
Side Projects - pointnova
http://avc.com/2016/03/side-projects/
======
patio11
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!)

~~~
herval
I think comparing the "web 2.0" era (2006+) with magazine distribution is a
bit too distant - but imho, things have really been getting too competitive as
of late, and that explains a bit of a reduction on the number of side
projects.

My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since
2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY
projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel
people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness
(is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very
addictive gatekeepers.

My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into
respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little
effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other
stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field
(QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get
crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments
got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but
retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early
adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things
that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why.

It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm
just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.

~~~
eloff
I think in mobile apps there's no doubt it has gotten very crowded with people
tripping over each other in a race to the bottom. Mostly free with some
freemium/ad based/in-app pruchase based models now.

------
WA
> I suspect that some of that is the effort to build and launch something that
> can reach broad adoption is harder.

No, it's just that getting attention is a lot harder. Side projects – by its
very nature – are exactly that: Some stuff happening on the side and the trash
can is an even more certain path than for most startups.

Without any visibility, side projects won't turn into companies. This doesn't
mean that there are no side projects. There are probably more than ever,
because everybody tries to get into the startup hamster wheel with their
little idea.

~~~
galistoca
If anything I think getting attention has become much easier compared to say 5
years ago. You used to have to go to Techcrunch and their friends to get
covered or your project would never have any other means of getting
significant attention for the launch. Nowadays sites like HN and Product Hunt
provide pretty much democratized way of getting attention for your projects.
On the other hand, getting meaningful adoption has indeed become harder,
exactly because getting attention has become easier. There are too many
projects and startups launching everyday that even if you place 1st on PH or
HN today, tomorrow people are onto the next shiny thing.

~~~
blackrose
Product Hunt is really only "democratized" if you know someone who can post to
the Featured list. For the rest of us, it's either the obscurity of the
"Newest" list, or basically the same exact process as getting covered by
someone at TC.

~~~
galistoca
Let's not battle with semantics. There are more venues to get exposure
nowadays and the gatekeepers at these venues have much less power than the
ones that came before, hence more democratized than 5 years ago.

~~~
enraged_camel
It's not "semantics" if the end result is the same, which is that you need to
beg certain gatekeepers to give your product exposure. The fact that there are
more of those gatekeepers now doesn't mean the process is more "democratized."

~~~
galistoca
Can't believe I keep feeding you guys stuff so I can get even more downvoted,
but this almost feels like talking to a wall. This is my last comment on this
thread because I know you'll probably say I'm wrong again, but I'll try my
best to explain. 5 years ago if you built a cool project or startup you would
pitch TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. (a handful of sites), and that was it. Most
likely it would have been ignored. Then there's not much you can do. Nowadays
there's room for creativity. You can even reach out to people on Twitter via
@messages and get their attention. That didn't exist before. Also you guys
make it sound like getting through the Product Hunt "gatekeepers" is some
mission impossible but that only means you haven't tried, because if you tried
you would know that they are also people just like you and want to share cool
products. My point is, in the past, unless you spend lots of money you had
little power over whether your project gets attention or not. Nowadays if
you're on HN complaining about how it's same as back then, you're probably
doing it wrong. There are tons of ways you can get exposure for your projects
and you're not trying hard enough or not being creative enough if you're
saying it's the same.

------
infodroid
Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work
60 hours a week at Facebook and then another 40 hours a week on your side
project". Because starting a business should not be founded on giving up your
personal life. Quitting your job to focus on your idea full-time is a
perfectly reasonable expectation. Investors need to start doing their homework
instead of pushing founders to the burnout limit.

~~~
eldavido
If you won't do it, someone else will.

Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than
yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _If you won 't do it, someone else will._

This mentality can be used to justify far too many stupid things.

~~~
eldavido
This is why it's important to have limits.

As a society, we have laws that make it illegal to cross certain boundaries.

As an individual, I'm free to set my own limits on what I'll do. For one, I
don't work at facebook or other adtech companies because I think the world has
enough advertising and I don't like how phone-addicted people are.

I just think it's incredibly naive to assume you can have whatever lifestyle
you want and be commercially successful. Success is _costly_ ; you have to,
almost by definition, be willing to do things other people aren't. I don't
know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per
week" comes from -- I just know that there are a lot of incredibly hard-
working people in tech, and it's a high-stakes, high-money game, so you're
going to get some outliers.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60
> hours per week" comes from

Perhaps you missed labor regulations over the last 200 years during the
industrial revolution? That's where these ideas come from, that someone can
have a solid quality of life without trading 60-100 hours a week of their life
away.

