
The Resistance Is Real – Why Side Projects Are So Hard - startlaunch
http://davemart.in/resistance/
======
heipei
At this point in my life I've started to believe that whenever you talk to
someone who is "passionate about technology X and clean architectures" or
"wants to work on challenging technical problems" is ultimately doomed to fail
when setting out to create a (for-profit, bootstrapped) business. This is a
strong opinion and there is certainly a spectrum for this mindset, but at the
most extreme your mindset should be more along the lines of "all technology
ultimately sucks, let's figure out the most straightforward way and the least
amount of effort and headaches so we can create value for our customers so
they, and we, can get off that damn computer screen and enjoy the fruits of
our labor".

If you're saying "I'm passionate about delivering great products to users" or
even "I'm passionate about making money" (I respect that) then technology
becomes the tool you unfortunately have to wield to arrive at that goal.

Note that this attitude only applies to people who want to take ownership and
deliver a fully functional product. There's tons of great people who are in it
for the sheer enjoyment of working with technology, they all will have a great
time working on challenging problems at one of the many tech companies. And
there's a few people who can both enjoy technical challenges but also switch
to dumb and boring crunch mode when it's demanded by the task at hand.

~~~
GordonS
This is something I really wrestle with. I intrinsically care about clean
architecture and clean code so much that I spend _far_ too much time
procrastinating and gold-plating. I realise I'm "doing it again" every so
often, but invariably tell my self "yeah, yeah, but it won't take much
longer". 4 hours later, I'm still at it :/

I don't know if it's my enterprise upbringing (been working for a megacorp for
~20 years), my love of tech, or my language of choice (C#, which I love, BTW),
but sometimes I wish I could just _ship a working product_.

~~~
akvadrako
You're complaining about 4 hours? If you can spend 4 hours to make your code
easier to understand, that's very likely to save someone 4 hours down the
road.

When it's 4 days or 4 months, then it becomes an issue.

~~~
GordonS
Of course I'm not complaining about a once-in-a-lifetime 4 hours - I mean, I
do this _all the time_!

~~~
akvadrako
I see. Well I used to have a tendency to start refactoring something, then see
it’ll be easier if I refactor another part and so on.

I would dig myself into a well so deep it might take a month to crawl out of
before my code is useable again, but it would be a huge waste to stop.

If you’ve only invested 4 hours it doesn’t seem that bad.

------
milesvp
It's a shame no one is really talking about the elephant in the room. At the
end of the day, most people are working on side projects... at the end of the
day. If you really want to be effective working on something that isn't your
primary thing, it absolutely can't be after a full days work, even if that
work isn't very taxing. Your mind needs time to not be working, or at least,
not be working on things similar to your day job. Worse, is many people
working on side projects are also doing it at the expense of sleep, which is
kind of like doubling down on a losing bet. Sure you might get lucky, but
you've still got a negative expected value from your time. People get dumb
when they're tired, and worse, is they often can't even tell how dumb they've
gotten.

If you want to work on a side project, you probably don't want to work on it
after work. And you probably don't want to work on it on your first of
consecutive days off. Even writers who claim to be night owls tend to work on
their writing first thing after a good sleep.

Also, if you really want to validate this wisdom, I suggest learning to play a
competitive game with a ranking system (although you may never get around to
your side project if you do...). I would bet dollars to donuts to that you
will tend to gain ELO/rating early in the day, and you will tend to lose
ELO/rating late in the day. That has held true for me for any game I play
seriously. It can be even worse at night, in that as you lose game after game,
you start to go on tilt, and try to keep playing until you get that win, or
until you gain back the rating you started with. It's absolutely insane, but
often not obviously insane until the next morning. Also, probably just take my
word on it, and don't game competitively, you're life will be richer without
it. Just understand that there is a mountain of evidence that talks about how
bad people are at performing when tired, and that the very best artists tend
to spend most of their time recovering from their creative endeavors,
punctuated by very short, very intense periods of exceedingly high focus.

~~~
brbrodude
A good hack to this is to wake up earlier and work on your stuff first thing
in the morning, allows you to spend that first energy on your real goals, and
then you can move to other stuff. It's fucking hard for me to wake early, but
I really need to get back to doing this.

Edit: another advantage of this method is that you can have guilt-free
relaxation on the end of the day.

~~~
city41
I used to wake up at 5am to work on my side project (blogged here[0]). It
really is the best way to go if you are serious about a side project. That
blog post was from 7 years ago. I again did the 5am stint recently and only
lasted a couple weeks. Although my day job now is much more stressful than it
was back then, so I think that is a big factor (along with being seven years
more tired...)

