I've shipped a lot of side projects, and most of them died. The ones that survived had a few things in common.
What mattered:
- A single painful problem I personally had
- The ugliest possible UI that still worked
- One deploy command
What didn't matter:
- The perfect stack
- A landing page before the product
- Tests for the first version (controversial, I know)
The last one I'd qualify: no tests on day one, but write one as soon as real users show up.
My current side project is a small tool that turns markdown notes into a static site. TypeScript and Go, one Postgres database, one deploy. It's not clever, but it's mine.
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