Ups and downs of a side project

I really appreciate reading this, i lay in bed this morning feeling all the doubts the author is experiencing. I’ve spent about 3 months on a new product, i spent all day yesterday trying to figure out how to sell it effectively. I met with sales reps i worked with in the past, wrote really thoughtful messages to prospects…No one has bitten yet.

I’ve been here before, this is certainly not my first startup, but man it hurts still. I feel like I’m missing something, despite all my efforts, I’m just not there yet and i need to step back and try figure out the missing pieces before i burn too much time.

It’ll be ok, but until it is ok, it’s exhausting.

what are you working on if you don't mind me asking?

I've found perhaps the biggest obstacle to working on my side project is something like lacking vision. If I have an idea, it's never hard to implement. Usually it works, sometimes it doesn't but at least shit gets done. The larger the project has gotten, the more planning it needs, and that's I've historically struggled with. Sometimes I don't quite know what to do next, so I sort of fuss with the code and don't really make meaningful changes. Always gets me in a bit of a funk.

I don't think it's so much about motivation as having a structure to your work that allows you to get shit done. I think motivation follows hard work and seeing results, it rarely precedes it. Attention from the press or social media or stuff like that can also briefly be motivating, but it wanes very quickly and is not very reliable.

It's helped to make notes of my ideas as they come. I have literally a wall of post-its that say something like "LSH", or "middle platonism is processed weirdly", or "34 bit URL ids" or "refactor query variants ASAP". It's not prioritized like a backlog, but just a jumble of ideas I've had about what to do next while working on something. It's been pretty helpful to essentially have a work pool to pull tasks from.

My project naturally has 2 month "iterations" because that's how often I do a new crawl and load crawl data, which permits breaking changes in the underlying data structure. So I'll just pull improvements from my wall and try to distribute the work evenly so it progresses in a meaningful sense.

It took me roughly 2 years to find "success" with my side-project / micro-saas: users using my product on a daily basis.

I've found that the hardest part is the "post-launch" / "first-user" phase, where one needs to have the fire / resilience to keep building / marketing without (what it feels) anyone caring.

Once the first users (and feedback) start coming in, it becomes much easier to keep shipping.

I wish there was more content like this - "making hundreds (not thousands) of $ in MRR after y years".

Give a dose of realism and pinpoint the second benefit — the skillset that is truly unique and worth it.

You no longer care about an isolated Jira ticket. You see a thread from vision to execution. As a dev, you start to value other parts of the company and build better bridges/interfaces between teams.

As someone said, building something on your own feels like staring into the abyss and eating glass. Be aware, it's not for everyone and can cost you — not only $$$ but relationships and health.

And that is even if you are passionate about the thing.

It reminds me of Steve Jobs's thoughts on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PznJqxon4zE&ab_channel=coach...

Having started a side project in 2018 myself (now in low $$$$ MRR), I can attest that passion is key — because it's what you would do in your free time anyway.