Last week I wrote about my fun little weekend project for Semantic UI. Well it turns out I wasn’t the only person to have this bright idea.
I released builtwithsemanticui on January 25th, and he released builtwithsemantic on January 27th. The big difference, though, was that he reached out to the Semantic UI author immediately, while I decided to wait and never had the chance to.
Well, speed kills, my friends. The author loved the idea and decided to put it in the readme and docs. In other words, it became officially endorsed. Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for my site, builtwithsemanticui, now does it?
So I did the only thing I think the nice, friendly, open source community would want me to do. I reached out to the owner of builtwithsemantic and offered to give him my domain for free and have it point to his site. This also avoids any confusion for users who aren’t sure which is the “official” showcase site. And I will add all the sites that were on builtwithsemanticui over to builtwithsemantic and then proceed to delete the builtwithsemanticui tumblr. *tear* [note: I have yet to hear from the owner of builtwithsemantic after reaching out to him a week ago. I will follow up again]
Ah well, you win some and you lose some. No worries. Part of the process is knowing when you’re beat (and when to fight). Besides, builtwithsemantic is better and has way more potential, so it deserves to be officially endorsed. Onwards to bigger and better things.
A few weeks ago I was catching up on my nightly Hacker News readings when I came across a thread about passive income. There were a bunch of really useful comments in there with people detailing their side projects that have either generated them some income or are on their way. There was one user in particular that caught my eye, simonhamp.
He detailed his side project, builtwithbootstrap, that helps him passively generate 4 figures/month using only tumblr. And since everything is hosted on tumblr, his costs are negligible. To me, that’s amazing. What’s even cooler is that he was nice enough to lay out exactly how he did it. You know the saying, good artists copy, but great artists steal. Especially when they give you the keys to the lock.
So that’s exactly what I did. I’ve been working with a UI toolkit called Semantic UI that I think is super fabulous, and it hasn’t even reached version 1 yet. You know what comes next. The next day after reading the HN thread, I bought the domain builtwithsemanticui.com. Then I spent about 5 hrs on the Saturday to set up tumblr, style it with Semantic UI, and find some sites built with Semantic UI. About half of that 5 hrs was spent figuring out how to style tumblr using a semantic ui tumblr theme, which I couldn’t get going fully and eventually gave up on. [Side note: styling in tumblr is a major pain in the ass.] The rest was a step by step process that I followed straight from simonhamp’s advice on the HN thread. It was that easy.
The only part that I had to do even a little bit of thinking (just a little) was where to find Semantic UI built sites. So like anybody who has used the interwebs before, I googled “sites built with semantic ui” – genius! I soon found myself on builtwith.com, a service that let’s you find out what web technologies power which websites. I signed myself up for a free account, and bam, 20 results to get me started.
I guess the question remains – will it take off? Who knows, who cares. 5 hours of work after given a step by step plan to a 4 figure/month passive income stream seems like a pretty easy time investment to me (and yes I know there is more work to do). You might be thinking how I just got lucky. Perhaps, but ask yourself this. How come nobody else took the time to execute the plan? Ideas are cheap. Execution is what’s valuable.
Seriously, ideas are everywhere and smart people are willing to give them away for free. Steal away. This post should give you plenty of ideas. There are tons of frameworks and technology out there. Showcase apps and sites built with them using tumblr. Get on it.
It has been a great and busy week for myself and Rentything, as we got our first bit of PR courtesy of TechVibes. That post resulted in hundreds of likes, tweets, and shares. My own social network really went with it and spread the love. I was floored by all the positive love and responses and words of encouragements I got from not only my friends and family, but also complete strangers. It was a great feeling and affirmation that I am on to something. I couldn’t be more thrilled. Check out the article here.
I woke up this morning and did my usual morning routine. I got some coffee, read the news, and checked my email. Today I got a special email saying something along the lines of “Congratulations, you’ve been featured on Beta List”. Sweet, I got featured. For those of you who don’t know, Beta List is a service that allows early adopters of new technology to discover the latest internet startups. It’s also a good way to get some exposure to your baby service. I clicked on through to the feature http://betali.st/startups/rentything and was surprised to find over 200 tweets, and a whackload of facebook likes to the project I’ve been working on: Rentything, a peer to peer rental marketplace allowing anybody to rent anything from anyone. That’s the punch line, I suppose it needs some work. Anyway, now that Beta List has featured it I guess it’s out in the wild now. I shared this story on my personal Twitter and Facebook and was blown away by the positive responses and love I got. And here I thought I was some weirdo loner who does shit that weirds out normal people (actually, that’s probably still true, but I digress).
I meant to write about Rentything here sooner, but I just never had the right moment to do so (I guess now is good…surprise!). It has been a tough year so far as I’ve tried to find my rhythm. I’m not there yet but definitely making improvements. Rentything has been a load of fun to make (most of the time) and something that I think has real value for some people. It’s a problem I personally had when I helped my parents move last summer and never had the abilities to borrow certain tools that we needed only temporarily. So in a way I built it for myself, and I am hoping it helps solve an issue other people run into as well. But it’s more than that. It’s access, it’s discovery (ever want to try canoeing or rock climbing or something else but didn’t have the equipment?), it’s convenience, and it’s money savings and earnings (people will earn money using stuff they already own… and rent stuff at hopefully competitive prices). In tough economic times, nothing will put a smile on my face more than knowing some family or individual was able to earn a little bit extra thanks to Rentything. If I hear that even once, I’ll consider it a huge success.
So, will it work? I don’t know. There’s a whole heck of a lot of reasons on why it will fail, and only a few reasons on why it will succeed. I’m aware of this, but I’m not too concerned about it either. I didn’t build Rentything to become an internet millionaire or something, I built it because I needed to. Rentything’s success or failure is largely irrelevant to me, but what is relevant is the skills I have picked up (javascript, what!), the skills I’m improving on (marketing, copywriting, seo, etc), the skills I’ll need to reawaken (customer support?) and the skills I will undoubtedly need soon/now/too late.
Life is short. I have my life’s mission to complete. Rentything is a great first step in that direction. Check it out at Rentything.com
P.S. With that, my blog will take on more topics now including the technical, the business, and the journey (although I was already doing that last one).
