My first attempt was a music site called "Rhythmscore" (no longer own the ___domain) written mostly in bad PHP. It was awesome, 100% ad-supported, and it was obviously going to make me filthy rich. Small, indy artists would upload their music, and visitors to the site would listen to songs (in random shuffle-order) and give them a numerical rating. The songs with the highest "Rhythmscore" would be displayed on a leaderboard, etc.
One thing I discovered, which surprised me, was that it was very easy to convince artists to get involved and upload their stuff (free exposure I guess). Getting regular users/music fans to care was not. I think I made a grand total of ~$40 in ad-revenue over about a year before I shut it down. Lesson: Ad-revenue doesn't work unless you're getting truly massive amounts of traffic.
Next attempt was a homeschool tracker-type application written in Ruby-on-Rails. The thing shuffled along, zombie-style, for 2 years with about a dozen paid subscribers before I conceded that it wasn't going to be successful and shut it down. Lesson: Stay away from the homeschool market. Egads, those folks are cheap (I should have known: we homeschool our son, and I'm cheap).
I'm currently preparing to launch my latest attempt, a productivity (intended to be a B2B SaaS, though could be useful for personal productivity as well) application written mostly in Clojure on the backend and ES6/mithril on the frontend. It's certainly my best work (from a technical standpoint) so far. I wrote it to use myself for a few things... We'll see if anyone else finds it useful. I certainly learned a ton building it.
One thing I discovered, which surprised me, was that it was very easy to convince artists to get involved and upload their stuff (free exposure I guess). Getting regular users/music fans to care was not. I think I made a grand total of ~$40 in ad-revenue over about a year before I shut it down. Lesson: Ad-revenue doesn't work unless you're getting truly massive amounts of traffic.
Next attempt was a homeschool tracker-type application written in Ruby-on-Rails. The thing shuffled along, zombie-style, for 2 years with about a dozen paid subscribers before I conceded that it wasn't going to be successful and shut it down. Lesson: Stay away from the homeschool market. Egads, those folks are cheap (I should have known: we homeschool our son, and I'm cheap).
I'm currently preparing to launch my latest attempt, a productivity (intended to be a B2B SaaS, though could be useful for personal productivity as well) application written mostly in Clojure on the backend and ES6/mithril on the frontend. It's certainly my best work (from a technical standpoint) so far. I wrote it to use myself for a few things... We'll see if anyone else finds it useful. I certainly learned a ton building it.