5 reasons to work on new side projects as a young startup.

In 2012, my three partners and I formed our first company together.

We are four guys who love thinking about, designing, and developing ideas. Not all of us actually write code, but we each have our role in shaping the product we’re building – and we take great pleasure in building products together from the ground up.

One the most important strengths a team has is the ability to be quick to act on their ideas. Very quickly, we realized that we don’t know everything, but we could learn from our mistakes – that we would rather gain experience from building stuff people will use and understand where we did wrong (or right) instead of not doing anything at all.

Right after we launched our first product to the market, we hired a social media manager to work primarily on content writing and distribution. Very quickly we realized that instead of creating content, the bulk of her time was spent finding content to share, so we decided to build a simple tool that will crawl the web for interesting articles about specific, pre-defined topics. Like we’d hoped, this product changed her job entirely – and ours too, because two years later, this product shaped our business and culture.

That weekend we spent building allowed us to realize something important : We’re not an army yet, just a small commando team capable of thinking, moving, and acting quickly and we should definitely take advantage of this.

Since then, we have spent many more weekends brainstorming new ideas. These after-hours sessions spent developing side projects have shown a number of benefits for our team:

It helps the team learn.

working on side projects can help you learn new development approaches, code languages, design methods and so much more. A fully-functional product with a large user base is not always where you should be testing new development and design techniques, but what we learn from these smaller projects can always be applied to your core product.

It keeps us fresh.

Much has been said about taking breaks, going on vacation, and taking yourself out of the routine. Sometimes, taking the time to develop new projects can help gain perspective on the main product your company is working on.

It helps can help you improve your main product.

Maintaining focus is one of the hardest things in life, especially when working on your own startup. Most of us constantly thinks of new ideas, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to build all of them. Products tend to change and adapt to users’ behavior and needs, but the more experimental the new feature is, the more impact it will have on your existing users. Working on side projects that might be relevant to your main area of business can help you validate (or invalidate!) some of your market assumptions without risking your main product and your users.

Hacking is sometimes the best marketing strategy.

Journey and experience are hot words in content writing, but it is crucial to capitalize also on the building process. Marketing is not only bringing people to use your current product, it’s telling the story about how your passions and skills. Building new products can help you gain attention to your company and your skills, it can help you get noticed by the right people and expand your community with new members who will follow your company’s future developments.

It makes your team better.

Building a product in a day or two is something that can make you proud of yourself, but even more so, it makes you proud of your team. When a startup is growing, procedures tend to take more time and everything is slower. Working as a small team on a new product from the ground up with a really tight schedule and limited resources can turn you into a well-oiled machine; each member of the team knows their unique role in the process and pushes the others to be better.
The opportunity to work together as a team – late at night, on weekends, and for deadlines – will only help you make better product and a stronger company in the future.

I’m always trying to think of my experience as a startup founder as a wonderful way to constantly learn. And if there is one thing I learned in the past two years is that instead of over-thinking ideas, we should just go ahead and build stuff.

I’d love to hear about your experience in developing new ideas you have while building your own company.

Ohad