Tiny Projects

Building for fun vs building for profit are very different and it's important to set your intention for a project, even though the line often gets blurred.

When you are building for fun, it is for yourself. When you are building for profit, it is for other people. When you are building for fun, you get to decide what to work on and when to stop - usually when it is no longer fun. When you are building for profit, other people decide what you work on and when you are done - usually when no new features are requested, you have no competition, and you have absolutely saturated your market. This rarely ever happens so you always have something propelling you.

The biggest failure most engineers encounter is they build things nobody asked for. They build products without customers lined up, for markets that do not currently exist, with only feedback from themselves. This is because they built the product for fun thinking they were building it for profit.

The line between the two is very easy to blur - especially when reading OP's blog where he genuinely sounds like he had fun building his projects, but I guarantee there was also a lot of very unfun background work done in the name of profit.

Edit: Don't just take my guarantee for it, read about his challenges for One Item Store https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store

From the author's description of the One Item Store:

> Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the final product, I think its actually really cool. But building it.. it was just a bit boring. There were lots of bugs, and I started to get a bit burnt out thinking about the endless list of things required for a good online store builder.

https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store

This is a fascinating observation. In a couple of weeks he's both built something from scratch and figured out that the work of doing it wasn't enjoyable. It takes some people years to get to that point.

To figure out what you want to do, you often have to sift through a lot of fool's gold - junk that looks appealing as an idea but isn't appealing as a part of your life. The tiny projects idea offers a way to accelerate that process.

But the key here is to finish. To have an end point in mind and then reach it. 20% completion may get you 80% of the functionality. But by god, getting that last 20% could be the hardest, grinding work you will ever do. It's going to be very difficult to finish unless it's aligned in some fundamental way with your life.

Hey! I'm the creator of Paper Website. This is the seventh tiny project I've built over the past 18 months - I've been documenting the whole process on my blog: https://tinyprojects.dev

I built Paper Website because I wanted a quick and easy way to start a daily blog. I get distracted when I write on my laptop, but I love writing using pen and paper - so I set out to build this.

I'm obviously very biased, but there's something about writing blog posts using pen and paper that is extremely fun and liberating. It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts onto the internet straight from my pen - it reminds me of all the unfocused blogs of the good old days.

I'm also weirdly very consistent at writing now - I've been posting for 40 days straight using this method (here's my daily blog: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev). It's not for everyone, but I love it.

Thanks for submitting this - if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them!

I usually just pick a very small problem that I have and start building around that. For example, right now I spent too much time reading HN/Reddit and not enough time studying for an exam coming up, so I'm thinking about making a chrome extension that prompts me to answer a random question from a bank every few minutes otherwise it'll lock me out of whatever I'm reading.

Picking a simple stack (e.g Browser Extensions are underrated imo) also helps with building something small and quick.

Someone who I get a lot of inspiration from is https://tinyprojects.dev/. I've been reading his blog for quite a while and it's definitely kicked my brain into gear with small projects.

Hi HN,

One Item Store let's users create an online store in minutes. You can just get online, sell your stuff, and get paid.

Its aimed at users selling a single item on mass, and want a more professional online presence compared to something like eBay, but don't want the bulk and cost of a full-scale CMS like SquareSpace or Shopify.

This makes it great for just whipping up a page to test out products and ideas.

I built One Item Store as part of my Tiny Projects year long challenge: https://tinyprojects.dev