[0] [https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/waking-up-at-5am-to-
code/](https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/waking-up-at-5am-to-code/)

------
soneca
My inconsequential guess is that he only not launched it yet because (i) he
thinks the technology he uses matters more than the product and (ii) he is
building features that should not be included in the first version.

I was able to launch my side-project (the for-profit bootstrapping biz type),
a web app, in 7 months even being a junior frontend developer.

I chose the tech with the sole criteria of how easy it would be for me to
build it (I went with Ember, that I use on my day-job, and Rails).

And the whole time I was _constantly_ thinking hard about a feature and then
realizing _" I don't need that for now..."_. I then would write the feature
idea in a card on my backlog (a Github's project board) and move on to the
next important feature.

What I guess is making so hard for him is not the diligence, commitment or
motivation, but the product decisions he has to make (and I speculate he is
making the wrong ones).

------
simonw
The absolute best advice on side projects (and full startups) I know of is
that classic quote attributed to Reid Hoffman:

"If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve
Launched Too Late"

These days I even apply it to my blog entries.

No one else cares about those details you are obsessing over.

What matters is that your product lets people do something that they couldn't
do before - or in the case of blog entries that it teaches them something they
didn't know already.

~~~
freedomben
I agree mostly with this, but I would emphasize that your first release must
_be usable_. I've seen a few promising products get released too early by
people pushing to "ship early, ship often," etc, only to crash and burn
because they quickly developed a reputation for being buggy pieces of crap.
Once you have a slate of bad reviews on an app store, it's difficult to fix.

~~~
TravHatesMe
I agree. If users have a poor experience, they'll be less likely to try it
again after you've polished it. I'm sure there's a balance between the two,
but "if you're not embarrassed" is too strong of a statement (I suppose it's
an exaggeration to send a message). Plus, embarrassment is subjective.

------
pascalxus
IMHO tech is the easy part. The two hardest parts of side projects are: 1\.
Finding a solvable problem that hasn't already been done a million times. 2\.
Getting users and breaking even on user acquisition costs.

If you're re-writing your project 4 times, it means you're having fun or
learning(nothing wrong with that).

But for those that are building a business, it is about delivering value to
end customers.

~~~
buboard
> breaking even on user acquisition cost

this has become increasingly hard as we are short of options for
monetization,as startups focus on being acquired since many years ago

> it means you're having fun or learning

I guess developers look at the huge salaries and decide that a job with the
latest qualifications is a more profitable investment of their time in the
medium term.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_this has become increasingly hard_

I take it you weren't around back when the only realistic method of finding
customers was magazine advertising and a 1.5"x2" ad in a tech magazine was
$500/month with no guarantee that anyone would even notice it?

 _look at the huge salaries_

For a lot of us it's not about the money; it's about being to live by your own
rules.

------
superasn
I have a very different take on why you're struggling. I read this in some
book a long time ago when I too was struggling with a similar problem of
procrastination and this advice helped me a lot (but YMMV).

What it says is (in my own words) you have three people living in you called
the id, ego and the superego. The id or the kid is the child who wants to
play, be happy all the time and wanta instant gratification, while the exact
opposite is your superego that wants to impress others and wants to be
perfect. The ego is the middleman trying to settle the two. So anyway long
story short your superego or the perfectionist is what is making you obsess
over the technology and you're doing the same work over and over again (if I'm
correct you've rewritten it 4 times?) yet your id is not getting any reward
and just more and more mundane work, so it revolts and creates resistance and
starts giving you the excuses for not doing it anymore or calling the whole
thing lame.

The best approach as others have pointed out is because you're being a
perfectionist. As soon as you can stop doing that you will suddenly see that
work even though mundane is getting done. Also you may need some play too as
you've said you're feeling like a failure (search play it away), that book may
have some invaluable advice for you on how to get back in the game.

------
ravenstine
I've found that the heart of the problem is... money.

With money comes time. If funds are sufficient, most of those whispers are
diminished.

Let's say one is sitting on a pile of money:

> A year! Why haven’t you shipped yet?

I would not be bothered by this if I could continue to fund the project.

> This is boring. Just shelve this project and move on to something fun &
> exciting.

With money could come the possibility of hiring someone to do the boring
stuff, or making the project look professional enough that it attracts
contributors who think it has a future.

> This niche isn’t big enough. You should change the target to developers?
> Marketers? Sales?

If the project has enough money, course correction should be much less of a
risk.

> No one will actually use this. / Will designers really find this useful? /
> What if you launch and no one finds it valuable?

Ok, this would be a worry no matter how much money one has. Although I suppose
it's less of a risk if a project is small.

I recently set out to work on a side project with virtually no funding. I
wouldn't call it a mistake as I've learned a lot about myself and the nature
of doing a side project full-time, but money is a biggie no matter how much
motivation one can muster. Maybe if I had spent less money on fancy lunches
when I worked for a company, for example, I could have bought a lot more time
to finish what I was working on. Now I'm at a point where I have to focus
almost all my time on finding employment because the electricity doesn't pay
itself.

Next time, I've gotta learn how to raise money for what I do instead of
believing I can self-fund it. lol

~~~
segmondy
It's not about money, it's about time, flow & motivation.

