Building A Side Project Is Hard But You Can Overcome It
That is what I admit after spending more than a year building a side project while having a full-time job. However, that period of time is wonderful, especially, if you are a monozukuri person who loves making stuff.
What kind of side projects that I mentioned?
If you are a developer, you might have a lot of side projects for many reasons. Personally, I built most side projects for learning and exploring purposes. They are usually open-sourced on GitHub. Besides, some of them are libraries for other developers or to demonstrate some concepts explained in blog posts.
However, what I want to mention here is a different type of side project. These projects are meant to be grown into a complete product or become a business.
The reason behind the desire to develop a side project.
First of all, I love making things, especially from scratch to the end. During my university time, I designed and created Android apps and published them on Google Play. I really enjoyed it although I made a lot of mistakes along the journey. After graduating, I shipped my focus to learning solely technical stuff and work full time as a software engineer. While I am happy with my current job but I am still missing the feeling of building something by myself. The feeling that you control the whole process from idea, design, development, and release to the users. I missed the time that I spent the whole afternoon at the coffee shop to chill and think about new features, then code overnight in a quiet environment. That sounds crazy but these times were priceless.
Now, I want to spend my free time building something new again. However, based on the development experience that I gained through several years, I want to build something much better than the projects during university time.
More than a year ago, I had a small idea that showing completed tasks of a TODO list in a timeline like GitHub contribution because the tiny dots inspire me to accomplish more. At first, I thought I was going to build a small and simple app but it took more than 1 year to complete the development part. That idea becomes Tinido, a personal task management app, with a long list of features that I am still working on.
Why is it hard to develop a side project?
I think that there are three main reasons.
- The lack of consistent motivation
- Limited time
- The lack of required skills
1. The lack of consistent motivation
The first one, keeping motivation is difficult. You can have a strong desire for a new idea when it sparks in your mind, and you might make a commitment to yourself “I am going to build this cool project”.
However, after generating more thoughts in your head, the negative voices come. Something like “that is ridiculous”, “it takes a lot of time”, “there are already so many similar products”.
Then, you start to doubt your original idea. If you overcome these negative feelings, you might write something down to expand the idea into a road map, a list of the functions, or executable actions. That is a good sign.
Therefore, it is always better to write down your new idea and sketch more to develop it instead of keeping and shutting it down right in your mind.
The idea phase is a baby step in the whole process. The more important is how you actually turn it into a real product.
Ideas are cheap, execution is expensive.
The development process includes planning, designing and developing. In each of them, you might doubt yourself and the result of the project again and again. Therefore, the difficulty is that you keep the momentum and overcome these feelings. If you work in a team, that is wonderful because all members will keep the whole team active and move forward.
Therefore, the second suggestion: Working in a team is usually better than alone.
2. Limited time
The second reason is the limitation of time. A side project is not the one that you work from 9 to 5 but the one you work during nights and weekends. That is the time when your energy is low, and it requires discipline to be consistent. Besides, it takes much longer time for development and you might get tired because of not seeing the outputs.
3. The lack of required skills
Your passion is strong, and you are disciplined to stay on track. However, building and releasing a great product requires more than that. You might have great technical skills but lack the design and business minds. It is easy to get wrong when dealing with your week points.
Focus on your strengths and delegate the rest to others.
If you form a team that others can support to each other and everyone has their own unique skill set, it is wonderful. If not, you can outsource or ask for help. In the case you want to learn new skills in this side project, that is great that you can learn and apply them immediately. There is no formula that works for all of us. You can choose what is best in your situation.
…. Yeah. There are many other reasons that keep you from finishing what you start. However, delivering a product that you build from the scratch through idea, design, development, and release phases are POSSIBLE.
In this blog post, I just jotted down the hard parts I faced when building a side project. In my next blog post, I am going to share its great part in this journey.
If you have a plan to build a side project or are working on that, let’s connect to learn from each other. If you have a side project that you are proud to share, you can leave its link in the comment section too, I definitely want to check it out. Thank you for reading.
The second part of this blog post series can be found here.
https://tinido.com/blog/2021-07-02-great-things-when-building-a-side-project
