Side projects — Let’s talk about it
It’s time for me to face the fact: side projects are awesome.
As a startup, it gives you so much value and opportunities to evolve and grow. However, I did not hold this opinion up until recently when we launched an incredibly simple yet powerful Chrome extension known as “Daily”.
For me, side projects were always perceived as a big disruption to the focus of the company. It meant for me that resources needed to be shifted from the core business of my startup to another less important project. To say the least, I did not like the idea of side projects.
This is what I think now
- Simple and minimalistic products can be super helpful for users and provide value.
- It doesn’t have to be a huge hassle to release a side project (and it doesn’t necessarily shift the focus of the company)
- It brings a lot of motivation to the team and inspires creativity.
- It actually increases productivity and achievements in the core project.
- Contributing back to the community should be a core element of any business.
What made me change my mind you ask?
Anyway, Daily, which was initiated by our super cool dev team and led by Ido Shamun proved to be different. It started from a pure and honest problem that our developers at TEM experience on a daily basis: the complexity of staying updated in the latest web and development technologies.
Such news are scattered all over the web (unfortunately, they don’t have a “home” as of today) and the frequency of publishing new interesting technologies is just ridiculous. The result is that there is no chance for a developer to focus on just coding and stay updated at the same time (and still keep time for sleep).
Daily gathers the best and more relevant news for devs from all over the web and delivers it to your New Tab. To make it even better we gave it an IDE look and feel ;)
The engagement stats shocked me.
Without spending a dime on marketing Daily rocked it on almost every single metric within just two weeks — Check it out yourself:
It soon turned out to be very popular amongst developers worldwide — within a week it reached hundreds of developers who now use it every day. It was even hunted by an anonymous developer and got featured on Product Hunt:
And we even got feedbacks from very passionate developers who loved Daily. Here is just an example:
My message is simple— don’t hesitate to start side projects.
