My own side project best practices after reading the ‘Side Project Book’

First, I recommend this book to any side project infected person : it’s a great motivation boost !

After reading it, it seems that there are no absolute rules to side projects success. Some did no marketting and just did what they loved, others did à carefull market study before building anything, some did the whole things, others outsourced the code or the design, or even both … That said, as I read somewhere, it seems that one is more likely to achieve commercial success if he first focusses on the market, then marketting, then the design, and eventually on the features.

Common advices from the interviewees are :

• ship early
• iterate
• don’t give up

Why not apply these principle to “building a side project” instead of “building XXX in my free time” ?

From now on, I am going to set up project target duration and revenue. For example, if I don’t make at least 100€ / month after one year, I’ll stop working on it and start a new one.

I hope that by iterating more quickly through projects I’ll learn more and increase my chances of successes as the time goes. Keeping the same target duration and revenue for all projects should make me better at filtering ideas that are a good fit to my resources. As I tend to get bored quickly, it should also allow me to keep my motivation high.

Let’s see what happens !

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