Time is the biggest obstacle, side project implies that there's another full
time job. With a full time job and other obligations such as family or
volunteer activities.

Without enough long stretch of time, it's difficult to get into a flow state.

Without enough flow while working on any project motivation wanes.

The secret becomes figuring out how to manage your small chunk of time, how to
get into flow fast, suspend it and resume it across time and how to keep the
motivation up if you miss out on flow.

~~~
zzzcpan
No, in the end it's pretty much all about the money. And not just funding, but
about making money. I mean imagine that you did finish your side project and
did ship it, now what? Does it become sustainable the moment you ship it, does
it pay your bills, does it maintain itself, pay for its own infrastructure? Of
course not. You still need to make money just to keep it and yourself alive,
and quite a bit of money.

~~~
segmondy
end goal for all side projects is not money, end goal sometimes is scratching
your own itch and using it, conquering a challenge you encountered, learning
whatever you set out to do, etc. I have built 100+ side projects, most of them
have NOTHING to do with money. People write poems, stories, music, paint,
build all sorts of things for the fun of it, and guess what? many of us code
for the joy of it too.

Keeping a side project going is pretty much $0-$5/month. if you already have a
VPS, you can just run it on there, or you can run it at your own server or on
a raspberry pi, you can even run it on many cloud servers for free. Using
serverless for instance, you can run many side project on AWS for free.

------
csytan
Reading this blog post, I see two skills in conflict:

1\. Ship now, ship often

2\. Strive for perfection

The first one is required for entrepreneurs. Your "work <\--> reward"
iteration cycle should be as short as possible, and should end with the
customer handing you money.

The second one is a skill that rewards knowledge acquisition, and can be
especially helpful for those looking to improve their skillset in order to
move up the career ladder. It's also an iteration cycle, but the reward often
doesn't end with directly delivering value to a customer.

Lastly, I think that startup media (Tech Crunch, YC, etc) has a lot to do with
this. There are way fewer stories told about bootstrapping something long
term, compared to stories about successful startups hitting home runs. The
reality is that the bulk of the work will be after you launch, and will likely
require continuing effort in the form of years rather than months.

~~~
enraged_camel
IME, the core of your product, the part that your customers use regularly,
should work perfectly. It’s okay for the other stuff to not be perfect.

~~~
Swizec
On the other hand: if nobody is buying your product, it doesn't matter how
perfectly it works.

~~~
enraged_camel
There is some truth to that, but most people want to try out a product before
they buy it. So if they run into bugs during that trial period, then your
conversion rate will suffer.

------
burtonator
This is my side project at the moment:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

.. but it's sort of become full time.

For me it started off as a need to manage my reading as I was working on
another project around cryptocurrencies and reading tons of PDFs and web
content.

Got majorly side tracked but launched it and so far there are a few thousand
active users.

~~~
fvargas
Thanks for sharing, this looks neat and useful! The pagemarks are an
interesting concept. It would be cool if the top progress bar above the
document showed, not cumulative progress, but the progress as it maps to the
areas marked on the document, which aren't necessarily contiguous. Kinda like
the progress bar you have for a torrent as non-contiguous chunks are
downloaded. This provides spatial information about what parts of the document
have been read.

------
ThomPete
I have launched several side projects a couple of them financially successful.

They have had plenty of bugs in them and I got several angry emails about
various things, but over the time I have fixed them as they come in. It's a
great way of prioritizing what of that last 20% you should fix.

In other words. Ship as fast as possible, treat it as a project then over time
improve. If you have something of value people will use it even when it's not
optimal.

------
encoderer
Really, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you need to ship. You have
probably overbuilt already.

The reason I’ve basically embraced a lifestyle with a “second job” is that
it’s enormously rewarding both intellectually and financially. Over 4 years
the business has grown from a “hobby that made me a few bucks” to meaningfully
changing my families financial outlook.

There is no way I could have sustained the investment without those two
sources of reward.

------
swsieber
I'm about halfway to launching a side project (I seem to be close than 50%,
but there's always the 90-10 rule).

