I have worked on below side projects in last 4 years and made $0 seriously
1. Intranet search engine - Shut down
2. Followyours.com - You can follow topics and you would get updates on the topic - It would get it from different sources and analyse based on social signals based of retweets, likes etc.. - Shut down
3. InstantExamResults (http://www.instantexamresults.com/) - to publish results of university students - Got interest from few universities but no one is willing to pay as there are sites which publish results for free.
4. ConceptsA2 (http://www.conceptsa2z.com/) - A site to teach math for school students in India - Going to shut down as there is no +ve response among students.
As they say, I think I have not worked on the problems that people are happy to pay to get it solved.
Now I am thinking of working in progress tracker application for online learners and teachers. Launched the landing page to verify the interest from online teachers. http://unbouncepages.com/online-teachers/
Sent mail to around Authors on Udemy(as Google adwords have become costly). Got interest from only 1 guy.
Will be sending mails to online teachers for another month.Based on the interest, I would decide whether to continue on this project or not.
2. sounds interesting. Something similar has been fermenting in my notes for a while, so I'd be interested in your thoughts on why it didn't work for you.
I have got some 300 users signed up for this web app. But the engagement was very low. When I talked to people, they said that they can get the information of their interested topics from their favorite websites - If they like cricket they would see in cricinfo.com and so on.. And most of the news they want, they can get it from twitter,fb and other sites they regularly check. So followyours.com did not provide 'real' value for them, from their perspective..
It still sounds like a promising idea to me. Perhaps niching it down e.g. for people to follow only their favourite authors will be a useful exercise. That way you can also build in features specific to that niche. Anyway, thanks for sharing.
Comments
I have worked on below side projects in last 4 years and made $0 seriously
1. Intranet search engine - Shut down 2. Followyours.com - You can follow topics and you would get updates on the topic - It would get it from different sources and analyse based on social signals based of retweets, likes etc.. - Shut down 3. InstantExamResults (http://www.instantexamresults.com/) - to publish results of university students - Got interest from few universities but no one is willing to pay as there are sites which publish results for free. 4. ConceptsA2 (http://www.conceptsa2z.com/) - A site to teach math for school students in India - Going to shut down as there is no +ve response among students.
As they say, I think I have not worked on the problems that people are happy to pay to get it solved.
Now I am thinking of working in progress tracker application for online learners and teachers. Launched the landing page to verify the interest from online teachers. http://unbouncepages.com/online-teachers/
Sent mail to around Authors on Udemy(as Google adwords have become costly). Got interest from only 1 guy. Will be sending mails to online teachers for another month.Based on the interest, I would decide whether to continue on this project or not.
2. sounds interesting. Something similar has been fermenting in my notes for a while, so I'd be interested in your thoughts on why it didn't work for you.
I have got some 300 users signed up for this web app. But the engagement was very low. When I talked to people, they said that they can get the information of their interested topics from their favorite websites - If they like cricket they would see in cricinfo.com and so on.. And most of the news they want, they can get it from twitter,fb and other sites they regularly check. So followyours.com did not provide 'real' value for them, from their perspective..
It still sounds like a promising idea to me. Perhaps niching it down e.g. for people to follow only their favourite authors will be a useful exercise. That way you can also build in features specific to that niche. Anyway, thanks for sharing.