Answer HN : Growing a side-project
There was a recent Ask HN thread recently about how to market and grow a side project. I posted a comment offering to chat with any entrepreneurs who’s like to have an ear to bounce off their ideas.
The reaction was astounding. Within minutes I had folks writing in with projects of all stages and all technical stages. It was an interesting learning experience for me to hear about all of the ideas for marketing that had been tried and attempted.
From the projects I saw, there were some common challenges and trends, which I think is worth summarizing holistically. The side-project-turned-company is a common path that bootstrapping founders take to grow their first company and it’s worth revisiting some of the best-practices.
Note: I’ve excluded specific examples to avoid exposing any specific details obtained in confidence.
Too much marketing, too early.
The most common problem was that there hadn’t been enough customer development and validation before attempting direct marketing. There hadn’t been enough time invested in validating product/market fit.
In many cases, the founders had tried buying ads (Google, Facebook, etc), posting to communities like HN itself or Product Hunt, engaging bloggers for “native advertising”, or other typical “post-launch” marketing activities. However, this is a huge risk (money spent, attention wasted, time lost) with very little confidence of results. The reality is, any of these activities done before finding product/market fit means taking a gamble without knowing the odds. This can often mean spending thousands of dollars (or the equivalent opportunity cost in man-hours) with very little to show for it.
The challenge is that it with no clearly identifiable customer that personifies a market, traditional marketing is too early. Spending $X on a project currently bringing in $X/2 should only be done when the results are predictable.
It’s best to find one (or a few) very passionate customers that validate the demand before trying to scale the marketing efforts with money.
Too much focus on the wrong work.
Several of the projects I saw obviously had hours and hours of weekend equity spent on the product itself. Almost every one either had a wonderful UI, polished marketing page, or interesting core technical concept. There was no lack of effort put into these projects.
I think it’s natural for founders to spend time on the product itself. After all, without a product, there’s nothing to talk about. Every feature added, every pixel pushed is immediately something from which a (fictional) user could gain value. Put simply, working on the project is working on something that scales and it naturally feels rewarding because the differences are immediate and visible.
However, un-intuitively, more time should be spent on things that don’t scale: Time invested in talking one-on-one with prospects; time finding pilot customers; time validating product/market fit.
While this type of work can sometimes seem unfulfilling, it’s the the most rational approach. If startups are tests of the market, then one should seek to maximize the number of hypotheses one can test. This can mean prototyping, talking to potential customers, and then abandoning any dead-ends early and often. Pruning in search of product/market fit is good. Even for small scale side-projects with humble ambitions at the start it’s often the case that we can quickly determine which of them have commercial potential.
Be as early as you can in making this determination before sinking hours/days/weeks/months into something that might not have wings. Avoid building products in a feedback vacuum.
Too broad
Lastly, I noticed that some projects had surprisingly very little product or market focus.
It’s no secret that most side-projects come from a founder’s personal observations, experiences, or direct needs. This is often described as “scratching your own itch”.
However, when a project grows to reach wider commercial ambitions, it can start accumulating all sorts of features for imagined reasons. This can make the product end up seeming like a hodgepodge of features rather than a cohesive product. Somewhere along the way, in an effort to grow from side-project to full-time project, the product took on too broad a definition. It lost its own identity in favor of broad commercial appeal. The end result is something generic and very hard to characterize.
Rather, I think it’s best to get super narrow with the product definition. Build something that serves a niche that’s small, but growing.
Having a narrowly defined product means having a well defined audience which in turns means you have a focused message to market. Marketing becomes a lot easier when the message is crisp and on point because it will resonate stronger even if the audience at first is smaller.
When should I go full-time?
Lastly, the question of committing full-time came up a lot. That’s natural as anyone starting to think hard about marketing a side-project is probably starting to consider the first step in turning a prototype into a product; a project into a company.
One conservative way to think about this is simply salary replacement. If you’re pulling in enough from the side-project to cover your living expenses, this seems like a good indicator.
However, I’d consider another criteria: A company usually considers hiring an employee when the additional head count will scale up revenue. Since you are technically your own first employee, by that logic, your side-project needs to have an identified engine for growth before making the jump. This is how you know growing your head count from zero to one is viable.
This moment is actually very easy to identify because it should satisfy all of the conditions mentioned: passionate customers validating the market, focused message that markets the product, and product/market fit with a clear opportunity for revenue growth.
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