The Beauty of Small, Simple Side Projects
We’re still basking in the glow of our recent side-project. It’s not going to change the world (although it might help turtles), it’s not going to make us our fortune but it has rewarded us as a team in ways we didn’t expect. It’s also revealed 4 key elements for future side projects we undertake.
We’ve been head down for 2 years juggling client work with bootstrapping our main project Slidecraft, an online presentation tool. Regardless of how much you enjoy the journey, it’s tiring. So after a recent spell of investor interest, resulting in us turning down a significant offer (a tale for another day), it felt the perfect time for a short sprint side project.
This decision hasn’t disappointed. And although it felt strange to take time away from Slidecraft when we’re only 3 months away from a major release, it’s certainly been a good decision. Two years is a long time to focus on one project and it’s been a massive confidence boost for the team to get a product to market and have paying users at the end of four weeks development. It’s allowed us to apply what we’ve learnt in a condensed period, without the time to worry, dwell, and agonise over the details. This has been about getting to market with our minimum viable product, working to clearly defined goals and within constraints.
It’s allowed us work on intuition and gut feel, be ruthless in our decisions of what to add and what to leave out. Most importantly, it’s given us the enjoyment of completing a project. The value of launching a product on schedule can not be underestimated. And this is the absolute beauty of small achievable side projects. They are an intense sprint towards a clear goal.
It’s been more relaxed than a purely commercial project. It’s been easier to make detached rational decisions and actions than on something we’ve been invested in for two years. And we’ll be taking all this with us into our push to launching Slidecraft.
I’ll admit, before completing FlipRSS, I was beginning to get anxious about launching Slidecraft. We’ve been invested in the project for two years and the personal pressure for success grows. It’s easy to see why startups can be paralysed into striving for perfection. We’ve certainly been guilty of it on certain elements in reflection, however that’s hindsight. And actually I’m not sure how much of that was something we had to go through to get to where we are today. It’s easy to look back and see shortcuts.
But, releasing FlipRSS has certainly reduced that pressure. It’s re-energised and excited us and given us the confidence from some unexpected successes. It has been more than worth the five weeks sabbatical from Slidecraft and I would urge anyone to jump on a side project where they can.
Looking back over the development there are some clear factors that lead to this being a successful side project for us. From the start it had:
- a tight defined deadline
- a clear problem rather than an idea
- a single core requirement
- a defined outcome of success
These pretty much speak for themselves. We couldn’t afford for this to drag on so we set ourselves a tight but achievable deadline of four weeks. We knew there was a need for this, even if it was only our client. But this gave us a clear focus and defined the minimum this product had to deliver at the end of the four weeks. Our client had to be happy enough to pay for the product.
One thing that was key was the core requirement which gave us our clearly defined outcome of success. To allow our client to automate multiple RSS feeds in their email newsletter based on their subscribers preferences.
We didn’t have to be a list management service, an email delivery service or a wysiwyg newsletter editor. We couldn’t afford any creep on the scope and we had to stay small. This helped us take an early decision to integrate with existing email providers. We chose to add a layer of automation and configuration on top of the great services they already offer. We didn’t have to find parity with any existing services. We could leverage the years of development by the teams at Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp.
This is something we’ll do more of. This has given us a good framework to efficiently manage client work and side-projects. We have one more side project in the pipeline and we have a big push on Slidecraft which we’re really excited to get on with.
If you’re interested in following our story as we try and build a responsible company, you can follow me below or find out more about our projects on the FlipRSS or Slidecraft websites. You might also find The Experts Guide to Side Projects interesting.
Originally published at blog.jamesqualtrough.com on December 12, 2016.
