
How side projects saved our startup - rmason
https://blog.crew.co/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup
======
awwstn
Interesting to note that while Unsplash's launch on HN led to it becoming a
staple and a huge success, the comments from the HN community were
overwhelmingly negative:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083)

As a happy subscriber to Unsplash since it first launched here, I'm glad that
the team ignored the comments and kept making this.

~~~
gedrap
The first comment in the linked thread says:

>>> It's amazing how much the title submission can influence comments.

>>> Original title: "Hated expensive, crappy stock photos so I made this."

>>> Current title: "Free hi-resolution photos for your website. 10 new photos
every 10 days"

So that explains a lot, and puts a good emphasis on how important is the
title. These type of titles work out pretty well in other areas but it is a
gray area here in HN. It also makes me appreciate the original title rule
which we have here in HN.

------
candu
One issue I have with posts like this, however awesome/uplifting/well-
intentioned they may be, is that they attempt to generalize mostly anecdotal
evidence to general advice.

Is this an engaging and inspiring story? Yes, and it's great that people feel
free to share their stories (successes and otherwise) here.

Having read it, do I have a better idea how likely this strategy is to work
for any given person/company? No, and I don't know that anything short of an
exhaustive longitudinal study would help there. (There's some mention of
studies on creative hobbies, but it's a bit of a leap from there to repeatable
ROI.)

~~~
birken
Bingo. And assuming somebody did actually have a really amazing and effective
marketing strategy, they would be heavily disincentivized from sharing it. By
its nature, marketing is about outcompeting other companies for attention and
sales, so the less competition, the better.

So just based on bayesian probabilities, if you are reading marketing advice
from somebody, it probably is bad (or wont apply to you). If you are reading a
story about an effective marketing strategy somebody used in the past, it
probably doesn't work as well anymore.

As you state, this doesn't take anything away from the entertainment value of
the story, but it is just entertainment and marketing, not advice.

~~~
666_howitzer
What If "the marketing advice" you're reading is the actual marketing?

~~~
LoSboccacc
no ifs involved: blog was specifically listed as one of their marketing
platform and HN as their target audience.

------
zem
"side projects as marketing" has a rather unfortunate acronym (:

~~~
rymohr
Not quite as bad as runc though
[https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/24](https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/24)
(admittedly not an acronym but entertaining nonetheless)

~~~
Kiro
That's not even true. "Runka" means jerking off. No Swede would associate
"runc" with that (c on its own is never pronounced like k), especially in this
kind of context.

~~~
pavlov
It works in Finnish though. My first thought when seeing "runc" was "that must
be the comic book sound effect for jerking off"... :)

~~~
flurdy
My teenage Norwegian mind (not body) did smirk at the runc name. Runk and runc
are pronounced the same there and have the same meaning as in
Swedish/Finnish...

Not offending someone in some language somewhere is hard. I remember Honda
nearly launched the Jazz with a different name in Europe.
[http://www.carscoops.com/2007/09/why-honda-didnt-call-fit-
ja...](http://www.carscoops.com/2007/09/why-honda-didnt-call-fit-jazz-by-
its.html)

------
swalsh
I think the "side project as marketing" might only work if your side project
is a good vertical for your product. People coming to a site that helps give
referrals to designers (i think that's what Crew is) is definitely the same
people who would be interested in UnSplashed.

If i'm working on a business for pharmacists, i'm not sure my side project
playing around with neural networks is going to get me the right eyeballs.

------
amelius
This is too simple to be of interest. Only a few companies can have side
projects like that, and with that amount of success.

Honestly, HN sometimes (but not always) feels like it is made up of a bunch of
gold-diggers, clinging to the hope of one day making a big breakthrough,
without proportional effort. It has a very shallow feel to it.

~~~
onewaystreet
There are a few notable companies that were side projects. Twitter, Slack and
Instagram are three I can remember offhand.

~~~
dylanjermiah
Instagram was more a pivot from Burbn than a side project.

------
simonswords82
We do similar things for
[http://www.staffsquared.com](http://www.staffsquared.com).

For example:

\- What type of manager quiz are you: [http://www.staffsquared.com/what-type-
of-manager-are-you-qui...](http://www.staffsquared.com/what-type-of-manager-
are-you-quiz/)

\- Timesheet calculator: [http://www.staffsquared.com/timesheet-
calculator/](http://www.staffsquared.com/timesheet-calculator/)

\- Maternity calculator:
[http://www.staffsquared.com/calculator/maternitycalulator/](http://www.staffsquared.com/calculator/maternitycalulator/)

...and much much more.

Generally these "side projects" take a few days to put together from concept
through to launch. They're very minimal overhead, and they drive good numbers
that convert to trials to the site.

The best side projects don't just link back to the website you're actually
selling, but somehow draw users in. A good example of this is the
[http://invoiceomatic.io/](http://invoiceomatic.io/) by Freeagent. They grab
you by giving you the opportunity to create an invoice, next thing you know
you're knee deep creating a Freeagent account...it works.

------
imh
It's very meta to realize that this blog post is marketing too. Great
execution of the "useful marketing" idea.

------
Jugurtha
This is nice. I experienced something similar. I live in Algeria and the
banking system is deplorable. I wanted to be able to buy things online and
needed a debit card. It took forever to find a bank that proposed them
(sometimes, the bank employees themselves didn't know their own bank proposed
such a service).

Anyway, after all the fuss and after gathering all the necessary documents to
open an account and get a card, I thought that a lot of people were in a
similar situation.

I created a wordpress.com blog and listed all the necessary documents. I
created a PDF the bank required but didn't even bother to ask for until you
went there (so extra trip) with fillable fields and all and uploaded it there.
The whole thing. It was so frustrating to me that I went overboard and listed
other options like comparing other card providers to the specific context of
the country, and how each one could be used differently.

