I had some success with side projects a while back, but I haven’t been able to spend much time on them lately. The anxiety is still there, especially with the current layoffs and the state of the economy. My plan is to go indie again once I reach lean FIRE, so money isn’t something I have to worry about and I can focus on building things I enjoy.
Monetization is always the tricky part, since most of the ideas I’m drawn to aren’t things a large audience would pay for. But working on projects I’m personally interested in is what keeps me motivated long enough to actually finish them. It’s easier now too, because AI lets me go from an idea to something usable in just a few hours.
I've just reached lean FIRE, will try to go indie soon. Like you the ideas I have are pretty niche and not things that neatly fit into a B2B SaaS. But I'm hoping I can build at least some income to supplement my investments, doesn't have to be much.
Totally agree with you I have had the same experience. Most of the bookmarks I saved over the years, I never went back to. These days I usually just copy content, run a quick summary through ChatGPT, and if its useful I keep it as a note. That way I dont have to keep deferring things in an endless bookmark pile.
Now I mostly keep two kinds of bookmarks: quick-access ones for work (like repos I contribute to or PR sections I need to check often), and then more organized notes for ideas, projects, or interests I want to revisit later. To make that easier, I use a little tool I put together (beavergrow.com) where I can group bookmarks into blocks and keep notes alongside them—it’s been handy for giving some structure without overcomplicating things.
Really neat work! I’ve been experimenting with something similar running a local Whisper model for quick transcriptions, then organizing the notes in a tabbed interface so I can keep different topics separate without switching windows. Vertical tabs have been surprisingly nice for keeping ongoing transcription sessions alongside reference material (I use beavergrow.com for this, but anything with a good tab system would work).
Looks futuristic! I really like the modular “building blocks” idea. I’m working on something similar in a different space with BeaverGrow, a productivity tool where you can drag and drop blocks to build custom dashboards with the widgets you need. you can checkit out here - https://beavergrow.com
This brings back so many memories I still remember having a cd with the serial key written right on it. Even now, that key is stuck in my mind qqwd7-8gr47-x9rcp-jjwh7-qpgqq
The incremental improvement reminds me of iPhone releases still impressive, but feels like we’re in the ‘refinement era’ of LLMs until another real breakthrough.
i made https://storyforu.com which generates stories for children, based on topics you select with vibrant graphics and an interactive and quiz mode.
it was fun to build it.
at this point, can i purchase the subscription directly from the model provider or hugging face and use it? or is this ollama attempt to become a provider like them.
This looks incredibly promising not just for AI research but for practical use cases in game development. Being able to generate dynamic, navigable 3D environments from text prompts could save studios hundreds of hours of manual asset design and prototyping. It could also be a game-changer for indie devs who don’t have big teams.
Another interesting angle is retrofitting existing 2D content (like videos, images, or even map data) into interactive 3D experiences. Imagine integrating something like this into Google Maps suddenly street view becomes a fully explorable 3D simulation generated from just text or limited visual data.
That would be more useful and there are some services that attempt to do that, though I don’t know of any that do it well enough that a human isn’t needed to clean up the mess.
Genie 3 isn’t that though. I don’t think it’s actually intended to be used for games at all.
Monetization is always the tricky part, since most of the ideas I’m drawn to aren’t things a large audience would pay for. But working on projects I’m personally interested in is what keeps me motivated long enough to actually finish them. It’s easier now too, because AI lets me go from an idea to something usable in just a few hours.