What is your B side?
Lately, more and more people are focusing on their time outside of their main job. When we call your main job ‘A side’, things like a side job or hobby can be your ‘B side’.
A representative service related to the main job is LinkedIn. Many people around the world use LinkedIn to record and manage their education, work experience, certifications, volunteer work, and more. And based on this, we find a job or network with each other.
In fact, our ‘B side’ is just as important as the ‘A side’. I believe that people’s hobbies and interests are as important as their main job to express themselves. However, no representative service should come to mind for the ‘B side’.
So, I wanted to create a service that allows people to manage their various hobbies and interests. After 4 months of preparation, I made HYDE, an app for the ‘B side’. If the main job(A side) is Jekyll, then the B side can be Hyde!
Why HYDE? Various Templates for various B-Sides
Those who like to record were already managing the B side in their way. Some people manage it using a personal cloud/document service such as Notion or Google Drive, while others create an Instagram sub-account to record their interests.
However, the original purpose of many of the services people use for the ‘B side’ is not managing hobbies. Therefore, it is difficult for many people to manage their B side through the service. For example, Notion and Google Drive have a strong purpose as a collaboration tools, so it is inconvenient to record interests on mobile. Also, Instagram lacks in managing various B-sides because only image templates exist.
Those who like movies want to manage it through star ratings, and those who like to keep a diary want to record the date mainly. People who run blogs on various platforms may want to collect links to their content. Aside from that, people have a lot of B-sides. And Hyde has prepared various templates to manage various interests. There are currently 10 templates, and we plan to keep adding more in the future.
The vision of HYDE: Insight with the B side, and a better world with insights
It’s wonderful to be able to manage interests or hobbies that you neglected compared to your main job. I hope that HYDE will help many people manage their various characteristics and get to know them better.
And I look forward to seeing HYDE evolve and do more than that.
Usually, when you find someone you like, you try to get to know that person. The same goes for your interest. People spontaneously study and observe what they like. Even if no one asks you to, idol fans learn more about their favorite idol than others. Shoe collectors care more about shoes, and anglers can distinguish more fish. I’ve been running a newsletter for about a year and a half, and I’m sure I know it better than others.
And genuine interest and exploration create insight. When you do what you love, you automatically accumulate relevant information in your head. What is taken for granted in the field is always valuable, new, and interesting to those outside the field. When these insights meet other insights, new ideas and creativity arise.
The book [What’s Your Side B?] that I read very impressively illustrates this example. The book deals with the Japanese advertising company Dentsu. It is said that in Dentsu, there is a ‘B team’ where people with B-side are gathered.
One day, a person with a ‘literature B-side’ came with information about ‘Book and bed Tokyo’. It is a ‘bookstore where you can sleep’, created for the happy moment of falling asleep while reading a book. Upon hearing this information, the teammate with the ‘playing B-side’ came up with another case he has heard. It was about the city zoo ‘Night Zurasia’, which opens at night and allows people to observe the ecology of animals that are active at night. He focused on the distinctive modifiers (‘sleepable’, ‘open at night’) that gave an interest to ordinary bookstores and zoos. And instead of just throwing away his discoveries, he looked at other insights the team has gathered so far and come up with distinctive modifiers. He added the name ‘Miracle Word’ to the modifier and contributed to [Forbes Japan]. Then later, he also made a product called ‘Miracle Word Card’ and conducted corporate training.
I hope that HYDE will become a space for expressing new ideas by gathering such diverse insights from the B side in the long term. Although the current HYDE has only a management function, if more people manage the B side in the future, it might be possible to add a function to record and share each other’s insights.
So far, I have briefly introduced HYDE. Since launching in early March, we are working hard to fix bugs and improve usability, so please give us your warm comments and interest! Thank you :)
- For Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=team.hyde.app
- For iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/hyde-place-for-b-side/id1609148216
