Answering questions on your mind
I like to build websites that answer questions that are on my mind.
From projects like "Will Robots Take My Job?" (sold), and "How Much is a Bitcoin Worth?" to "Will My Job Give Me Covid?".
I'm currently thinking a lot about the US election, I've been seeing the numbers on news regularly about how many people have voted, and wondered if this information was available in more realtime online.
I found the data on the United States Election Project and so I built a very quick project to collect and display that information in a way that I wanted:
https://howmanypeoplevoted.com/
I wrote a little more about the process here:
https://practicalmvp.com/blog/how-many-people-have-voted
Obviously some questions have longer potential than others, but I think this is a great way to get idea for projects, or just quick fun side projects.
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Interesting! How did you drive traffic to these sites? (particularly the robot job one - presumably that one has significant traffic and its value when you sold it was based on it?)
With the robots site, we got really lucky.
Obviously if the question is on your mind it may be on the minds of other people too, and at the time AI/Robotics was on a lot of peoples minds.
I did the usual stuff of sharing on Product Hunt, Hacker News and a few subreddits.
The site got picked up by The Next Web, and the story ended up being syndicated to MSNBC.com, and from there it just blew up.
Cool! Thanks for sharing.
Hi Mubs. Love your approach of building side projects based on questions. Ask a good question. Find data to answer this question. Buy a domain...
Someone else did a funny one, calculating [how long your toillet paper would last] (https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com/), when the toillet paper craziness started. It caught media attention, good backlinks, etc.
Thanks!
Oh yeah I remember seeing that at the start of the pandemic, very cool!