The Great Pacific Ship-Off

Aurnik and I have decided to host our own personal coding / side project competition, called The Great Pacific Ship-Off.

Weekly, we will each be posting updates about the various projects we are working on. The challenge: whoever can make the most money from their side projects developed before December 31st, wins.

I've got a little bit of a head start with two projects that both started from simply realizing that the domain names were available.

runclubs.ca

Launch: runclubs.ca - All the best running clubs in your Canadian city

A quick side project that lists all of the running clubs in Canadian cities, laid out in a convenient, weekly schedule for easy reference.

Patrick BollenbachPatrick Bollenbach

schematest.com

Test and analyze Google snippet structured data - Schema Test

Use our free tool to scan your website URL for rich snippet data to see what fields you are missing and how it stacks up againsts Google’s requirements.

Schema Test

They both are free now (and will always have free functionality), but I have some ideas on how I could monetize each of them. I think schematest.com has more potential if I can implement some new features (eg. API access, automatic daily tests, etc).

Other than that, I have purchased two domain names that will likely be the themes of my next two projects:

and

More on those next week 🙂

Rules (stolen from Aurnik)

1. Products can’t be free. There has to be a way for each project to accept payments.
2. Each week, we need to post an update on our blogs, even if it’s “I didn’t do anything this week”.
3. The deadline for building is the end of the year. Then we let the products generate revenue for the month of January. The winner is whoever generates more revenue within that month.
4. The loser’s punishment (and the winner’s reward) is that the user has to pay for all the winner’s products for a month.

I still think the stakes should be higher, the loser should have a bigger punishment - I will be thinking about this over the next weeks.