How to Ship Side Projects

exactly! MVP FTW!

I've really enjoyed this comment thread because I started feeling like everyone was shipping their side projects but me. Turns out I was only seeing the highlight reel. Weirdly, the fact that everyone seems to have problems with this, encourages me to keep trying to work on it.

Khan Academy history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy): The organization started in 2004 when Sal Khan tutored one of his cousins on the Internet using a service called Yahoo Doodle Images. After a while, Khan's other cousins began to use his tutoring service. Because of the demand, Khan decided to make his videos watchable on the Internet, so he published his content on YouTube.[9] ...The critical acclaim and the positive responses of students prompted Khan to quit his job... and focus on the tutorials

As a designer this become even more problematic.

I have been depending on developers to do the hardcore development (I can do web-coding myself well enough) and are therefore depending on convincing developers to help me.

After a number of attempts at starting various products/services with various levels of success but ultimately fizzling out.

Ex. Weekendhacker have around 8K designers and developers subscribed but it kind of died out, because the time i spent vs. any income I made was not making sense. I haven't killed it but it's basically in hibernation until I figure out what to do with it. It was a really frustrating to see something like that die out with such high hopes of starting an actually community.

However I finally managed to launch something that is generating growing side income for me year over year, which I can control the progress of and which allow me to expand slowly but surely.

https://www.ghostnoteapp.com

Now GhostNote is only the start of something much bigger I am building but it allow me to control the scope and slowly expand what I am doing while still enjoying it as an added bonus I am making good money.

You should ask yourself the questions like.

Why am I building what I am building?

Is there a simpler way to do what I want to do. (Ex. could it just be email to start with? Weekendhacker was.)

Is this really what I want to spend my time on?

Does the world really need this?

But most importantly you should never give up, sooner or later you you wil find something as long as you make sure you don't spend too much time on each.

I have literally hundreds of ideas, a whole graveyard of almost implemented projects

Just keep trying new stuff, make new alliances with developers. Do several things at once if you have to. But if you want to make money with your side project don't be too attached.

But what's an MVP? That's very subjective.

I'm working on a DITA (to PDF) renderer [1] based on rinohtype [2]. About a year ago I was in a startup coaching project. I was advised to put out an MVP ASAP. Since then, I've worked full-time on the project and only now I'm releasing what I believe is an MVP. One year ago, my product was functional, but it didn't allow easily styling the output PDF. I believe this is the feature that differentiates it with the competition. I feel that, without this feature in place, my product wouldn't offer anything interesing.

I could have also released an "MVP" much earlier, but say it couldn't render tables. Who would've taken it seriously then? Even if I added this feature at a later point, how many of the people that tried the first version would bother checking it out again?

For some (new) markets, I'm sure you could crank out an MVP in a month. But for existing markets, there's the established competition that sets the bar, no?

[1] http://www.opqode.com/rinoh [2] http://www.mos6581.org/rinohtype/