How a simple side project changed my life completely
Originally posted on pawelkadysz.com
Let me tell you why you should try new things in your life. Things that you would not expect yourself of trying. This is a story of a simple side project that pretty much changed my life.
But let me start with a simple observation I made some time ago. There’s not many experiences more depressing that talking to a person who has no hobby.
If you ask yourself: „What do I do in my free time?” an the answer is „Uhm… well different things. Nothing special really.” or „I watch TV.” — things are bad. It’s even worse if the answer is „I have no free time.”
I was pretty close to one of those answers in summer 2013. Me and my girlfriend (she’s now my wife) just moved to a new house. Our own house. Things were going great for us. My company was doing good. We, as a couple had no reason to complain.
But I, personally was getting bored with all the free time I got after the fuss around building the house was over.
You probably know that feeling, just before falling asleep, you decide you’re going to start jogging tomorrow. Or start an extremely good blog. Or quit smoking. Those little resolutions that are laughing in your face the next morning.
I remembered I had unused DSLR laying around in one of the boxes upstairs. It was Canon 50D with 50mm f/1.4 mounted on it. A decent camera. Brand new. Shutter counter showed around 7k. I decided I’ll teach myself how to take photos. Not the best photos, but at least decent pics.
A moment later I thought to myself that it would be hard to determine the point at which I could say: „Ok, I know how to take good photos now.” So the goal had to sound a bit different. I decided to…
Take photos every day. For a year.
I shared my resolution with friends and my followers on Facebook and Twitter. It’s always good to share those things with at least one person. It’s then harder to give up, because you’re not only letting down yourself, but also someone else.
So I started the next day. I decided that I should take photos every day and publish one that I chose the very same day. If I miss a day — game over.
7 days later I was completely out of ideas for new photos. It turned out my everyday life isn’t as exciting as life of Instagram celebrities. I found out a lot about myself during that year. I learned that I spend too much time at home and even more at the office. I work too much, I travel rarely. I don’t meet with friends often enough. These were not very pleasant discoveries about myself, but it opened my eyes.
On August 14th I took photo no. 365. Me and my wife had cake and champagne. And believe me, the feeling of accomplishment was unbelievable. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. But that feeling is not the only reward I got. Let’s go back in time twelve months.
Ok, so I decided to take and publish a pic every day. But I had to choose how I was going to publish it. WordPress felt like too much for this kind of project. Flickr always seemed to me like a photo bucket with random pics laying around and I didn’t want my 365 photos to get lost amongst millions of others. So I decided to go with tumblr. I set up a blog, hooked up a domain name (an old one, I haven’t used for quite some time), bought a premium theme and was ready to go.
But damn, I’m a webdesigner and what’s even worse I know HTML and CSS. So I started customizing, tweaking and „fixing”the theme. And of course I finally broke it.
I decided I needed a custom made theme, just for me and my great project. I had no idea how to design for tumblr, I wasn’t familiar with this platform. It took me 7 days to get to know it and design a custom theme. The design was ready in September.
Unfortunately we had a lot of client work going on at the office and couldn’t develop the theme until mid December of 2013. That’s when my photoblog finally got upgraded. It looked fabulous with my custom theme.
I was so delighted with it, I decided we should sell it to other people. Hell, if I love it so much people will buy it for sure. And you know what? They did. First month got us 20 sales. I could make it work — I thought to myself.
We set up a site — Pixel Revel and started developing more themes. Today, we have 16 themes available for Tumblr and 3 for WordPress. And thanks to the passive income Pixel Revel generates we finally had time to work on our own ideas. But to tell you more about it, we need to go back in time 12 months again.
Ok, so I decided to take and publish a pic every day. After few weeks I noticed people following the idea. More and more 365 projects were popping up. Unfortunately none of them survived the first month. Most of the authors were giving up after a week or two. I talked to them and they said it was the lack of motivation that was killing their projects.
I remembered I also had the same problem. There were moments when I just wanted to turn the blog off and throw the camera out. I missed a community of people focused around the same idea. Focused around everyday photo taking. Someone who trully understands what I do and why I’m doing it.
Since we had some free resources at the time (due to the Pixel Revel doing really good) I decided we should build a site for people who want to run their 365 projects. Not in solitude, but with other, similar people around. A true community.
I planned out the site. Added some gamification features like experience points, levels and achievements to motivate people even more. In June 2014 we started working on tookapic — best place for running a 365 project.
This wasn’t easy. We had no prior experience in building a startup from scratch. Usually we were just responsible for the design and front-end development. So we had to learn a lot. A lot!
On October 9th 2014 first 60 beta testers got their invites. And that amazing feeling of accomplishment was back. We’ve built something from scratch. And it turned out people really like it.
Today, after six months of beta testing we have almost 2000 users. The community is just unbelievable. It’s so much easier to run the project with all those amazing people around.
Yeah? So what?!
If I hadn’t decided to start a 365 project in summer 2013, I wouldn’t have learned photography. Pixel Revel would have never been made. And those 2000 people would have never met on tookapic.
When I talk to people about my 365 project and try to talk them into starting their own I often hear a weird response „I can’t take photos, I don’t know how. I’m not as good as you at this.”
Well, guess what. I had no idea about photography when I started my project. I had no prior experience in designing for tumblr when I designed my first theme. And building a startup was just a huge mystery for me.
That’s why I think we all should have a side project. To learn new things and experience the unexpected.
And what scares me now is on that august evening, instead of starting a photo-a-day project I could’ve just turn on the TV. And my life would be so much different now.
