Not Everything Needs a Business Model
A few years ago, I built a tiny website that did exactly one thing: it displayed the weather in my hometown in Jakarta, rendered in a font that looked like it belonged on a 1998 cereal box. No sign-up. No newsletter. No "premium tier." I showed it to a friend and the first thing he asked was, "Cool — what's the monetization plan?"
I didn't have one. That was the point. But the question stuck with me, because it revealed something about the water we're all swimming in: somewhere between the indie hacker boom and the AI side-hustle gold rush, we collectively decided that building for the web is only legitimate if it's going somewhere. A project needs a roadmap. A funnel. A path to $10k MRR or it doesn't count.
I think that mindset is exhausting, and I think it's quietly dying. Good riddance.
The Tyranny of the Launch
The modern side project comes with a script. You build in public. You post screenshots. You write the "I shipped something" thread, you submit to Product Hunt, you check analytics like a stock ticker. And when it doesn't take off — which is most of the time, for everyone, always — the project dies of embarrassment rather than disinterest.
We've imported startup logic into what used to be called hobbies, and the vocabulary betrays the problem. We don't say we're "making things" anymore; we say we're "shipping." We don't have websites; we have "products." A personal blog becomes "content infrastructure." It's the linguistic equivalent of wearing a blazer to the beach.
The cost isn't just burnout. It's that the pressure to scale kills the experiments that never get a chance to be interesting. The weird idea you'd tinker with for three weekends — the one that teaches you something genuinely new — gets skipped because it "doesn't have legs." Legs toward what, though? Toward whom?
The Quiet Renaissance of Small Websites
Here's what gives me hope: the small, unmonetized web is having a moment. Scroll through the feeds of people who actually make the internet feel alive and you'll find digital gardens, one-page shrines to niche interests, hand-rolled tools for an audience of twelve. A guy in Ohio maintains a site cataloging every rest stop on I-80. Someone else rebuilt their family recipe box as a static site with no search bar because "you should just scroll and get hungry."
None of these are businesses. All of them are theirs.
This is the part I wish more creatives understood: a small project is a portfolio of judgment, not just output. When a potential client or employer stumbles onto a weird, well-crafted little site, they learn things no LinkedIn profile can tell them — that you have taste, that you finish things, that you can be playful with technology instead of merely competent with it.
I've gotten more real-world opportunity from a two-hour joke project than from months of polished case studies. The joke project signaled something the case studies couldn't: I build because I like building.
Keeping It Small Is a Skill
Intentionally small is different from unfinished. It takes discipline to resist the urge to add accounts, dashboards, and a waitlist. Here's the test I use now before touching any new idea:
- Can I describe it in one sentence without using the word "platform"?
- Would it still be worth doing if literally nobody else ever saw it?
- Can I maintain it in under an hour a month?
If the answer to all three is yes, it's a keeper. If not, I've usually smuggled a startup back into my hobby, and I put it down before it starts demanding things from me.
The Career Argument Nobody Makes
The counterintuitive twist is that unmonetized projects are often the best career move available — precisely because they're unmonetized. They're the only work you do where the client is yourself, the deadline is fictional, and the success metric is whether you learned something. That's where skills compound fastest.
Every technology I've ever gotten professionally paid for, I learned first on a project that made zero dollars. The weather site taught me APIs. A recipe scraper taught me deployment. A broken to-do app taught me humility.
So no, the side project isn't dead. It just stopped pretending to be a startup — and the ones that survive are better for it. Build the small thing. Keep it small. Let it be yours.