~~~
eldavido
Honest question: do you see modern tech workers as "labor" in the classic
sense?

I don't but you seem to, I wonder why?

My rudimentary understanding of labor law suggests it's not really clear what
we are right now.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Honest question: do you see modern tech workers as "labor" in the classic
> sense?

If they're owners, founders, or have significant equity? No. That's not the
vast majority of tech workers though. They're (we? I'm a tech worker) just
higher up in the caste system.

------
thedevil
I do side projects for different reasons: they're a great way to express my
creativity.

I can create my very own unique solution to a problem, rather than just being
a cog in someone else's machine.

Edit: not that I mind being a cog if I get a paycheck, but it's not as awesome
as creating something new

Edit2: and quitting my day job and raising capital would screw everything up
for most projects.

~~~
altotrees
This is exactly the same reason I value side projects. Coming up with an
elegant, creative solution without being forced into time/system/professional
constraints is pretty amazing.

I want to use the language, platform and philosophy of my choice when working
on things for myself. It reminds me of why I got into this field in the first
place.

~~~
ca98am79
exactly. I have a side project that is doing well and growing, and I feel
pressure like I should hire people and try to make it hockey stick growth..
But I love that it is just my thing - more than making it as big as possible.
I don't want to create a giant company - I just like making a great product
and I don't want the pressure or have to deal with the other stuff.

------
chatmasta
He raises a good point that the "barrier to entry" to creating even a side
project is getting harder and harder for one person to attain in their spare
time.

Nowadays an MVP needs to be fairly polished to be useful at all, and often
needs to support multiple platforms. And, CRUCIALLY, if you're asking for
people's money, there is an expectation of ongoing support. If the business is
visibly a side project, clients will be unlikely to purchase from it over a
competitor that has a dedicated team working on a similar product. How do your
customers know that your side project will not disappear tomorrow?

I suspect there is a "chilling effect" that causes a sort of paralysis in
developers who are not ready to release their side project unless it's
"perfect," because they need to build the product well enough that it does not
require constantly supporting customers, responding to help-desk tickets, etc.
An MVP is not enough to get real customers on a side project, simply because
the barebones nature of it will amplify the support costs, causing strain on
the developer and taking time away from perfecting the product.

~~~
guy_c
This is a good quote from [http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-
basics.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.html)

The modern software developer has to be something of a swiss army knife. Of
course, you need to write code that fulfills customer functional requirements.
It needs to be fast. Further you are expected to write this code to be
comprehensible and extensible: sufficiently flexible to allow for the
evolutionary nature of IT demands, but stable and reliable. You need to be
able to lay out a useable interface, optimize a database, and often set up and
maintain a delivery pipeline. You need to be able to get these things done by
yesterday. Somewhere, way down at the bottom of the list of requirements,
behind, fast, cheap, and flexible is “secure”.

\------

I'd add to this list, if you are doing a side-project: marketing, SEO,
customer acquisition, advertising, customer support, infrastructure support,
...

------
tyre
Side projects also help diversify your perspective. As a founder, I don't want
people who are 100% invested in one thing. It sounds good at first, but you
run into burnout and narrow-mindedness very quickly.

How can you be expected to see your product, company, mission, etc. as part of
a larger world if it is your entire world? Most people I meet in SV cannot,
and a large part appears to be what percent of their life is wrapped up in
their work.

~~~
stevesearer
I really enjoy my line of work, but sometimes the day-to-day work just isn't
very creative so every few months I take some time to build a small project
that has zero potential to be a "startup".

The latest is just a database of local parks that will be sortable by the
various features (bbq grills, play grounds, etc). The official city website
was terrible, I'll get to have the joy of using it because it was something I
wanted, and I learned a few new things about WordPress which is what I work in
for my primary job.

~~~
davidjnelson
I love these and do them too. I built an app to search craigslist in 2007
across multiple neighborhoods and regions and plot the results on a map. This
was roughly 6 or 7 years before Craigslist added these features I think. I
found a great apartment with it, as did some friends. Fun, and learned some
cool stuff. Another one was a Wordpress plugin for Facebook comments before
Facebook released the official one and the existing ones were hard to use.
People loved it, and again I learned a lot. Side projects rock!

------
avip
If you put your life on hold for a year, build that side project, then go
pitching to VCs with your MVP and 100 users - you'll be negotiating same terms
and seed as if you had never built it.

Skipping that garage weekends step makes good sense. Good for your health,
good for the project. Only not so good for VCs...

