Side projects for marketing, fulfillment, and sanity

Hi everyone,
This might end up a long post.

In recent months, I have been struggling with motivation, even though I have a profitable and reasonably successful (bootstrapped) company. The reason for it is I focused on moving upmarket, and we built an enterprise tool. But it takes so long to get anywhere with a new product when you are not an established player that I had a very long time of hard effort with not much to show for it.

Now, if you read the fantastic @patio11's article Don't end the week with nothing, you know what difference it makes if you consistently share your work over weeks, months, and years. I never did that. I liked building cool things and enjoyed the craft of creating software. However, after almost two years immersed in building our solution for the enterprise market, I feel drained. Don't get me wrong, the future for that product looks fantastic - it just goes far slower than expected. Now we are mostly finished setting up partnerships and having talks with interested parties.

What I am getting at, I suppose, is that I realized I miss the olden days of building something quick, dirty, and very cool. And I realized I miss people knowing about my work.

A recent Google update killed the ranking of many of my tutorial pages. As I was looking at what can be done about it, I found out it would be good to have a sitemap on the site. Looking at existing solutions, the typical sitemap generators charge to crawl the site and generate the sitemap. But I have an ahrefs subscription, so exporting a list of URLs is straightforward. But they miss the functionality to generate a sitemap! So I quickly whipped up a super-simple sitemap generator, made a free tools section on our site, and put it up here. It took just a few hours. Then I tweeted about it, mentioned the guy doing content for ahrefs, and went on with my life. He got in touch recently, and I improved the tool a bit and updated it. It felt good to make something for free, which makes life easier and is worth talking about - however small a project it is.

So, here is the plan. As my team is now handling most of our day-to-day work, and I am finally free to focus on marketing and spreading the word, I will work on the projects I wish to make for years now but didn't have time. I will build in public and share the learnings and struggles. Admittedly, this post is mostly for me. This is a promise to me not to get bogged down in daily routine, to share the work, to be part of the community, and provide value.

So what will I build:

1. A free online database migration tool. As cross-database migrations are my company's bread and butter, it's something I have been considering for a long time. There are a few companies making that already, but the number of databases they support is small. We support almost 50, so this will be useful. What will it look like? A tiny upload form (exactly the same thing I already built for the sitemap gen). Give me your database, get back the same thing in another format. Of course, I will limit it in size so people who need millions of records and thousands of tables converted will have to buy the software. Still, it looks like a great value for many people.
2. A modern, fast, and powerful online database manager. This is my pet project I have been thinking about for the past 5 years or so. So much to talk about this one! I even made a PoC in vue.js, then another one in WPF.
3. An online stored procedure translation tool. This is such a pain to build. Perhaps it is better not to talk about this one, not sure when will I get around to it.

I would appreciate the good company on this journey. I will post here and on my Twitter account about it and would love feedback, (constructive) criticism, and - who knows - perhaps making new friends.