List of Side Projects

Published at Oct 14, 2020

It’s been a year since we started to build side projects regularly. We planned to launch ten projects in 12 months. Let’s look at what we’ve got now. All projects are in chronological order.

#1 Alldocs

We’ve never talked about that one, but it has been our first project. Alldocs is an online text converter that takes any text file and converts it to any text format.

Sure, there are many online converters already, but they all look like they want to steal my data. We wanted to make something looking more professional. We’re still working on it from time to time and hope to improve the search engine ranking. Currently, it has 1.500 page views/month, and the number grows slowly.

By the way, the code is public: github.com/ueberdosis/alldocs.app

#2 Mouseless

Mouseless is a beautiful app to learn and look up keyboard shortcuts on your Mac, and it is our most significant success in many regards.

It has been sold more than 1,600 times and has more than $30,000 in revenue. It’s also part of the fantastic SetApp catalog.

We’re still maintaining it and publish an update from time to time.

And even this one is open source: github.com/ueberdosis/mouseless

#3 Floatie

With Floatie, we’ve built a platform to publish metrics for our projects, including page views, tracked time, sales, revenue, and many more.

Around 20k people looked up our numbers, but only about 100 others showed interest in publishing their numbers on our platform. The project is on hold now.

#4 Untitled Blogging Platform (killed)

Yeah, that was a stupid one. We started to build our blogging platform and had a few ideas to grow it but were too afraid to try it. There are just too many blogging platforms out there. We’ve renamed and moved it to different domains a few times, and here is one fun fact: The blog you’re reading doesn’t use the platform, but its design.

#5 Glyphfinder

After the success of Mouseless, we felt confident to try another macOS app and even wanted to bring it to Windows this time.

Long story short, less than 5 % of purchases were Windows users, but the development, testing, publishing, and support for the app was a tremendous time killer. We will probably never develop a Windows app again.

We still maintain the macOS version, release an update now and then, and love to use it ourselves.

Dig through the source code here: github.com/ueberdosis/glyphfinder

#6 Fokus (paused)

We answered hundreds of support emails for our products and thought about building a lean support platform. We had a few ideas for it, designed the interface, and then stopped.

It’s a lot of development work, with many competitors, and we aren’t confident that our ideas are unique enough.

So that one is still on hold. I like the name, though. Maybe, we’ll start to work on it again someday, perhaps not.

#7 Frontend News (killed)

After feeling stuck for a while, I’ve built Frontend News, which aggregated news from hundreds of blogs. I tried to make that very open but received only a little feedback, so I decided to kill it after a few days.

Also, that experiment showed me that I don’t want to work too public. It feels stressful to write about every tiny step and is demotivating when there’s not enough feedback. I prefer to work on something until I’m (mostly) happy and share it then.

#8 matter.md (paused)

This project had a few names and took a few directions already. It started as an online text editor. Then we merged it with the untitled blogging platform, made it a macOS app, and tried to move it to the web again. None of that really worked, so we paused it in the end.

#9 tiptap

tiptap is a text editor we built a while ago, and we have big plans for version 2.

We have no idea how to make money with it, but with millions of downloads, it’s the most successful project we’ve ever built. We enjoy working on it, so we follow that and see what it’ll bring us later.

#10 Skara

Skara is a slick knowledge base for teams. It’s still in private beta and we will keep it like that for a while, but plan to invite new users on a regular basis soon.

This one is a little different though. We already started Skara a few years back, but as an endeavour separated from überdosis. It felt wrong, so it became officially a part of überdosis just a few weeks ago.

Oh, and there is also #11, but we’re not ready to talk about that one. :​-​) We learned a lot on our way, but I’ll keep that for a different post. If you have any questions about that, share it on Twitter and I’ll answer them in one of the next posts.