

Why making a cool project is a good idea for an aspiring software developer - cool-RR
http://blog.garlicsim.org/post/7699968171/why-making-a-cool-project-is-a-good-idea-for-an

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mechanical_fish
_Not being burdened with having to make a profit will make it easier for you
to build a successful product. You’d never have to think about limiting or
exploiting your users..._

Okay, this is true some of the time, and I work supporting an open-source
software product so I'm officially committed to trying to make this as true as
it can possibly be.

But let's not take this too far. If you build a product with no visible means
of support... it won't be supported. Yeah, you'll support it while it is new
and fun, but six months from now? Two years from now, when you're in the
middle of that startup that this toy project is the warmup exercise for? _Ten_
years from now?

If it doesn't at least make back its costs -- hosting, support, whatever --
the product is not going to fly long-term, and that is eventually going to
limit your users.

Unless your users are hackers (in which case you really can make them
perfectly happy by releasing completely unsupported, underfunded, possibly
even dangerous software on Github with the GPL attached; they'll happily take
it from there) they may ultimately wish that you had at least a modest
business model to go along with your project. Because _more_ than half the
game in product design is to design something that is at least modestly
profitable in the long run. If it was merely a matter of making customers
happy, product development would be easy. This is a PG-rated comment so I'll
refrain from suggesting the sorts of things your project could supply if
economics could really be ignored.

(Hm, I've just noticed my own tl;dr: A project which is not also a business
tends to be, or rapidly devolve into, a project which is aimed at hackers. And
this is fine if you're trying to build your skills or show off for hackers,
but if you're trying to learn to design a product for people who can't compile
the product themselves there may be no way to play the game without actually
_playing the game_.)

~~~
cool-RR
_"Yeah, you'll support it while it is new and fun, but six months from now?
Two years from now, when you're in the middle of that startup that this toy
project is the warmup exercise for? Ten years from now?"_

You're taking it too far-- I sometimes see great projects on HN that took less
than a month to make.

By the way, since you bring up the commitment issue; I've been sticking with
my own non-profit project for slightly more than two years now, and I see it
as a real possibility that I will keep working on up to the next decade. But
maybe that's just me :)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Well, clearly that project is profitable enough to survive! Good for you.

But what I suggest is that this is usually not an accident: You have an
available budget of time and money, and your project fits within that budget,
and that is most likely by design, consciously or unconsciously. Unless you
have very cleverly chosen a project whose bottleneck is _not_ your available
time and resources, one in which there's nothing you could do with more
resources that would make your users happier, or make the number of happy
users more numerous.

------
mike_esspe
I like about juggling metaphor the thing, that juggling is not hard, at least
with 3 objects. Anyone can learn it in 30 minutes and be able to juggle in
several hours of practice. The real problem is 4 objects and more.

Probably this applies to startups too :)

