<p>Six months of Tiny Projects | Tiny Projects </p> <p> Dark Mode </p> <p> Home<br /> Projects<br /> Guides<br /> Blog </p> <p> November 18th 2020 </p> <p> Six months ago, I set myself the goal of creating one tiny project each week. </p> <p> My main aim was to get better at testing out all the ideas I had written down in my phone, but not actually done anything with. </p> <p> 26 weeks later, and a quick glance of this website, you&#8217;ll notice I&#8217;ve launched 6 things. </p> <p> Although I&#8217;m 20 projects short, it&#8217;s not all bad. My projects are generating some passive income, I&#8217;ve gone from no online following, to a few hundred twitter followers, and I&#8217;ve had a great time building weird and wonderful internet things. </p> <p> In this post I&#8217;ll give an update on how these projects are performing, and the pros and cons of launching micro-businesses. </p> <p> Let&#8217;s rewind. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ’ก Tiny Website </p> <p> Page views: 129,000<br /> Unique users: 58,000<br /> HN Upvotes: 348<br /> Cost: ยฃ10.00 </p> <p> Tiny Projects was born the day after my 25th birthday. Project #1 is this bare-bones tiny website that you&#8217;re reading right now. </p> <p> When it launched, the only content on this website was a blog post, a guide on making tiny websites, and an update about my goals. </p> <p> Randomly, I decided to submit my blog post &#8220;Tiny websites are great&#8221; onto Hacker News. Over the next 24 hours it hit the top of the front page, bringing 25k users to this site in its first day. It was absolutely thrilling. </p> <p> As a double whammy, the guide I&#8217;d produced also hit the top of the learn programming sub-reddit with 1.3k upvotes. </p> <p> Somehow, I&#8217;d managed to hit a homerun with no idea what I was doing. Pageviews, followers and emails were flying in fast. Anyone who has produced a bit of viral content on the internet will know, the dopamine rush is insane. </p> <p> ๐ŸŒ Silicon Valley Domain names </p> <p> Page views: 28,500<br /> Unique users: 25,500<br /> HN Upvotes: 410<br /> Cost: ยฃ76.25 </p> <p> Funnily enough, my second Tiny Project was the only one I actually completed in a week. Spurred on by the previous project, I was keen to replicate my success. </p> <p> I wanted to investigate domain names. Specifically, was it possible to buy a google.x domain name? It was an investigative piece with a bit of coding sprinkled in. </p> <p> Completing this project in a week was gruelling. My day-job was neglected, and I pulled some very long hours. However, 7 days later, I hit publish on my second blog post: &#8220;I bought netflix.soy&#8221;. </p> <p> Again, I posted it on Hacker News. It became the most viral thing I&#8217;ve written. </p> <p> The Tiny Projects website received 28k page views, and the post got 410 upvotes. Hundreds of followers and emails again poured in. </p> <p> Writing two viral pieces back-to-back made me question what I was really doing. Somehow I&#8217;d stumbled into writing click-baity blog posts for Hacker News instead of building tiny projects. </p> <p> 6 months on, I still own all the domains I purchased for this project except the Facebook one. Damn you Zuck. </p> <p> โš”๏ธ 8-bit Battle Royale </p> <p> Downloads: 25<br /> HN Upvotes: 3<br /> Revenue: ยฃ0.00<br /> Cost: ยฃ36.71 </p> <p> For my third tiny project, I decided I wanted to make an online game. </p> <p> With minimal knowledge of Unity, I cobbled together a tiny battle royale game called &#8220;Wee Royale&#8221; in 2 weeks and launched it on Android. </p> <p> Posting this project write up on Hacker News got zero attention. I expected this, as it didn&#8217;t really fit the usual HN content, but I was still disappointed. My brain had been jaded by the massive numbers of the first two posts. </p> <p> Wee Royale currently has 25 downloads on the Google Play Store. I&#8217;m actually not sure if the game still works though. </p> <p> Overall, Wee Royale was a flop, but it was hilarious to play it with my friends. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ›๏ธ One Item Store </p> <p> Page views: 1,500<br /> Stores: 1,400<br /> PH Upvotes: 83<br /> Revenue: ยฃ1.63<br /> Cost: ยฃ41.00 </p> <p> With a minimalist design, and the tag line &#8220;just sell your stuff&#8221;, One Item Store lets anyone create an online shop in minutes to sell their goods. </p> <p> After two weeks of building my micro e-commerce platform, I launched it on Product Hunt. At the end of the day I finished on the homepage with 83 upvotes. </p> <p> Today, people have created over 1400 stores, selling everything from t-shirts, to human beings. I&#8217;ve seen some very strange things. </p> <p> In total, ยฃ163.09 has flowed through One Item Store checkouts, mainly from a car dealership in Australia offering deals throughout the pandemic. I take a small 1% fee on every transaction, netting me a small fortune of ยฃ1.63. </p> <p> Although its not a significant amount, this was my first Tiny Projects internet money! The best thing is, One Item Store makes money without me having to do anything. </p> <p> One Item Store is a Tiny Project I&#8217;d like to continue building. My next step would be to add some better checkout designs, and make the website look a bit more legit. