TL;DR
I will make a new website / app / game / service / product (digital or physical) every two weeks for a year.
The plan
Time
Starting tomorrow I will be consistently making something (hopefully) useful, and I will give myself a deadline to design, develop and launch it. I’ve decided on two weeks, which potentially has 14 * 8 = 112 hours of work, which should be enough for an MVP. I don’t really care for taking weekends off, as I spend them online anyway, I generally take time off for sports (yay windsurfing!) and family, but 6-8 hours a day should be doable. I will give myself two weeks of vacation this year. So overall I will have 50 full time weeks of actual work, and 25 launched projects.
Projects
I have a ton of unfinished side projects, I will start with some of those. I’ve also been writing down some product ideas for years, so there won’t be any problems in the idea department. Interestingly enough, some of them got implemented by others, like craigslist-for-services that I wrote down in 2007, which now exists as a myriad maid/cleaning sites, including Amazon’s Home Services.
Why?
I need accountability. Posting this publicly will hopefully force me to complete the projects. The overall goal is to have a portfolio of live products that will, ideally, make enough passive income to support our family. If I fail, I will have to go back to working for someone else.
Main challenges
I’ve developed many small-ish projects before, some of them turned out profitable, many failed to gain traction. Technology has only been the hurdle in one of them so far. Creating communities has always been the hardest part for me, mostly because I have no budget for advertising, and have to rely completely on SEO and social media.
Weeks 1 & 2 project (Jan 2 – Jan 15)
My unfinished project healthcarecost.info, a site to search for the cheapest hospital based on the procedures you need to perform. All based on the 2012 government data.
Goals:
- Display the cheapest hospitals for a given procedure (with a map)
- Display histograms of the procedure costs
- Advanced search for a combination of procedures
Stretch goal 1: make an Android app, which I’ve never done before. This will only require a frontend, the backend can be shared with the site.
Stretch goal 2: see if I can get fresh data for free
Not crazy. Just good