~
thenomad
This is an excellent response!

I'll just add an anecdote - in the past I've bought a friend's unsuccessful
business and promptly made a decent profit from it. Sometimes a different
skillset is just what a project needs.

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tklovett
You should probably turn off debug mode, or whatever is causing me to see
stack traces instead of a 404 page.

[http://www.sideprojectors.com/404me](http://www.sideprojectors.com/404me)

~~~
jaredstenquist
As a side benefit, this showed me that Symfony has a really nice trace output.
I wish Codeigniter had this.

~~~
rorrr2
Switch to Kohana (which is a codeigniter fork).

~~~
mikelbring
Kohana 3 is a rewrite (couple years old now). Not really a CI fork anymore.
Looks and works completely different.

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sideproject
Here's a clickable link

[http://www.sideprojectors.com/project/hello](http://www.sideprojectors.com/project/hello)

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manuelflara
Sounds interesting, but what's the benefit of using this over, say, Flippa? Is
this more targeted towards not-necessarily-money-making projects?

~~~
welder
Looks like the sellers _and buyers_ are both meant to be developers:

> SideProjectors is a special community for the creative types, just like
> yourself, where you can find someone who can potentially take over your
> projects.

> Alternatively, if you are looking for interesting projects that others have
> paused on, SideProjectors would be a great place to discover them.

While Flippa.com is marketed to non-tech buyers.

Also, [http://flippa.com](http://flippa.com) is only for websites while this
looks to be for any side-project, opening the door to more interesting
projects.

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dgunn
This is something that will be exciting to developers who don't want their
side projects anymore. The other side of the marketplace will be more
difficult.

I think your market for that side is actually the people on google searching
for "technical cofounder". They want something they can't do for themselves.
It's more tangential but I think you would need to spin it in that direction.

Tech people like to build products. That's why we have side projects that we
want to sell in the first place. We're probably unlikely to buy more. You need
to get marketing people in there to buy them. The difficulty with that is that
these people will need a functionally complete application.

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ISeemToBeAVerb
I think this is one of those cases of building a solution for a problem that
never existed.

Either that, or you need to explain the business better on your landing page.

What the heck IS a "side project"? And, furthermore, why on earth would I want
to buy one?

Is a "side project" the half-cocked proof-of-concept game code I wrote over
the weekend?

Is a "side project" a successful open-source project?

Is a "side project" an app?

What are we talking about here?

I'm not trying to rag on you, but I think you need to be more specific,
because right now I learn nothing on your homepage that would cause me to want
to sign up.

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timhargis
I'm not a programmer but I think a site like this makes alot of sense. My last
company did pretty strong revenue, well into the 7 figures annually but I
wouldn't have a clue how to develop anything. I think many times programmers
build products that alot of time don't have strong marketability, but that are
"cool" in their eyes. A new set of eyes, a different perspective with a strong
business sense might see an angle that a programmer does not for a project
that is partially built. I signed up for the waiting list. Good luck!

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webwarrior
The web page is confusing. What looks exactly like search field, is in fact an
e-mail address field. And when you enter something that can't be an email, no
error is shown.

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wanghq
I had the same idea, but never had the chance to make it a real product, which
proves on thing - idea is nothing and execution matters. [http://www.ex-
prj.com/](http://www.ex-prj.com/) "They were your favorites in the past, but
for some reason, you have to say 'Good-bye'. So why not just let others take
care of them? Ex-Prj.com - a place to share what you spent days and nights
building, and loved."

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ada1981
It's presumptuous to assume that because the founder of the project was unable
to make it profitable that someone else couldn't. Many engineers have no sales
/ marketing skills _at all_. Also, a service might be useful for a preexisting
user base. And maybe a service that is making someone $50k a year isn't worth
it for one person might be perfect for someone else.

~~~
ada1981
and also - how long until Side Projectors is listed on itself ;)

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mwd_
Interesting idea. I have an Android game that I've been working on for a while
and I think it is pretty interesting but I just don't have the time to
continue to polish it and market it. Maybe there's somebody out there who has
the time to finish up the project and likes the idea of skipping the early
development phase. There must be a lot of side projects like this.

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tdd1
You should really validate your email field when someone clicks the submit
button...

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adrianwaj
How about a "pay me to continue with my side project" ?

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_random_
A decent side-project is something you believe could be big. Why would you
sell your "baby"? If it's not decent people just make it open-source.

~~~
petercooper
That sounds more like a main project rather than a _side_ project. My side
projects are just things that I want to experiment with or that are based upon
ideas or technologies I just wanted to screw around with at some stage. They
could _become_ my main project one day but that's not really the goal
otherwise it'd be my main project already..

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thenomad
Interesting idea. I might well be up for both buying and selling - I'll sign
up on Monday.

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mlkarora123
I'm trying to also build a marketplace - who are you using as the payment
gateway?

~~~
fbuilesv
I'm not the OP but take a look at Balanced Payments:
[https://www.balancedpayments.com/](https://www.balancedpayments.com/)