~~~
derefr
To put it another way, the garage weekends step only makes sense if you're
never planning on taking investment in the first place. Bootstrapping requires
garage weekends (or enough of a nest-egg that engineer-you can work full-time
for visionary-you.) The whole point of venture capital is to skip that part.

Importantly, a startup with enough sweat put into it that it's now _executing
on a business model_ instead of _searching for a viable business model_ is no
longer a startup; and if that's the only thing a VC is funding, then that
person is not actually a VC, but rather a private-equity investor.

(And you could go further, and point out that the whole concept of "private
equity" was just for the sake of startups with market risk; and that, having
validated their market and eliminated such risk, companies should—according to
the spirit of the law—immediately do their IPO. These "venture
capitalists"—really just plain-old "capitalists" at this point—would then be
forced to compete with every other schlub who wants a piece of the company.

------
baus
Unfortunately many employment agreements prohibit side projects.

~~~
eldavido
My experience (SF) is more like "don't ask, don't tell"

If you do something blatantly competitive, e.g. launch a product that competes
with your employer's product, try to use employer's customer relationships,
you'll get sued. If you do something outright illegal, like steal IP, you're
probably going to jail.

But most managers I've worked for don't really care if it doesn't affect your
day job, and in fact, might quietly encourage it as it lets you scout the new
hotness and then bring it back to your day job, if it's good.

I suspect the norms around this depend highly on where you work, but I think
this attitude is pretty common in SF tech.

~~~
nostrademons
Your _manager_ probably doesn't care as long as you don't rub it in his face.
The _company_ only cares if you're becoming a direct competitor or try to get
it to buy back IP that was created on company time anyway. However, potential
_investors_ care a lot - this sort of thing shows up in due diligence, and
it's negotiating leverage that can be used against you in any potential
lawsuit or acquisition.

It's fine to _do_ side projects anytime you want - it's not like the company
has the ability to restrict what you can do in your free time. But if it looks
like the side project may turn into something more than a side project, it may
be a good idea to quit your job, throw away the code, and rewrite everything
from scratch.

~~~
outworlder
> this sort of thing shows up in due diligence

Everyone throws around the phrase "due diligence", but what exactly does that
mean? How is this kind of thing showing up in "due diligence", assuming a side
project could be at any stage? Do they interview employees? Go through their
social accounts? Github repositories? Lurk at IRC chat rooms?

~~~
nostrademons
My understanding of the process (I've never been through it myself, but my
wife does it as part of her job) is that the acquirer or institutional
investor will request a pile of documents, including: audited financials for
the company; the cap table, and any investment documents; tax returns; company
bank statements & other financials; all agreements that employees have signed
with the company; all agreements with partners & customers; commit logs for
the repository, and oftentimes samples of actual source code; etc. Then a team
of people - usually including financiers, lawyers, accountants, and
occasionally domain experts like programmers for a software startup or
biologists for a biotech company - will go over that with a fine-toothed comb,
looking for inconsistencies.

If the documentation is inconsistent or missing, you will be grilled on it.
For things like missing partner or employee agreements, you will have to go
back to those people and get them to sign the appropriate agreements. For
audited financials, if there is an inconsistency you may have to restate
earnings. If your commit logs show that some of your code was written by a
person who was not an employee of the company at the time of the commit, you
will be asked to produce a license or otherwise explain how you can legally
use that code. If it turns out that they were an employee of _some other
company_ at the time, with IP assignment to their employer, then you'll have
to go to that company and get them to sign a release or license agreement to
use that code, and if they won't do that, it may torpedo the deal.

~~~
x0x0
I've done it recently as an employee of an acquired company. In addition,
acquirers can (and do!) interview the developers as well. We got questions
that approximated how one would take git and turn that into the running
system. The acquirer also crawled through all our software license agreements;
wee discovered we weren't licensed quite correctly for a commercial db, so had
to rip it out in a real rush.

For each customer agreement, it has to be either assignable, or you will have
to go to that customer and get them to agree to make it assignable. Each
customer that doesn't so agree, or each customer that is slow to respond, will
have to be individually negotiated with the acquirer in the period before the
deal closes.

I'd imagine that one of the big risks acquirers of small companies care about
is the company somehow fucked up and doesn't own, or there is a colorable
claim they don't own, their source code. Having an overlap of git commits with
your previous employer could cause you a lot of heartburn at minimum. And good
luck getting a timely response from your previous employer that they don't own
that code. Your previous employer, even if they have no intentions of being
dicks, simply have no incentive to sign (and definitely no incentive to
promptly sign) such an agreement.

------
acconrad
This is a great point - experimentation is _huge_ and a big part of my own
growth as an entrepreneur. To me I feel better knowing my side project work
isn't sucking up someone's money when it doesn't work out, and I'm building my
programming skills. If a project will truly work, it will rise to the surface
and be better than the others, all while building on the skills from my
previous projects.

------
emehrkay
Who is giving out 250k in seed money these days? Asking for a friend.