After that, I got proper hosting and redirected the .wordpress there. There
were about 300 people daily on the site. Not much, but that's 100k people who
read a very long post. The post alone had more than 700 comments (I changed to
Disqus) and I replied to 99.99% of them. The remaining was spam. Soon, other
readers were answering questions of "new" readers. They also sent me different
documents to attach to the article. The site was linked to from a whole bunch
of geek sites in the country. Sites to buy cars linked to it, too (they were
interested in buying car accessories).

Often times, people I knew would read the article and then read the author's
name and laugh because they knew me personally. Another contacted me and said
good things and asked if I was related to an author/Gynechology Professor (my
uncle) and he said he avoided his wife a couple years of prison time (she was
to be jailed for medical mistake and my uncle apparently made a report it
wasn't, the investigation was reopened). Others said it would be cool to meet
IRL for coffee, etc. Others said I should monetize it.

The site ranked 1 on Google for "MasterCard Algérie" (it's not anymore as I
was too busy to renew hosting, etc. But the wordpress.com blog ranks 7th).

It all came because I was too frustrated by the paperwork and the 18th century
style banks have to do business.

The point is: It might not seem like it's a big thing (I mean, it's only a
darn card, right).. But you never know how bad the itch is for someone else. A
good indication is how it is bad for you, though. It doesn't matter if it's
not revolutionary, only that it needs violent scratching.

Good luck with your projects.

------
hrayr
This is a very interesting marketing (unmarketing?) strategy. I'm in a similar
spot as Crew were when they posted that project, I even remember seeing it on
hn at the time.

Andrew recently posted an interview [1] with the founder of betalist.com,
which was also born out of desperation and as a side project. Marc talks about
his betalist experiment and the impact it had [2].

I would love to see other examples and write-ups about this. Was it accidental
or strategic? I'm the sole developer of our product right now, but we're also
struggling with marketing at the moment. How much does it make sense for me to
put the effort into such side projects?

[1] [http://mixergy.com/interviews/marc-kohlbrugge-
betalist/](http://mixergy.com/interviews/marc-kohlbrugge-betalist/) [2]
[https://medium.com/beta-list/how-i-tricked-techcrunch-
into-w...](https://medium.com/beta-list/how-i-tricked-techcrunch-into-writing-
about-my-startup-248083eb0c34)

------
personjerry
For Unsplash, could we get soft-links (i.e.
[https://unsplash.com/photo/1](https://unsplash.com/photo/1) would always link
to photo 1 of the set of 10 for that week)? Then I could set up a script to
update my wallpaper weekly, because these are gorgeous! :)

------
mozumder
> The best marketing is when you don’t know it’s marketing

There's an entire industry that revolve around this idea.

We call the people that work in that industry "publicists".

~~~
iraldir
The "you" in the sentence is the creator of the product, not the target

~~~
troydavis
I don't know Mikael's intent, but even if it was meant that way, the statement
applies just as well to the viewer/target. It's arguably a lot more
generalizable.

------
ljoshua
Thank you for this post: I've been feeling especially down on myself today
since I've a lot of learning to do when it comes to marketing and managing
side projects, but the ideas in the post were gold. Kudos!

------
ivan_ah
Very good insights about marketing material that is "useful".

The idea reminds me of Vaynerchuk’s _Jab, jab, right hook_ strategy
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/10/11/13-memora...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/10/11/13-memorable-
quotes-from-jab-jab-jab-right-hook/) (sorry for the popups)

------
hardwaresofton
I've been using unsplash for a while and I was amazed the first time I used
it, and am still amazed today. Enjoyed learning a little more about how they
started.

The content is some times a little repetitive (just how many shots of amazing,
beautiful scenery could one need?), but it has become an absolute go-to for
me.

Article is old, but still like hearing about Unsplash

~~~
keithpeter
What kind of images would make a change?

I think that still life images of old things might fit in with the motivation
for the site (free images to use on Web sites &c).

~~~
hardwaresofton
I'm not sure -- there is a site that specializes in what you are talking about
though:

[http://nos.twnsnd.co/](http://nos.twnsnd.co/)

------
dools
This is a very common seo tactic most often referred to as "tools". See
quicksprout.com for a high profile example.

cueyoutube.com has been a good source of seo juice work workingsoftware.com.au
but beware tools that have a maintenance overhead: youtube updated their api
weeks ago and i haven't had time to fix it.

------
fruitfulfrank
Candu- excuses excuses, time to just get out there and do it. Try something,
you might strike gold first time like Crew did, but probably not. Invest
little and expect little back, that's the lesson here. If it works, then shine
a light on it.

------
melle
This is some great advice, nice post!

Too bad the article only focuses on the success stories. I for one would be
really interested to know how many failed/abandoned side projects they created
and how they relate to the successful ones.

------
joslin01
Oh wow! This was you who created it. I had been looking around for nice stock
images to use for a product and stumbled upon "Unsplash". I was like sweet!
Awesome work and thank you again!

------
ddrum001
Very interesting post and seems to be the best way forward for "marketing" and
creating the right culture at a start-up.

------
avinassh
btw, Github was also a side project once.[0]

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772357)

------
philip1209
This isn't clear on the page, but if you look at the metadata - this article
is from October 2014

------
Disruptive_Dave
Also love what Hubspot did w/ Sidekick.

------
hackuser
I'm sure this breaks some HN rule, but consider visiting this discussion:

The Nigerian Teenagers Who Built Crocodile Browser
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9787010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9787010)

One of the teens found his/her way to HN, but all that's in the thread is
nitpicking about their website. It would be great if he/she got some
engagement and encouragement.

