Why startup-flavored side-project spaces look 99% business
The short answer is that the projects are not missing. The audience and the ranking systems are selecting for a different kind of artifact.
In spaces like Indie Hackers, the unit of attention is not just “something someone made.” It is a legible business case: a clear pain point, a target customer, a revenue model, and ideally a number attached to it. The homepage does not hide that. It says “Work Together to Build Profitable Online Businesses,” and its description promises “strategies and revenue numbers” behind companies and side projects. The ideas database continues the same logic by sorting attention around revenue, MRR, and business categories. When a community tells people what counts as an interesting update, people build toward that shape.
That framing has second-order effects. Once builders expect that the audience wants monetizable stories, their ideation changes early. The Hacker News thread about monetizable side projects does not mostly discuss toys, experiments, or weird personal obsessions. It quickly converges on practical advice: B2B is easier to monetize than B2C, build around bottlenecks you already know, ship in a couple of weeks, and launch in channels that catch buying intent. A separate HN thread about finding side projects moves in the same direction, talking about TAM, ICP, B2B sales, and network access to business niches. The conversation is not “what would be delightful to make?” It is “what kind of project survives contact with a market?”
That does not mean builders have become less curious. It means curiosity is being routed through risk management. Ben Stokes’s piece on why developers build side projects frames them as outlets for creativity, but also as a way to mitigate risk and open optionality. That is a big clue. A side project in 2026 is often expected to do several jobs at once: teach a new skill, signal competence, maybe turn into income, maybe become leverage against a fragile job market. If a project has to justify late nights against work, family, and burnout, “this could become a business” is a stronger social explanation than “this made me laugh.”
That is why the business projects look overrepresented here. They are easier to summarize, easier to compare, and easier to reward publicly.
They are easier to summarize because the story structure is standardized. “I built X for Y market and it makes Z per month” travels well in feeds, directories, podcasts, and forums. A playful project often has a much messier pitch: a browser toy, an art sketch, a tiny simulation, a niche local utility, a one-off instrument, an absurd game, or a personal workflow gadget that is interesting mainly because it is specific. Those can be deeply alive, but they are harder to rank with generic metrics.
They are easier to compare because business communities share a common scorecard. Revenue, MRR, customer count, pricing, churn, launch channels, and conversion rates let strangers compare unlike projects quickly. The moment you have a shared scorecard, the feed gets cleaner and more addictive. Fun projects do not share one universal metric. Is the weird audio toy better than the browser pet, or the shader sketch, or the map-based story generator? There is no common spreadsheet for delight.
They are easier to reward because the platforms themselves are tuned for legibility. A post about “AI tool for customer support, $417K+ MRR” is immediately understandable to a broad ambitious audience. A post about a tiny creative-coding experiment or a game-jam prototype might be more original, but it asks for more attention and often delivers less reusable business insight. In startup-leaning communities, reusable business insight wins.
So where are the fun projects?
Mostly in ecosystems whose social mechanics reward expression, not monetization.
itch.io is the clearest counterexample. Its jams page says anyone can instantly create and host a jam, and that more than 545,000 games have been created for jams on the platform. That is a huge volume of playful side-project work. But the artifact there is different: short games, prototypes, experiments, community prompts, constraint-driven pieces, and collaborative weirdness. The point is to make something and share it with a scene that knows how to appreciate unfinished or strange work.
OpenProcessing is another example. Its tagline, “Creative Coding for the Curious Mind,” points to a different discovery model. It is built for sketches, visuals, experiments, and technical play. Projects there are often impressive precisely because they are not trying to become SaaS. They are trying to be surprising.
You can also see the value system difference in writing about side projects. Buffer frames side projects and creative hobbies as making people happier, healthier, and more productive. Tiny Struggles makes the contrast explicit: sometimes the game is scaling a business, and sometimes it is fun and exploration; the author chooses the latter while trying to keep it sustainable and avoid grind. That is a real builder voice, but it usually lives on personal blogs, creative communities, game jams, demo scenes, hack nights, small Discords, and niche open source corners rather than in side-hustle feeds.
This is the deeper answer to the question. Fun projects are not absent. They are scattered across places that index for subculture instead of marketability.
If you stay inside startup-side-project venues, you are effectively standing in a farmer’s market asking why everything is produce. The venue is doing the filtering for you.
Three forces are causing the skew.
First, audience selection. People join Indie Hackers, Product Hunt-adjacent circles, and founder-heavy subreddits because they want traction, autonomy, or extra income. Even when they say “side project,” many of them really mean “seedling business.” That self-selection pushes the median project toward tools, SaaS, and monetizable workflows.
Second, status incentives. Publicly posting a fun little experiment does not produce the same status as posting revenue screenshots or a disciplined launch story. The business project lets the builder demonstrate taste, execution, and market sense all at once. It is résumé, lottery ticket, and identity signal bundled together.
Third, survivorship and visibility. Business-flavored projects leave cleaner traces. They have landing pages, waitlists, pricing, launch posts, SEO pages, and case studies. Fun projects often remain local, ephemeral, or embedded in communities with weaker search and indexing. They absolutely exist, but they do not travel as well through the discovery systems most people use.
That is why it can feel like “99%” business stuff even if the real underlying maker population is more varied. The visible layer is biased toward projects that can explain themselves in business language.
The practical conclusion is simple: if you want fun projects, change the map, not just the query. Search game jams, creative-coding galleries, weird-web communities, hardware clubs, demoscene archives, local hack nights, niche open source forums, and personal blogs. Look for places where applause goes to originality, craft, or delight instead of monetization proof.
The fun projects are here. They are just not competing on the same field, and the business field has much better scoreboard software.