~~~
imperialdrive
I'm giving out 2.5 and 25K pretty willy nilly if you give me a good vibe!

~~~
emehrkay
I should tell you about my side project(s)

------
encoderer
My co-founder and started Cronitor as a side project, now I usually call it a
side business. I'd consider a seed round, and angel investors have told us we
could raise money at a 7-figure valuation. I'm sure we could grow faster, but
I also enjoy it for what it is: passive-ish income. We develop features
because we want to, and we've built a stable service with few operational
problems and minimal customer service demands. I say, let the side projects
roll.

------
Sapph
I think the beauty of side projects is it's a low pressure way for people to
put their idea out in the world and see what happens. Only difference between
a hobby and side project is most side projects start off with a slightly more
defined potential to monetize it.

And if the project pans out, great! If not, hopefully the side project was you
doing something you love anyway so you still had fun and gained a lot of
experience.

The fact it's now easier (cheaper startup costs for many types of work) to
start side projects is a boon for the rest of us. It means every once in a
while, someone who would never had considered starting a biz right away but
would create something for fun may end up bringing a truly valuable product or
service to the world.

I started my biz ([http://www.artofemails.com](http://www.artofemails.com)) as
a side project. I think seeing it as a side project in the very beginning
freed me from feeling I had to do market validation and the whole launch a biz
laundry list to just put it (in my case sales email templates) out there. Once
it was up and I got really positive feedback, that's when I committed to
growing it as a fully fledged business.

------
thedogeye
Flexport started as a side project. Nobody noticed us until we had enough
traction to make it my full time job.

~~~
dilemma
Interesting. If you don't mind me asking here, I've seen you're hiring for
your HK office. I'm based in Shenzhen -- will you be hiring here in the future
or would you be open to employees commuting to HK? Happy to email you if
possible.

------
soneca
Why sucking crowd money through Kickstarter is acceptable but sucking seed
money from a professional is not?

------
jkot
I disagree wit article. Today there are way more entrepreneurs who turned
their side project into business. But today its not about huge "scalable"
startup, but more relaxed lifestyle business. And most projects are build
within existing system (youtube channel, amazon seller...), so they hide under
radar where every business is independent website.

------
myth_drannon
I have a feeling that the perceived lack of "product" side projects corellates
to the rise of Github and "open-source contributions" as a requirement to get
a tech interview? People spend all their hobby energy trying to build github
portfolios that most of the time is just libraries or contributions to
libraries.

------
dkopi
On the other hand, you have paul graham's great post about the top idea in
your mind. "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think
about in the shower.":
[http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html)

~~~
galistoca
> "It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the
> shower."

Just because it's a side project doesn't mean you don't think about it in the
shower. I never think of dayjob work outside of office hours, rest of the time
I'm always thinking about my project, including when I shower.

------
educar
There is a notion that seed funding is very easy to find. Is this really true
for normal people ? Does 'facebook' tag somehow magically attrach money these
days? How does one begin this process ? Most of my friends are engineers and I
know nobody in my friend circle who has raised a seed round.

~~~
nostrademons
A lot of people aren't actively seeking it. I'm not, and I have a number of
former coworkers that have successfully built startups (either been acquired
or running profitably) and only about half of them took seed funding.

If you're good enough and dedicated enough to execute on your ideas yourself,
chances are you were paid pretty well in your past life and have decent
savings. (If you weren't, it often makes sense to do a two-step path into a
startup, where you write a side project that is impressive but not lucrative,
use that as leverage to get a Google/Facebook/etc. job offer, save up a bunch
of money, and then seed fund yourself.) And if you've got decent savings, it
can often make more sense to avoid the dilution and investor-relations hassles
that come with taking investment.

~~~
vram22
Are you doing a startup?

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah.

------
draw_down
Easy to quit and get seed funding, sure. But when it's time to raise an A
round...

------
sideproject
People are building/running/coding side projects more than ever before! I run
sideprojectors.com
([http://www.sideprojectors.com](http://www.sideprojectors.com)) - it's a
place where people can sell/buy/show off side projects and we've been
receiving increasing number of side projects over the last few years. To my
surprise, a lot of projects are also getting sold. Whether they go on to
become big companies or not, I'm not sure - but many are building stuff.

------
lowglow
I REALLY REALLY want to help people test out these ideas early on with their
community and grow social proof with real capital from their networks. Check
out [http://baqqer.com/](http://baqqer.com/) to help grow your side project
and your community simultaneously.

