Next is writing code entirely. Whatever has the most robust documentation will be the next big thing, since AI agents will be writing the code for the programmers.
This is a great project at CMU. Worked on it from the beginning as an undergrad.
It’s a very unique project: students have the ability to be involved in almost all of the roles of the project - from mentoring high school teachers to writing new course content and working on backend systems. There are 2 professors who oversee the project, and a handful of awesome full time staff to guide and manage the CMU students.
The approach was fairly simple: access to the college board’s website was geo-IP restricted for about 5 days time. It would start with a small collection of states, and each day over the five days another group of states would get access to the site starting at ~8:00am EST. I would get a few AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean nodes in a DC that had an IP in a state releasing on the first day. Put a small JS script on the nodes that would use the username and password input from students to sign in to their Account and send back the scores. Basically just a proxy without the need for configuration.
Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million students checking their score in its peak year. It was immensely fun while it lasted (ran for about 7 years) and honestly I miss the thrill of it. CollegeBoard now releases all scores on the same day so the site is pretty much useless now. Definitely always looking to chase the thrill of that score release day again though.
Congrats on a successful end to a fun high school project! Stories like this are always fun to read.
That’s not exactly true - as an Amazon affiliate you do see the exact items purchased under each of your specific tracking IDs, as well as the price it was purchased for, category and device group it was purchased using (desktop, tablet, mobile). This also includes any purchases the user makes in a 24 hour session of browsing after clicking your referral link to Amazon.
I’m unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your account, and as far as I’m aware and can tell, you cannot pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send to Amazon, and where you’re sending them, and you can see outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)
I got lucky, the subdevelopment I live in has been upgraded from classic Centurylink DSL to “Spectrum” fiber (1gbps fiber line to the house for $60/month, no contract and no equipment or setup fees. Growing up a few blocks away, it was a comcast subscription or a 1mbps DSL line(~10yrs ago).
It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.
Not too difficult! Monetized with ads, the project was making a significant profit (>$15k per year; all of it came in on one day) - the difficult part was trying to do anything else with all of those users.
In high school I made a site to help students view their AP scores early. It ballooned in popularity over the past 8 years. At it’s peak in 2020 and 2021 it was getting over 1.5 million students in 2 hours on the day of release. It was quite profitable for a side project I started in high school. Sadly I was never able to turn it into anything more than an early scores site on the day of score release, but now all AP scores come out at the same time and the site is fading away to being forgotten.
Tabler is a really awesome theme - sits right on top of bootstrap, and gives a very cohesive look for backends/admin interfaces. Also, the corresponding email template library is fantastic and only costs $30. Doesn’t seem like the project as a whole gets enough love.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is looking at Facebook Groups. The advertising can be weird because it is somewhat of a grey area, but most Facebook groups pages are run by companies or moderators who are looking for a little extra cash. They will add you to their group and let you post a certain amount of ads per day. You have to make the posts interesting and provide value to the group members, as more engagement will increase the reach of your post.
On a side project last summer, I was able to work with a company running education niche groups. To join 10 of their groups (total reach probably around 30k audience) was $500 per month billed on PayPal. Could make a post per day in all 10 groups, so 300 posts. The conversion rate was better than any other paid advertising we had tried and the targeting was much easier.
It’s easy to get started: find a few Facebook groups you might be interested in joining, go to about this group, add the admin as a friend/send a message request, and ask about advertising opportunities. Be sure to show them your project, and why you think it would be beneficial to their audience, that will help your case!
Also - have you thought about going to teachers with your product (assuming it’s compass letters from your post history), getting them on a free subscription, and hoping the kids go home and tell their parents they want to get the letters too?
Anecdotal evidence - but I feel like this could be completely valid.
One of my biggest side projects for many years was a student tool centered around test scores. It was a niche use case with a huge amount of students using the tool on one day per year (1m+). There was exactly one competitor. I had a better domain but a much worse site in terms of design, speed etc. We were nearly the same in traffic, until I decided to monetize the site with a lot of Google ads. Immediately, Google shot my site up in the rankings, and actually seemed to penalize the competitive site. My traffic went up 10x and the competitive site remained flat. This happened for 3 years, then the niche use of both of our tools was “patched”.
When an NFT project proposes a value share and airdrops amongst token owners, and also has a royalty fee paid on every transfer [1], I think the “up line” and MLM aspect come more into play. There is value for you to inflate the price of the NFT as it benefits you and the other owners directly as sale prices get higher.
Sending away all of your PII to be verified in games isn’t much better (in terms of intrusiveness) than running anti-cheat software in the first place.
Additionally, will it be any harder to get around a system like this than a traditional anti-cheat system? Theoretically - for the average player at least, it might make cheating worse - assuming the cheater runs their cheats in a realistic way, in your world, there is now no detection software pinpointing the cheaters!
Check my other reply to the sibling of my original post for a little more detailed story. I need to check out IndyHacker. B2C products have a longer growth cycle if you’re not full time, as prices are lower but the markets are bigger. My main recommendation is to follow a lot of the advice given for B2B - just involve users in more of the process. I think B2C is traditionally harder for devs because it’s a lot more personal and human than B2C, and requires usually a lot more of the BS work that others have diminished in the comments here: finding and becoming active in relevant communities to your product, creating content and perfecting SEO to use Google to drive natural growth, etc.
My most successful side project - by traffic volume and by usage - is a viral site idea which consistently generates over 1 million users in July of every year, those users generate about 20k in revenue yearly. It solves a problem I had in high school, and lots of other students have too. The project revolves around seeing location locked test scores up to 2 days early.
I think the important aspect that keeps the project useful is by using the same metrics that you would use to evaluate any business. I’m able to run this company completely in my spare time, and it’s reached a point where only a week of work is needed per year to keep it stable. Traditional metrics, front end analytics and some anonymized data collection, as well as social media sentiment review show extremely positive user feedback. As well as continued growth every year.
It’s important to remember that it’s your baby and your idea still has to follow traditional success metrics. And also, for a side project, success metrics don’t have to exclusively be “billion dollar company with VC funding in 3 months that is my full time job that I’ve invested my whole life into.”
I’ve had great success building B2C apps as side projects. It’s more about matching your passions to solving issues. Otherwise you’ll burn out and produce crap before you ever make anything people use.
You’re saying that user preference shifted, but in reality, Google’s preference shifted. That, to me, is the problem highlighted by this story and others.
It’s easy to say “Ignore Amp” when you’re not a content site that depends on Google Search to stay alive. Sadly, for a large amount of sites on the web, what Google says is what goes. Chasing a #1 keyword ranking puts food on people’s tables. It’s not always as easy as “this thing is bad: stop using it!”
There will need to be a bigger driving force to get amp out of popularity. As long as AMP pages unlock preferential treatment in search results (mobile carousels), sites that want to compete will be forced to use them.