Mubs With over 120 side projects, a question I often get is: "How do ship so much?" Keeping on track with projects can be difficult when after the demands of a day job and personal commitments. I've shared some of the ways I stay on track with my projects in the most recent blog post: How to keep shipping? I'm focusing on SEO as a way to market (and grow) projects this year, and was excited to see that Danny Postma will be publishing a course on SEO soon. I've already learned a lot from...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Mubs This week, I've been thinking about who I'm building for. Yes, I'm building a side project for my own reasons (networking, revenue, whatever) but who is the actual project for? What is the Ideal Customer Profile for your project, and why is it helpful to think about that right when you get started. I dig a little deeper into the concept, and how I worked through the process for a previous project: Defining your ICP Featured Side Project I wanted to take a minute to highlight a side...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hello everyone, Welcome to the all new side project MVP newsletter. I'll still be sharing updates on the projects I'm working on, but not as often as before. Instead, I'll be sharing more insights on building side projects while working a 9-5 job. I took a little time to build the Sideproject MVP website over the past week, where I'll be sharing more content and tools. I built side projects for over 20 years, the first one was in 2001, I've built well over 100 side projects since I started...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Excited to announce the launch of Thumbnail Vote. I had the idea on Wednesday and did the bulk of the work on Thursday, and as usual it takes a little longer than you expect to get things into shape to actually launch. Keeping things minimal If you visit the website, you'll see that things are pretty lean. This is the key to getting projects launched quickly. While there are a lot of features I wanted to add, I kept my list as short possible to launch. There is no user sign up required to...
5 months ago • 1 min read
I had an idea on Wednesday, and thought I'd share how it came to be, and how I decided what would be in the MVP. Keeping it simple enough to be able to launch it tomorrow. YouTube has been a popular platform for all kinds of users for a very long time. What started as a simple video sharing site is now home to media empires of folks like MrBeast and PewDiePie, but also for the old guard of media. I've tried being a YouTuber, you can see my "One Hour SaaS" series from a few years ago, but find...
5 months ago • 2 min read
I didn't send an update yesterday. I was enjoying the 4th of July holiday and thinking about the current situation: my problems with Spotify and the potential problems if I built a Twitter application. These are all problems that I can get around given enough time, but given the schedule for Nights and Weekends, I'm a little hard-pressed for time. I realized that I'm actually already doing a project that would be a great fit for Nights and Weekends: SideprojectMVP! What does that mean...
5 months ago • 1 min read
We're in week 3 of nights and weekends S5, launch week, but I'm heading back to the beginning! It's looking very likely that the Playlist Kit application, won't be approved by Spotify, at the very earliest, until August. Demo day is just 24 days from now, July 27th. Clearly this isn't going to work. Since I'm short on time, I'm going to build a tool that I want, and need. I should be able to power through the build without having to take a lot of time figuring out features and requirements...
5 months ago • 2 min read
I talked about Platform Risk earlier and here we are already, a little sooner than even I expected. It's only been 3 days since I submitted Playlist Kit to Spotify, so I might be panicking a little bit early, but I was curious what wait times others had experienced after submitting their applications. After a little googling, I landed on this pinned post in the Spotify community. It has been pinned for over a year, first red flag. I started reading the post and replies. During peak periods,...
5 months ago • 1 min read
Marketing any project can be challenging. Marketing your side project can come with its own added complications. Some of the things you would normally do, become even more difficult due to the lack of time, or simply the actual times when you can work on your project. Although there may not be an actual conflict, any day job you have may restrict exactly how you are able to share and discuss your project with the world. For any project to be successful, we need to attract visitors, that we...
5 months ago • 3 min read