~~~
nathantross
Hey this is Nathan, co-founder of Baqqer. Just to echo what Dan just said, we
built baqqer with the idea that individual
creators/makers/developers/designers should be able to test out their ideas
with minimum effort to see if they have legs. Unlike Kickstarter where users
need to have their product costs down to the penny, we let users build
community and long-term funding around their ideas(side-projects) until they
prove the model. This allows for pivoting, product recognition, and idea
validation. We see ourselves as a pre-kickstarter platform.

~~~
vram22
>Baqqer

This may be the first time I've liked a Web 2.0-style name like that :-) -
since Web 2 started in 2006-odd.

I kid you not.

~~~
lowglow
Thanks! Funny story: I pitched an early group of investors this idea, and they
stopped me and asked me why I settled on this name. I replied, "Because the
domain was available." and the entire room erupted in laughter. Pretty solid
experience.

------
abalashov
My personal experience working full-time and working on side projects over
several years in my early twenties has led me to a relatively pessimistic take
on the idea, at least from the perspective of realistically building something
serious and taking it to market. It wasn't until I actually quit (more
precisely, got fired) and went out on my own that I was able to produce
anything non-trivial, although I'm entirely bootstrapped and never took any
investment.

Some of it might just be that I had demanding jobs. It's true that the network
service provider arena is particularly 24/7\. However, I went through half a
dozen jobs between 18 and 22, and some afforded me plenty of free time outside
the 9-5. With the easy jobs, I was demoralised, frustrated and/or bored, which
didn't lead to a lot of spiritual energy for pursuing side projects
diligently. With the more intense jobs, I was so busy that I had to try to
squeeze in my side projects in the after-10 PM bracket. This all presumed no
social life to speak of, by the way; the moment life even vaguely threatened
social engagements, it was all out the window. Worse yet, staying up till 5 AM
working on my side projects and trying to make it in at 9 AM for my actual job
wasn't sustainable. It was arguably the immediate reason that led to my firing
from the last job I actually had. It's not just a time thing, of course;
sitting in an office all day is draining, even if one's job isn't very
demanding. Even with my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed energy at 20, I often came
home exhausted and would often spend my side project time just looking at the
screen without getting much done. And, as I said, this is _without_ factoring
in any other concerns whatsoever -- social life, personal life, working out,
errands, grocery shopping, etc.

Anyway, maybe some people can do it, but in my view, this is no way to build
something serious. I didn't start really making progress until I could afford
to go "all in" with my time and energy. Also, it's important to remember that
one is competing with folks who _do_ have the luxury of working on their
venture on a full time-ish basis. That's quadruply important if go-to-market
time is a serious linchpin of the venture.

Of course, the problem of bootstrapping while having a relatively high
personal expense base is that the inevitable consulting required to support it
sucks up all of one's time in the same way the day job used to (but with much
higher economic stress and cash flow volatility), so it's not that going into
business for myself opened up unparalleled opportunities to build product,
either. However, even so, it beat grinding myself to powder.

EDIT: In one of my less intense jobs, I tried the approach of crashing out as
soon as I came home (e.g. 7 PM) and waking up at 2 AM to spend my "best hours"
on development. The actual day job could have the sloppy seconds; it wasn't a
development job and didn't ask much of me. That was all good and fine, as long
as one is comfortable with exactly two modes of existence: sleeping or sitting
at a computer.

------
mode80
I think for every delicious side project that succeeds "in spite of itself"
there are 10 side projects who don't fulfill their destiny of greatness --
because they're missing the dedication ingredient that most startups require.

~~~
matt2000
I think you've nailed the toughest part about working on projects in general,
not just side projects - determining whether the thing isn't working or just
needs more commitment and time.

~~~
mode80
So true. Dedication isn't a guarantee; it's more like table stakes. Maybe the
trick is to be dedicated to an outcome, not a particular idea.

------
dreamdu5t
Maybe it's that more side-projects are being bootstrapped rather than VC
funded? It doesn't seem Fred Wilson has thought about that.