It's been fun. I've been writing the backend in rust, using squire for
storage, and actix-web for the server framework. The front end is plain html
without a lick of js. And my css is really just compiled scss.

I'm happy to report I've only engaged in a small bit of yak-shaving (writing a
custom derive for defining APIs I need to hi from my backend for integration
purposes) and only a small bit of framework churn (I switched web server
frameworks because I wanted an abstraction that wasn't ergonomic/available in
the initial one i had chosen).

And it's been fun. The best part is that even if it flops, my wife and I will
still use it.

Edit: I've only been at it for a couple months

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Couple of months and you’re half way? So if you cut some scope you can launch
by dec 31st right?

I have no idea what you’re working on but I bet you don’t launch till March at
least.

~~~
swsieber
I have already cut features - I was going to launch with multiple
integrations, but I decided to just do one. The difficulty is carving out
time, and being painfully aware that anything I go to do could give me a grief
and cost me lots of time trying to figure it out :)

I am mostly done with the bare minimum of what I need for it to be usable for
_myself_. I have a little more work to do. Not much though, I've tested the
most of the bits I still need to do. Now I just need take that learning and
finish building it.

I think I'm only halfway because I need to get billing working (planning on
integrating with Stripe - there goes my no JS goal...), fix the CSS so it
doesn't look _terrible_ (doesn't need to be fancy, just passable), and work on
my error logging / reporting. So... mostly polish. But not feature polish, but
"don't drive away potential users via stupid stuff" polish.

Edit: I do hope to launch by Jan. 1 since new years resolutions _could_ be a
great driving force for new user signups, but your assessment is a reasonable
guess.

~~~
rpeden
I've heard of quite a few products that launched without billing in place yet.

They gave users a 30 day trial period, so starting on launch day, they had
precisely 30 days to get billing sorted out if they hoped to be able to charge
anyone.

A free trial period may or may not be suitable for your product. But you can
probably get by without it on launch day.

You could even launch in beta mode and give people access in exchange for
feedback.

If you're targeting graphic designers, then go ahead and tweak that CSS.
Otherwise, go ahead and get some real people using it. If they're using it to
solve a pain point, they'll quickly tell you what's good and what's not. And
if they don't use it at all...well, that's valuable feedback too.

~~~
swsieber
Thank you for the advice. I hadn't considered launching without billing. I
don't think a free trial for my product could be very long (since it involves
sending lots of SMS which would cost me quite a bit if I get a big user
spike). But I think I can provide a sort of demo without that bit.

~~~
rpeden
Right, that makes sense. It's not the right fit for every business idea.

If you could find yourself a 5-10 beta customers, perhaps launching to them
before billing is ready might work? You could even perhaps set a cap on how
many SMS messages they can send per day or week. That would keep your costs
low while still getting you some feedback.

You should of course do whatever is best for your product. I've just learned
from experience that launching as soon as you can is great, because you'll
often find that many of your assumptions about how and why people will use
your product don't match how they _actually_ use it.

------
blizkreeg
Don’t mean to be mean (i’ve been there) but this is the money line “Re-written
the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to Vanilla JS).”

Is the goal to ship or play? If latter, no harm done, else that’s your
resistance, nothing else.

------
CM30
So true, I'm constantly plagued by those thoughts to stop whenever I work on
anything, in case it's either not good enough for the public, boring, not
gonna sell/find users, etc, and every minute I spend working on my projects is
a battle between declaring I'll actually finish them this time around and a
feeling of 'relax, you can take more time here'.

That said, they're not the only issues. In fact, I'd say what hurts me more
than the nagging thoughts in the article is a deadly combination of OCD esque
perfectionism and a tendency towards feature/scope creep that really needs a
good project managing laying down limits.

This means endless reams of time is spent on 'nice to have' features that keep
wasting more and more time, like a one person version of Duke Nukem Forever.
And then even more time is spent procrastinating because I'm worried about
said goals being too ambitious and the amount of work required to meet them
being overly daunting.

Still, I guess it's not a unique issue, and I suspect this perfectionism is
why (as some others commenting here mention) many successful entrepreneurs are
the kind who can step back, stop trying to be 'artistic' and just get the damn
thing done, tech be damned. Heck, sometimes I suspect someone like Homer
Simpson/Peter Griffin would probably be the ideal entrepreneur/founder, since
while they're not particularly bright, they've also got no inner filter
whatsoever, are completely delusional about how good their work is and are
willing to jump into new projects and ideas without a second thought. I'd
rather be a delusional moron who gets things done than a normal person haunted
by inner doubt and constantly worried about whether their work is good enough.

