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How to Ship Side Projects

blog.andyjiang.com

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71–80 of 114 posts

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#71

Post by Tarlen »

I will agree with the strategy of separating your product into sub-products, and working on and releasing them one at a time. A single, well-executed feature is often better than many mediocre ones.

Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin.

I've taken this approach as I set out to compete with companies with 100s of millions in funding and 100s of employees who had built out very feature rich and elaborate product platforms.

In my specific case, it went something like

1. build a shitty live chat plugin

2. make said shitty live chat plugin good

3. extend previously shitty live chat plugin with shitty automated messaging capabilities

4. make those shitty automated messaging capabilities good

5. and so on..

In between each step you should try and get people to use it, be shameless. You'll often be surprised that you can find users already at step 1, despite competitors already rocking well-established and mature solutions.

Doing this long enough (I have been going hard for 9 months), all of a sudden you'll find yourself with your own platform, built slowly by stacking one brick on top of another, and sticking to it.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#72

Post by k__ »

jcoffland wrote: post #58
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the only down-to-earth meaning of unicorn was a startup with a $1B+ valuation, regardless of the number of co-founders, no? [1] Your statement "There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns." seems to indicate a restriction to one founder for unicorns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

There can be multiple species of unicorn.

hehe.

In polyamory a "unicorn" is a single bisexual woman.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#73

Post by aembleton »

Tarlen wrote: post #71

I will agree with the strategy of separating your product into sub-products, and working on and releasing them one at a time. A single, well-executed feature is often better than many mediocre ones. Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io ), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin. I've ta…

I just visited resend.io and got the following message:

Message: TypeError: e.srcElement is undefined URL: https://resend.io/ Line: 75 Column: 28317 Stack: Rhttps://resend.io/:75:28317

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#74

Post by majewsky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #36
arthurjj wrote: post #4

Limiting the scope can't be emphasized enough if you're married with kids. I've failed to ship 6-7 side projects because of limits to my free time. The best side project I've successfully shipped, besides blogging, was limited to 2 "features" one of which I already had from a failed project.

So basically, try to group anything into smallest possible self-contained utilities, until you grow a pile of them big enough that your next project can be basically assembled from them...

Ironically, my current side project evolved exactly the opposite way: I tacked on more and more features, and later broke everything apart into plugins once the correct abstraction had emerged.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#75

Post by Tarlen »

aembleton wrote: post #73
Tarlen wrote: post #71

I will agree with the strategy of separating your product into sub-products, and working on and releasing them one at a time. A single, well-executed feature is often better than many mediocre ones. Especially as a solo founder (shameless plug: I run https://resend.io ), I think this is the best way to both test your assumptions early, and to consistently ship improvements without spreading yourself too thin. I've ta…

I just visited resend.io and got the following message: Message: TypeError: e.srcElement is undefined URL: https://resend.io/ Line: 75 Column: 28317 Stack: R https://resend.io/:75:28317

Shame on me for testing on an outdated FF version. Deploying fix now.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#76

Post by z3t4 »

codingdave wrote: post #27

My trick has always been to solve one of my own problems, and be my own first customer. Then I know it works, and meets the goals of the audience. I figure that if I need the problem solved, so do other people, but even if nobody else ever shows up, I got my own value from it.

Just make sure you weight the opportunity costs, meaning your time might be better spent on something else. If you are an highly skilled and productive software engineer you are one in a million, and fixing one of your problems, even a very hard one, might only end up being useful for a tiny group of people.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#77

Post by amelius »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #65
codingdave wrote: post #27

My trick has always been to solve one of my own problems, and be my own first customer. Then I know it works, and meets the goals of the audience. I figure that if I need the problem solved, so do other people, but even if nobody else ever shows up, I got my own value from it.

I'm struggling with finding a problem I have myself that isn't already solved a thousand times. As a software developer it's not so easy, as software developers tend to solve their own problems very quickly =) My hobbies so far haven't translated neatly into side projects, but I guess I just need to get more creative.

Solution: create a platform where users can submit their problems, and developers can take inspiration and build solutions :)

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#78

Post by Clubber »

Twisell wrote: post #61
Clubber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Building a usable, shippable, commercial grade product and actually getting people to pay you money for it is quite an ordeal. An enormous amount of attention needs to be paid to get a product nobody cares about installed, even for free. Even after the sale, you have to provide support which will run at a loss until you reach a customer threshold. The SaaS and subscription model evens out the revenue s…

Or maybe you could actually just ship a FOSS product so that if people are interested they can hire you or pay you (or your company) to get more good stuff ?

FOSS folks probably wouldn't like my stuff. It's Windows based.

Re: How to Ship Side Projects

#79

Post by bluedino »

epynonymous wrote: post #41

i think reid hoffman's quote (linkedin founder) sums it up best, "if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've launched too late." i have seen many posts about mvp and narrowing scope here--all right on the money. some other things that have worked for me, i'm the world's biggest procrastinator and i have literally 20-30 side projects that i've started for some time, was extremely pass…

>> "if you're not embarrassed with the first version of your product then you've launched too late."

Carmack said it as well: Michael Abrash and I once had a discussion kind of justifying ourselves. We said, "Well, if we shipped on time, we probably weren't ambitious enough."

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