Over the past six months, I’ve launched three side projects — and failed at two of them. But through those failures, I’ve learned some important lessons that are shaping how I work today. Here’s my journey so far.
Project 1: DevGameNavigation
I originally planned to build my own indie game. But as a beginner, I had no idea where to find game assets or quality tutorials. After spending a lot of time searching, I managed to gather a collection of useful websites, game assets, and paid tutorials I had bought myself.
That’s when the idea came to me: maybe others face the same problem. So I built DevGameNavigation, a curated directory of game development resources — assets, tutorials, and even some creative indie games for inspiration.
But after six months online, the traffic was extremely low. Despite the effort I put in, the site didn’t gain traction. I eventually decided to shut it down and move on.
Project 2: NewsDigestAI
I read the news every day, but most news articles are way too long — I just want the key points and core data. So I built NewsDigestAI, a tool that fetches news from various sources and generates concise summaries for quick reading.
After a month of development, I launched the site and submitted a sitemap to Google. Things looked promising — over 20,000 pages were indexed and traffic started climbing. But soon after, Google penalized the site. All indexed pages were gone, and traffic dropped to zero.
This was a painful but valuable lesson: don’t flood a new site with auto-generated content, and always prioritize high-quality pages. Quantity alone won’t work — especially with SEO.
Project 3: ChartFromText
Sometimes I need to add charts to presentations or documents, but opening Excel or Google Sheets just for a simple chart feels like overkill. So I built ChartFromText, a lightweight tool that generates charts from plain text input.
This time, I did things differently. I spent minimal time on development and focused most of my effort on promotion. I submitted backlinks, shared it in communities, and recently listed it on Product Hunt.
For this project, I’ve made a conscious choice to shift my focus: development is important, but promotion is what makes or breaks a project. That’s the biggest takeaway from my previous failures.
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