Either way, hopefully I'll just bite the bullet and get my current projects in
the next year or so. Better to have something rather than nothing.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
I'd be happy to look over your project and its features to let you know if
something should be a v2 feature. Kick you to the finish line so to speak and
keep you accountable.

In fact, this would make for a nice community. Anyone try to set one up like
this?

~~~
davidjnelson
Cool idea. Kind of like the boss as a service idea, but with peers.

------
miguelmota
My philosophy has always been "make it run, make it right, make it fast". If
it runs and is functional it's good enough to ship and release. Making the
codebase pretty and optimizations come afterwards

------
egfx
The trick is finding a problem you have a passion for. That way, no matter
what or how long, it won't feel like work. Your side project is the
sabbatical.

~~~
rpeden
The downside to this approach is that it can kill the passion for the thing
you were passionate about.

Also, I've noticed that real world solutions to problems tend to include lots
of schleps that are excruciatingly boring, but necessary.

The longer I do this kind of work, the more strongly I believe that the people
who are most likely to see a project through to completion are the ones who
have the stone cold professionalism - or just plain stubbornness - to grind
though the boring stuff instead of just faffing around on the bits of the
problem that they're passionate about.

I think a side project that's just about indulging a passion is totally fine.
But a side project that is also a product that makes money will almost require
lots of pieces that definitely feel like work.

------
ungzd
Side projects are hard when you are using "best practices" from Google and
Facebook, choosing the best and "most right" js framework, even landing page
looks like landing page of "best unicorn VC companies".

~~~
robterrell
For me, it's easy to complicate things by saying "for this side project I'm
going to learn new thing X" \-- using 'learning something new' to help justify
the time spent, but usually screwing up the project as a result.

~~~
amoitnga
So true. I've done it, I know it. It's very dangerous.

------
barefootford
I've found that setting a very hard deadline, ideally with some money on the
line, is the best way to guarantee something gets done. It seems like this
should be the authors next step. To get my last video out, I sent a friend
$200 through Square Cash and said "Only send this back to me if I have X
published by X hour on X date". It worked!

I definitely feel resistance in the last stages of side projects, but I don't
necessarily buy Pressfields reasons for why it's there. Still valuable to know
it will be there ahead of time though, regardless of what its origins are.

------
systematical
12 years ago I could code on a side project 8 hours straight. It was fun and
exciting. 6 years ago I could do that, but with less frequency. Today its a
rare thing that I can even sit down and get in 4 hours in. My computer is
littered with barely started projects and a few projects sitting around
50%-90% completed.

The last side project I was able to hammer out was a thin API wrapper that I
open sourced to github. It only took about 4 hours to code. It's a piece of a
bigger project I am working on. Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your
bigger project into smaller chunks?

~~~
craftyguy
> Maybe thats a possible solution? Breaking your bigger project into smaller
> chunks?

Definitely. Anything I cannot hammer out in a weekend I break into smaller
chunks and treat each one as a separate project even though they are all
contributing towards one larger one. This advice generally works great for any
large type of problem or endeavour.

------
Kaveren
> "Re-written the code base 4 times (Laravel, Vanilla JS, React, then back to
> Vanilla JS)."

The path of least resistance is to research all available options, pick one,
and see the project through, not to jump back and forth. It's a side project,
but still, this isn't going to make it any easier.

That aside, the side project looks like it could see a good degree of success.
I wouldn't use it because it seems like it's way too simple a feature to
outsource, but then again, many companies also pay for simple customer /
customer-service instant messaging services.

~~~
pdimitar
I fully agree with the premise but many times, it's just way too hard to
actually _predict_ the production problems you will have even with your most
favourite tech.

Truth is that while working in a corp you can't see the big picture of seeing
a project through from start to finish.

For example, I am helping on mostly good faith -- and at about 30% of what I'd
normally charge -- a friend to bootstrap their website / platform and even
though I use language and tech I very much like and I am the dictator of the
backend, 95% of the work is extremely boring and it's just "make this
controller, make this API endpoint, wire this object to that other object,
integrate this payment provider" etc... Combine with the universally bad
deployment experience of basically 99% of the languages out there and things
aren't really that glorious even if the tech is much better than what you
worked with your entire life beforehand.

What I am saying is -- even for every experienced programmers it's very hard
to make an accurate prediction.

But if there's one metric I always use, it's this one: "does the tech stand in
my way to productivity and waste my time with details I shouldn't care about?"
\-- if so, I try to ditch it (not possible with JS but still, there are
transpiled languages and frameworks that make things better).