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ“— Snormal </p> <p> Page views: 2,000<br /> Users: 200<br /> PH Upvotes: 59<br /> Revenue: ยฃ0.00<br /> Cost: ยฃ10.00 </p> <p> Snormal is a social network for everything that doesn&#8217;t make it onto your Instagram highlight reel. A typical post on Snormal is something like: &#8220;Dude, I just ate a whole baguette in bed&#8221;. </p> <p> I launched Snormal with zero intentions of making any money. It was a bit of a social experiment to see if people were becoming as jaded with social media as me. </p> <p> After 1 month of building, and an accidental Product Hunt launch, Snormal has gone on to gain 200 registered users, who have scrolled 4432 times on the discover feed. </p> <p> Its incredibly fun running a micro-social network. </p> <p> Two weeks after Snormal launched, I hadn&#8217;t implemented comments on posts. When I finally added them, it felt godlike letting people finally talk to each other. </p> <p> Growth on Snormal slowly increasing. For some strange reason it has become popular in Portugal. Have a scroll now, and you&#8217;ll see loads of statuses in Portugese. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ’ธ Earlyname </p> <p> Page views: 10,000<br /> Subscribers: 1,500<br /> PH Upvotes: 274<br /> MRR: $200.00<br /> Cost: $108.20 </p> <p> Earlyname helps you claim rare usernames (like @ben or @alice) on new, emerging social platforms. Currently it is generating $200/month. </p> <p> Running Earlyname is so much fun. I get to talk with founders, try out new products, do a bit of web scraping/automation, and find rare usernames for people. </p> <p> The only downside is that it requires my input every month to produce a new email. I&#8217;m anxious for the month I can&#8217;t find any new social platforms. </p> <p> At present, Earlyname has 1500 subscribers on its email list, a number which thankfully seems to be growing naturally. </p> <p> Although its currently only at $200/mo, its cool to think Earlyname is generating $2k/year. My plan is to keep plugging away launching monthly newsletters and see how high that monthly revenue number can get. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ‘ Positives of Tiny Projects </p> <p> I believe there&#8217;s a big advantage to this &#8220;micro-bet&#8221; approach of launching many tiny businesses, and then sticking with the ones that become successful. </p> <p> Firstly, it drastically reduces the risk of putting too much time into an idea that doesn&#8217;t quite work. Even if you stumbled across a decent idea that did work, what if there&#8217;s an amazing one just around the corner? It keeps you on your toes. </p> <p> Creating lots of tiny businesses also keeps things fun and interesting. This is probably the most important factor for me. </p> <p> Feeling obligued to keep building something that you&#8217;ve sunk hundreds of hours into but no longer enjoy sounds like my personal hell. </p> <p> With tiny projects, the stakes are so low, I can kill a project with no guilt and build something else, or just bounce between the projects I want to work on. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ‘Ž Negatives of Tiny Projects </p> <p> My original plan was to launch one tiny project each week, however I&#8217;ve realised this is an insane schedule. You can&#8217;t build or document anything meaningful in this time. </p> <p> This schedule might be possible if I treated Tiny Projects full-time like a YouTuber. But, I don&#8217;t think going all in on Micro-SaaS businesses would be very fun with the revenue they&#8217;re currently generating. </p> <p> 1-2 months is a more reasonable tiny project timeframe. It gives you enough time to build something with substance, and test the idea thoroughly. </p> <p> One major downside of launching lots of things is that you become way too happy to give up on a project when it doesn&#8217;t show instant success. </p> <p> Perhaps if I spent more time on marketing, or slightly pivoted a project, I could see more success. Currently, I&#8217;m more inclined to just start something new. </p> <p> Maintaining lots of software can also become a bit of a burden. Once the domain name renewal date comes around, I&#8217;ll have to make some decisions as to whether a project lives on for another year or not. </p> <p> ๐Ÿ”ฎ Conclusions &#038; The Future </p> <p> I feel like I&#8217;m trying to learn the skill of generating better ideas, and rapidly building and launching them into a business. </p> <p> I try to think about this process like going for a run. The more runs I do, the faster and fitter I&#8217;ll be. The more projects I launch, the better and more profitable they&#8217;ll be. </p> <p> How often does someone build &#038; launch a business in their lifetime? I&#8217;m hoping that by doing this process over and over again, I&#8217;ll discover some really interesting things. </p> <p> My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects. </p> <p> A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m doing. There&#8217;s this whole other level afterwards called &#8220;sales &#038; marketing&#8221; that I want to master. </p> <p> Another goal is to also be more consistent with my writing. Hopefully, this ultimately means you&#8217;ll be hearing a lot more things from me! </p> <p> It was nice to catch up. </p> <p> I make tiny projects </p> <p> Follow me: </p> <p> Get in touch via email: [email protected] </p> <p>Let&#8217;s block ads! (Why?)</p>

Breakdown

Six months of Tiny Projects | Tiny Projects Dark Mode Home Projects Guides Blog

November 18th 2020

Six months ago, I set myself the goal of creating one tiny project each week.