There is a thriving community / ecosystem of people doing side projects. It is big enough to support conferences. I'm making my annual pilgrimmage tomorrow to Vegas to attend Microconf, where ~600 people selling software over the Internet are going to be shooting the breeze and talking conversion rates, email marketing, and Slack integrations.
As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.)
It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around.
It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20.
Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment.
Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)
As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.)
It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around.
It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20.
Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment.
Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)