------
ErikAugust
This is relatable. I have even begun to read "War of Art". Consistency is key
to momentum.

My most recent project won an overall award at ETHDenver - which at the time
became the world's largest cryptocurrency hackathon. My teammate and I created
a cyberpunk-themed cryptocurrency trading game based on the classic Drugwars.
My teammate is a great multimedia/graphic artist, and it was very well
received. If interested, Beta is at
[https://www.cachethegame.com](https://www.cachethegame.com).

However, I would about 20% of the current total project (it's been 9 months)
was completed in the 36 hours of the hackathon. We were on a roll.

After the hackathon - we ended up talking to investors, but decided to pass.
This is a double-edged sword with downside.

"Side" projects are hard in the way self-guided learning is hard. You don't
have people breathing down your neck periodically to keep you on track.

The further we got along to releasing a Beta the more the "Resistance" crept
in. To the point of, as soon as the Beta was released - basically taking
several weeks off altogether.

This is where some seed investment would have helped, besides the obvious
ability to clear the calendar a bit. Forget big splashes of "raising a ton of
money" or an ICO - it's practical to raise a bit money for reasons I
mentioned.

------
happybuy
I've found that if I can't just complete a certain feature, task or function
on my product, and it keeps dragging on, then there is likely a reason for it
being too difficult (more than just laziness on my part!)

A good approach when this happens is to redefine the feature. Either by
reconsidering its importance, investigating different ways to achieve a
similar outcome or mostly decomposing the feature into even simpler and more
minimal deliverables and implementations.

Then deliver the extremely minimal implementation.

In a lot of cases you then come back and make it more rounded later on, or in
many cases, the simpler deliverable is actually all that is required and you
move onto something else entirely.

It's taking a disciplined and strict MVP approach to every task you have and
focusing more on continual delivery as a north star. This tends to work
because – as noted by the author – giving up on a side project is the biggest
risk and one of the larger reasons for failure (you can't succeed if you don't
show up).

By always delivering something/anything you get the satisfaction and reward of
progress which is a lot of times all that is needed to keep going.

------
Delmania
These questions are telling:

* No one will actually use this. * Will designers really find this useful? * What if you launch and no one finds it valuable?

Why not do some basic user research and get people to pay for it? This isn't
some new ground, there are literally hundreds of internet gurus all saying
that if you whip up a prototype, present it to people, and they pay for it,
you'll have a higher chance of success.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
Do you have experience with this? What if your prototype doesn't have any of
the important functionality?

~~~
Delmania
Then you analyze feedback and redo your prototype with what your customers
need?

The key thing is understand the underlying desire. Ford is famous for saying
that if he asked people, they would tell him they wanted a faster horse. He
understood they wanted a quicker means of transportation, so he built a car.
That's what you do with the feedback of the prototype. Listen to responses,
and adjust or abandon.

As for experience? Not directly, but seriously, this isn't hard. This is
literally the standard way every successful businesses operate. They analyze
market demand, built an answer, get feedback, and adjust. Only very rarely
does an individual's personal itch ever become a successful product.

------
jammygit
The real reason they're hard is the employment contracts that forbid them (or
surrender their ownership, which is almost worse)

~~~
wmurmann
Just because you sign a contract doesn’t mean it’s enforceable.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
Bingo- has there actually been a recorded case of this happening to someone
who’s working on an unrelated project? Obviously if you copy your employers
product or do something very similar it’s suspect, but if you work for a
defense contractor and build a social network for cats in your spare time,
they’re not going to care

~~~
jammygit
Are there recorded cases of this happening where the employee won? I've heard
of those 'used a company laptop to work on the project so the employer is out
for you' cases, but never read much in detail.

------
sdenton4
My breakthrough this year has been working on a side project that really
really isn't just me. It's a collaboration with a small research group at a
university.

I do my stuff mainly outside of work, and generally am improving the group's
overall research bandwidth, rather than taking a full project on all by
myself. Having some social obligation to keep the relationship going is enough
to overcome a lot of the little hurdles, and having some excited feedback when
I make some genuine progress is super helpful. It's also been a great chance
to just meet lots of lovely people in the community, and having the
communication has helped me make progress much faster than I would have on my
own.

And best of all, I get to have the feeling of doing some real Science, in an
important but generally underfunded problem space. It's been great.

~~~
pdimitar
Would you be comfortable to share what you are working on?

