By the article's own logic, the examples of Twitter and Gmail probably wouldn't have come into being if they were sales-driven side projects.
I don't think Vinicius' article was making a general statement about side projects being bad. His experience was that they can be dangerous distractions while you are still in the "startup transition cycle".
- Vinicius's article was great advice, so please don't consider this a knock on it.
- I wasn't really trying to outline sales-driven side projects in that part of the article, merely successful ones.
- For truly mature companies (ones who are out of the startup phase), side projects are a healthy thing to encourage because they can afford to take risks with their time and money. We were looking for a standard by which a startup like ours could tackle a side project. This is the standard we hit on that seems to be working for us. Of course there are others. And in different kinds of companies with different kinds of cultures, we'd expect variation.
This is a good article, but it goes a bit too far. The concept of a sales driven side project is a good one, but it's an attribute of a side project, not a requirement.
The value of this post is that it should bring into focus the two types of side projects: those that are sales driven, and those that are not. Both have their place when growing a company!
We're not really in the habit of announcing products before we've launched them (although we've already pre-sold this product to several customers). If you work with a newspaper we're not already working with, give us a call at (888) 850-2497. We'll schedule a demo for you after we've launched our initial customers.
It might seem like it, but it's not. We won't build one-off projects and nothing we do is a one-time fee. Almost everything we do (except for setup fees and training fees) is recurring revenue. These projects have to be generally applicable to our market and it must be sold to at least one of our existing customers beforehand with others who have expressed interest.
If we were doing fixed price development bids, I would agree that we'd be facing some serious pain down the road.
Can someday confirm, then let the author know that disqus comments make the article unreadable on iPad because the text is covered with a big white square. When it loads you cant see the text of the main body. I've seen it on several blogs now.
I don't think Vinicius' article was making a general statement about side projects being bad. His experience was that they can be dangerous distractions while you are still in the "startup transition cycle".