Tools, Platforms, and Community: The Small Project Flywheel
Tags: webdev, beginners, sideprojects, startup
Published: 2023-09-22 16:51:02

## Small projects are taking off


If you follow trends in the startup or indie hacking world, you’ll notice an increasing amount of quality software being put out by small teams and solo developers. Backed by an ecosystem of incredibly robust development tools, services, and communities, solo devs and small teams are launching high revenue projects left and right.

After struggling to get two different go-to-market agencies off the ground, I've decided to try my hand at software. My web dev skills haven’t been honed since before 2020, so I was curious to see what I could pick up after such a long time.

So far it's been fantastic, incredibly daunting, but fantastic. The JavaScript world has completely transformed from just jQuery and Bootstrap. People are building successful businesses making plug-ins and templates for Airtable, Google Sheets, and Notion. SaaS projects built on low-code tools like Bubble and Webflow and LLMs like chatGPT are gaining serious traction. Teams are even putting out enterprise grade solutions at launch plugging together APIs on static sites hosted on outsourced infrastructure.

From the early stages of my own project, I can confidently declare now's a great time for a starter entrepreneur or indie hacker to dive head first into the software world. Here are few reasons why launching your next project could be easier than you think.

## Tools 


Today, anyone with an internet connection has access to a vast number of easy to use and incredibly cheap tools to design, develop, and deploy software. Learning a new tool has never been simpler, with a quick web search you can find an endless array of educational content and a community of helpful experts. Look a little harder and you’ll find tons and tons of showcase projects to help you get started. And if one tool can’t do it all, you can find an API for any data or functionality you’re missing. 

You don't even need to have the latest and greatest computer, you can develop and deploy completely on the cloud, right in your browser if necessary. Anyone can fork any repo on Github right into a Replit project and have their environment set up to start hacking away. Once they're done, they can push their repo to Vercel or Netlify for hosting and let them take care of DevOps. And that's assuming they don't go the faster route and host their project on a low code platform like Webflow. Even if someone has to learn more than one tool at a time, there is a growing collection of multi-tool frameworks that make set up and development a breeze.

All else fails, now everyone has access to LLMs like chatgpt to guide them when they get stuck and even spit out or edit code snippets. With all of these tools available, getting to a simple version one has never been more possible. It really just becomes a question of who to make software for, and that’s where platforms come in. 

## Platforms


Ever since the birth of the app store, the platform marketplace has become the holy grail of software delivery. This has shown up again and again in many forms: CRMs, social media, e-commerce, the list goes on. Whatever you’re interested in or knowledgeable of, there's probably a few dominant software solutions in that space, each with a marketplace for plug-ins and add-ons. People using those platforms are constantly looking for automations, integrations, or templates that have not yet been developed. 

There are whole companies built off providing services and tools for Salesforce and Wordpress, and even more niche things like Google Sheets, Notion, and Airtable. Care about the environment? Build a plug-in for Greenly. Game every night? Start shipping mods or making tools for streamers. Look at stocks at the bell open? Work on some templates for an investing site. Bottom line, the right amount of domain expertise packaged as a software on the right platform can quickly gain traction.

Think of a platform, a person that uses it, and challenge they might have and you have grounds to go build a version alpha. Don't just take my word for it, go try it!

## Community 


Whatever your tool or platform of choice, there's a Twitter account, Telegram chat, Discord/Slack server, or subreddit where other people are working on similar projects. Even your favorite open source project probably has a list of first issues on Github you can contribute to. The internet has given you direct access to experts, if not the original developers, of the tools available to you today. And the vast majority of these people are incredibly generous and more than willing to help. 

To top it all off, joining and giving back to these communities helps build your audience, connecting you to potential customers and partners. Even the concept of solopreneurship and indie hacking has developed its own community, more and more people are encouraging others to go down this path and helping each other along the way.

## What are you waiting for? Jump in!


If you have an idea for a project, I'd love to hear about it! It's easy to get lost in the weeds of what's a good idea or what's a good version one. But if it's been awhile since you've worked on a side project, or are just considering your first one, I encourage you to go for it. The more reps you get building something the better you'll get. Just start building consistently and I'm sure something good will come out of it. Hope to see you on #buildinpublic!