I'd love to be a part of something like that... but definitely don't have the
network for it.

~~~
sdenton4
I spent about a year or so reading and reimplementing interesting papers
around machine learning on audio - probably six months was actually getting to
know signal processing in a real way and learning tensorflow, and then some
months doing seq2seq for ASR slightly more seriously. And now I've been doing
things that you can find in the lifeclef or dcase competitions, with a group
that focuses on one of the sub tasks.

------
peterburkimsher
Good luck. If you use your side project, it's worth it. If you learned new
skills, the project taught you better than any textbook.

Marketing is hard. If you ask people what they want, they don't know what they
didn't imagine. (Insert quote by Henry Ford about a faster horse, or the St
Pancras train station champagne bar, etc). It's better to build something
first, and if people like it, continue developing it.

I've made several Show HN, and occasionally even been offered jobs that way. I
need a job now, and I've tried some more projects with that purpose, sadly
without success. I think it shows motivation and initiative far better than a
résumé, though, and attracts like-minded new friends.

~~~
pdimitar
Landing a job you deem [almost] perfect for you is, as many other things, a
matter of luck beyond many other factors.

Very uncomfortable truth and something I had to gradually accept over being
unemployed for 6 months (in fairness, I had enough money reserves to live very
comfortably for 4 of them).

I am not gonna bore you with my story but the bottom line is -- keep trying.
As you said, marketing is hard. But very, VERY essential, including in how do
you present yourself in interviews. In the end what landed me the job was an
injection of optimism I got from a really good massage by my wife and then 8
hours of tight sleep -- I used that optimism to send out several more job
applications to leads I deemed highly unlikely to even get a response from.
And lo and behold, 3 days later I successfully moved through all phases of the
interview process of one of the companies, and I am starting in several days.

Don't let a bad period get to your head, no matter how long it may be.
Persistence is basically your #1 advantage.

Good luck to you!

------
ernsheong
As a perfectionist myself, I continue to learn that you have to live with some
"shit" in order to get your stuff out there. There's the tendency to
rewrite/refactor, this makes side projects harder than it needs to be. It's
self-defeating, really. There's plenty of time if you succeed, but no time if
you don't.

The perfectionism also prevents shipping because you want to avoid the
impending negative feedback of your current project, and so you bounce off to
something else.

How to overcome? Experience (and failures) helps. You've spent so much
perfection on something and it still didn't succeed the way you hoped. The
next time you would care less about perfection and just ship.

------
StavrosK
I can't relate to this at all, I work on a side-project for a week or so and
then launch it. Here's last week's, a community of maintainers that aims to
maintain abandoned FOSS projects:

[https://www.codeshelter.co/](https://www.codeshelter.co/)

Why rewrite stuff? Just see if people want what you're building first and then
figure out whether it's well-written or needs a rewrite.

------
pmontra
A note to the author: this is by far the whitest font I saw on so many light
gray text on white background sites. Why? It's beyond readability.

~~~
Ace17
Yeah, it's unreadable. Too bad, the article seemed interesting.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I too have a side project that is nearing completion but I'm nervous to launch
it. It's nerve-racking not knowing if and when someone might sign up. As a a
non-dev it's even harder since I had to pay a developer out of pocket. I'd
this doesn't work I'm out of a lot of my personal money.

~~~
jlangenauer
If you don't launch, I can predict with 100% confidence how many people will
sign up: 0.

What do you have to lose at this point? The money's already spent.

------
finfun234
Hi Dave, Kudos for sharing what you experienced. I actually completed a year
working on [https://shareseer.com](https://shareseer.com) on thanksgiving day.
It is a side project. I have found shipping whenever a small milestone is hit
to work for me. Another trick i use is to keep a backlog of items that need to
be done, which brings me back to work on it. Thirdly I really care about the
problem. Fourth an d finally I realized distribution is a vastly harder
problem than product. Getting people to use what you build is the core of
whether the product succeeds or not.

------
danielor
I think this is natural. The line between a hobby project, and unpaid venture
can be quite thin. When your attention is split, it only becomes harder. Most
rational people want to live life a little, and not work constantly.

------
akavel
Related Ask HN from a few months ago: "Why is nearing completion so
demotivating?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17138794)

------
yjhoney
I know I'm nitpicking here, but I find it annoying when people say things
like: "If you’ve yet to read these x books, do yourself a favor and buy them
today".

Did myself a "favor" a few times in the past and every single time I only read
the first couple of pages and ended up giving them away. Or worse, I get FOMO
so I keep those books around and it becomes clutter around my small apartment.

