I tried to make an IMDb for politics a few years ago. I got to some interesting places - I was consuming the records of the California state government; elections and house/senate records, to see who was in office when and what they did (to a limited extent).
I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.
Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.
I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.
However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!
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About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness questions throughout the day.
Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a breakdown at that 2nd level), specifically for a friend who's a chemical process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".
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The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you and a "primary customer" - but you need other people to share the emotional burden of keeping momentum.
I got a mentor, and we pushed me to try to put out any kind of product for the... 2012? election, so I figured out a neat way to make word clouds of the legislation written by a person; I figured it'd be a decent bad way to find out what topics they're active about. I put it up as an IndieGoGo, and had some fun with friends and family exploring the database, seeing what interesting statistics we could pull out. Made maybe a grand from 3-10 donors.
Ultimately, as far as I could get as a one-man team, I couldn't actually take it anywhere solo. Theoretically, one can, with all the tools that are out and about - but I'd run into the motivation / momentum issue. Carrying an entire thing on just your own shoulders doesn't work out very well.
I spent a year-ish building it off-and-on, starting as a side project during the last couple months of regular employment; but I also skipped the country to hitch-hike for three months, and otherwise didn't dedicate myself to it like a real job while I was unemployed and "trying" to make it work.
However, I basically taught myself web-dev / RoR in order to do it, and now I'm a nearly-senior RoR dev, so that all worked out pretty well in the end!
--
About a year ago, I started making a little mindfulness widget. You'd sign up on the website, give it your phone number, and it'd text you mindfulness questions throughout the day.
Currently, I'm working on what's basically dependency management for cosmetic ingredients (cosmetics are made of stuff that's made of stuff and you need a breakdown at that 2nd level), specifically for a friend who's a chemical process engineer and needs more than spreadsheets can deliver. This one I'm doing properly as a side-project, rather than trying to do it "full-time".
--
The big take away from these for me is: Have a team before you try to make it more than a side-project. Doesn't have to be other programmers - it can be you and a "primary customer" - but you need other people to share the emotional burden of keeping momentum.