3 ms·

Or it might help you to learn how to drop the useless things and just ship a bare essential MVP.

sergent_moon 7y ago
Or, maybe even more, recognize that the fun was in the developing, and not in the shipping. Don't stress over it not getting done. I have a ton of abandoned side projects, and I don't regret a single one. I also don't regret stopping them when they stopped being fun.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  I've designed and shipped my side project after a year, presented it at meetups, social media, but now I'm struggling with marketing. I have very little motivation to work on it, but I have endless drive to polish the codebase and features :) But I also know that 2-3 visitors per day will case me to abandon the whole thing. It's tough, shipping is only the second step.
  - illegalsmile 7y ago
    I have a hard time with marketing too as it seems the most hustle oriented and requires constant vigilance. My motivation dwindles much past the website/product design but everyone likes the product. My project is stupid simple and has a niche customer base. I don't know but I'm thinking it might be best to hire a marketing person on fiverr or upwork and have them manage marketing. I don't know if the return would be worth it though. Have you looked into hiring someone to do the social/marketing work?
archi42 7y ago
I read this often, and since people tend to do overengineering, this isn't bad advice. However: Some things can only be reduced so much. Rebuilding the product we ship at $dayjob, and which I enjoy working on, with a comparable feature set would probably take me ~8 years fulltime, assuming I know the whole stuff as well as I think and I don't hit major blockers (e.g. I don't do UI stuff, but most work is in the backend anyway); there is virtually no FOSS to accelerate this. A lot of the features can be dropped to get to a MVP, but I suspect I'd still be working on that for 6 month to a year, fulltime, and I will not be as easily extensible as the current incarnation. So that's 1000 to 2000h with a huge amount of technical debt and magnitudes inferior to the "competition"/$dayjob. Could I still pull that off if I wanted to? Yes. Would I enjoy it that way? Hell no.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  I know, but one shouldn't try to build a death star as a side project. Pick the scope wisely would be my number one advice.

Or, maybe even more, recognize that the fun was in the developing, and not in the shipping. Don't stress over it not getting done. I have a ton of abandoned side projects, and I don't regret a single one. I also don't regret stopping them when they stopped being fun.

tiborsaas 7y ago
I've designed and shipped my side project after a year, presented it at meetups, social media, but now I'm struggling with marketing. I have very little motivation to work on it, but I have endless drive to polish the codebase and features :) But I also know that 2-3 visitors per day will case me to abandon the whole thing. It's tough, shipping is only the second step.
- illegalsmile 7y ago
  I have a hard time with marketing too as it seems the most hustle oriented and requires constant vigilance. My motivation dwindles much past the website/product design but everyone likes the product. My project is stupid simple and has a niche customer base. I don't know but I'm thinking it might be best to hire a marketing person on fiverr or upwork and have them manage marketing. I don't know if the return would be worth it though. Have you looked into hiring someone to do the social/marketing work?

archi42 7y ago

I read this often, and since people tend to do overengineering, this isn't bad advice. However: Some things can only be reduced so much. Rebuilding the product we ship at $dayjob, and which I enjoy working on, with a comparable feature set would probably take me ~8 years fulltime, assuming I know the whole stuff as well as I think and I don't hit major blockers (e.g. I don't do UI stuff, but most work is in the backend anyway); there is virtually no FOSS to accelerate this. A lot of the features can be dropped to get to a MVP, but I suspect I'd still be working on that for 6 month to a year, fulltime, and I will not be as easily extensible as the current incarnation. So that's 1000 to 2000h with a huge amount of technical debt and magnitudes inferior to the "competition"/$dayjob. Could I still pull that off if I wanted to? Yes. Would I enjoy it that way? Hell no.

tiborsaas 7y ago
I know, but one shouldn't try to build a death star as a side project. Pick the scope wisely would be my number one advice.