Entrepreneurship

1. You remain in control of the data.
2. LibrePress is just a platform to distribute your newsletter, rather than yet another social network.

I failed to drive any traffic to it, and came to a conclusion that building communities—is extremely hard. The success of a community based product, relies on critical mass of users, or an appearance that the product is used by many.

An idea that was born out of necessity, together with my wife, and our dog. We were able to drive some traffic to it, but attempts to reach out to potential customers—yielded no results.

After burning out, I put most of my free time into this project. Instead of trying to come up with a million-dollar idea, I decided to just offer existing tools at a cheaper price. I had some traffic to it, however any attempt to contact potential customers—yielded not results.

I later learned that there are existing tools, some of them are even open-source, that offer the same. Right now, the project is dormant, and I don’t work on it.

As a fan of mechanical keyboards, I wanted to create a tool that will allow users to compare key switches based on raw specifications. The database for the switches is open-source at switchdb, while the website is not.

The idea was very simple: create the most comfortable personal finance tracker. It had many faces.

• A web-app, but I didn’t want people to store their finances in the cloud.
• A local application, built in Java/Kotlin. But it turned out to be complicated to create UI elements with JavaFX.
• A desktop application built with electron. But I never appreciated electron apps, and building complex UI elements, with awareness to accessibility (and I wanted a big focus on keyboard driven approach)—turned out to be extremely hard with JavaScript.
• A CLI app. I had an attempt to build it as a TUI, but again, it was complex to build a data-heavy app in the terminal. In addition to that, It really narrowed down the potential audience.

It was very hard for me to let it go. It was my main side-project which I worked on when I had a free evening, or weekend. But eventually, in 2022, I decided to let it go, and started to focus more on my blog.

Looking back, it was a great boost for my career. I had the chance to work with RabbitMQ and asynchronous task processing, a fact that later helped me get my first job at Autodesk.

Not only that, but it also kick-started my interest in Rust. And the combination of Rust and JavaScript helped me to create an amazing blog post: Supercharge your NodeJS with Rust. I, later, created a presentation based on that blog post, which I present at a local NodeJS meetup, as well as two international conferences: JSNation 2022, and Conf42 Rustlang.

I wanted to build an app that would aggregate prices from all super-markets, and would allow you to create the cheapest basket. It would take into account your purchase habits in terms of what products you buy and how often. I ran a survey among potential customers on their buying habits, but failed to gather any critical mass for the MVP.

I get inspiration from the WordPress codebase, and digg.com. I coded it during the summer break between college semesters. Took me about 1.5-2 months, with 3 rewrites (I’m an engineer and a perfectionist).

I used my dad’s credit card to buy the domain name faweb.com, because my credit card was blocked for internet transactions. And it ended here. Like a good newbie solopreneur, and indie-hacker, I believed in the “build it, and they will come” mantra. But nobody came.

Then college started, and I found a job as software engineer, so I abandoned the project. Looking back, if I would invest more time into marketing it, it had chances to become popular, based on the existence of lobste.rs and HackerNews.