Recently I’ve been focusing on launching some of the side projects I’ve had on my ideas list for a long time. Chances are most of them will not make any money, but by keeping the cost of each one low it doesn’t matter too much if only 1 in 10 succeed. They are also an opportunity for me to learn new skills and add to my portfolio.
My criteria for a side project include:
- Something I will use
- Minimal ongoing costs
- Competition
Let’s delve into those in a bit more detail.
Something I will use
If I’m going to use a side project, there’s already an incentive for me to work on it. By using a project myself, I find some of the issues and hopefully fix them before others notice. On the flip side, if I wouldn’t use the side project, why would anyone else?
Minimal ongoing costs
I don’t want side projects to cost a lot of money, because I expect the majority of them not to cover their expenses. For most projects, there’s no additional hosting cost as I already have a server. The main cost is a domain name, although I could skip that as well if I used one of my existing domains. A .uk domain costs around £7/year, which is affordable to me.
Competition
The existence of competition might seem odd – surely everyone wants to be the first to launch with a truly new idea? That might be the perceived business wisdom, but I disagree: competition means there is an established market for the service.
I think that in most cases, it’s better to be second to market than first to market. If you are first to market, you have to convince people there’s a need for your service, work out how much to charge, where to advertise, and every other aspect of the service. The upside is that you might be able to establish a dominant position early on – though whether you can maintain it is another matter. If you wait however, you can let someone else take all the risk and then enter the market once it’s established. The pay-off may be lower, but your main risk is execution rather than the fundamental question of whether anyone will buy the service. Also, chances are that the first to market will have been a bit lazy whilst they were the only player, so they will have annoyed some customers who are now looking for an alternative.
Think about the example of the first streaming service – they had to work out how to deliver video at scale, how much users would be willing to pay, at what point would they become profitable etc. If you start a streaming service now, you can poach ideas, revenue models, and even staff from an existing company. It took Disney+ far less time to scale up than Netflix, even though Netflix had a 12 year head start.
Existing projects
Projects I’ve already launched include:
Pick a Date: A simple way to vote on the preferred date and time for an event.
Viking Mind: Store and tag bookmarks in one place.
Both projects are simple and respect the privacy of users, e.g. you can delete some or all of your data at any time (and it is deleted automatically if your account is inactive). At the moment, I don’t expect either of them to make any money, but they have been useful learning experiences, and it’s possible that someone might hire me for paid work as a result.
Upcoming projects
Todo list app: There are lots of todo list options out there, but many of them are complex, require a network connection, and don’t protect your privacy (your todo list could expose a lot of information about you, e.g. where you shop, what you buy and aspects of your health). I want something much simpler that runs on my device and doesn’t share any data. This is also an opportunity for me to learn how to build offline apps, as this is a service which I think will become more important as time goes on.
Cron jobs via HTTP: Many sites are still using shared hosting, which usually doesn’t allow shell access or cron jobs. This can make it difficult if you have a process that needs to run on a regular basis. This side project will let you setup a regular schedule for making HTTP requests to trigger a process (e.g. a PHP script which calculates daily sales figures).
Website monitoring: Most of the current monitoring systems are overly complex and aimed at technical people. I want to create something really simple that is accessible for non-technical users and also helps developers like myself who want to monitor lots of different client sites (e.g. for certificates coming up for expiry).