Its hard to focus and read the rest of what the author has to say if he makes
blanket statements like that.

~~~
toyg
Worse, the mentioned books are some veiled Christian propaganda, as mentioned
in this review:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6)

------
viburnum
It gets hard at the 90% point because that's when you realize your idea was
bad, and nothing you can do at the last 10% will fix that.

------
mooreds
I've run a side project for about 8 years (
[https://farmshares.info](https://farmshares.info) ) with varying levels of
effort and commitment (and income).

I think it's key to realize:

* you have to be really into solving the problem

* you probably aren't going to make much money from it

* a side project is a great way to experiment with different tech

------
catchmeifyoucan
Usually, after I build everything out, I debate whether I want to publish my
work or not. I find that to be very hard. What motivates me is at least
sending it out to my friends and getting validation that this is good and I
should share it. So that pushes me to do the extra mile for polish.

------
ronreiter
Great post! Added my two cents: [https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-
projects-are-hard-psy...](https://medium.com/@ronreiter/why-side-projects-are-
hard-psychologically-speaking-1672331ead79)

------
austincheney
My year long application update is finally nearing publication. The emotion
and fear are very real. The psychosis resembles combat fatigue. It’s
exhausting to think about, but I know people have waited on this and depend on
my delivery.

------
brbrodude
I'm three years in.

~~~
napsterbr
Four here. Cheers!

~~~
HDevo
Hello, eight here. Good luck!

------
vexangel
Just started a side project and hit all of these ideas. For me they just
aren't pronounced enough to be stopping points at this early stage. Hope this
helps!

------
thesz
Obligatory reference to За миллиард лет до конца света:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_\(novel\))

My friend developed first then Soviet software-controlled modem. He said they
experienced more line cut-offs (hangups by telephone line operator) during
testing next to the end of project (which was a success). He explained that
their modem had crude analog adapter and caused a lot of noise and/or
interference with the other phone company machinery. He said he also suspected
KGB who they may thought that this is new voice scrambling device.

Basically, the Resistance is real, but can be explained by some real factors,
just like in the novel above.

------
bitL
Hire a boss ;-)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197)

------
Dowwie
Purpose pushes us forward. Find yours.

------
jcroll
Looks more like you're procrastinating writing blog posts

------
magic_beans
Note: this applies to finishing a novel manuscript as well.

Source: self.

------
ngrilly
Why the rewrite from React to vanilla JS?

------
vonnik
> "GET's"

------
madeuptempacct
I am amused by how easy I find it to work on corporate drone work 8-12 hours a
day + during my vacation, but have a hard time forcing myself to work even a
couple of hours on my own stuff.

I think it's because in the end, it's hard to really believe it's not all for
nothing.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I’m literally laughing out loud. I thought I recognized your username: you
were one of the ones calling Boss as a Service a complete scam for losers who
have psychological issues motivating themselves. And yet here you are, talking
about how it’s easy to work on boring corporate stuff _where you have a boss_
, but it’s nearly impossible to motivate yourself on your own stuff.

Which is _exactly_ the issue that something like Boss as a Service is there to
solve.

It’s so perfect that I’m pretty convinced this is a subtle troll on your part.

~~~
madeuptempacct
Hmm, saw this just before heading out. It's not a troll. It has nothing to do
with having a boss, it has to do with knowing you are getting a guaranteed
paycheck and knowing you need that to survive or maintain a certain lifestyle.

~~~
wst_
Not OP and I think too it's not about the boss. But marketing and sales as a
service could be a help. I guess this is at least a part of the job that
investors are doing for the startups. Maybe not marketing and sales but
guidance to get a ROI.

------
alwaysreading
Steven Pressfield’s War of Art (mentioned in the post) is such a great read
when you’re stuck - [https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts](https://amzn.to/2FF9Nts)

~~~
toyg
Is it? Not according to this review:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1936891026/R1PIVDBK0NS9D3/ref=cm_cr_dp_mb_rvw_6?ie=UTF8&cursor=6)

When God entered the picture, I lost all interest.

~~~
tlb
The book invokes the pagan notion of a pantheon of gods, rather than the
Judeo-Christian God. He describes a ritual where he propitiates the Muses (the
gods of creativity) before sitting down to write. You might find it easier to
swallow, because when people invoke the J-C God they often mean it completely
literally, while the Muses are clearly allegorical.

But to get through the book, you have to suspend your rational empiricism
quite a few times. Perhaps no more than to read The Odyssey or Macbeth, where
internal human struggles are illustrated with supernatural imagery.

~~~
jen729w
Not true. A quick search of my Kindle version shows references to “God” – the
one we all think of as God – twice on p34 then on p86, p109, and so on.

The author believes in God and isn’t afraid of letting you know about it.

------
buboard
Calling procrastination resistance is a bit rich. And wasting time writing a
blog post about it ... kind of nullifies the blog post itself.

