The Low Stress Framework for Launching Your Side Project (without going broke)

Fair warning: It’s going to look nothing like this.

Successful people launch side projects.

They are a way to sharpen your skills while contributing something of value to the market. Good side projects make you more interesting at cocktail parties, build your portfolio, and, perhaps most importantly, make you money.

Today I’m going to show you how to launch yours without going broke in the process.

Why you should listen to me…

Over the past few months I’ve spun up a ton of projects with the help of David Ladowitz while we were both working as Entrepreneurs in Residence at Tradecraft (some of which were much better received than others).

During our time spent working on these projects, we pulled together a step by step framework (along with some handy tools) that we developed to speed up and simplify these projects. It’s your lucky day because I’m here to share it:

1. Find your idea. There are outlandish ones out there, but that doesn’t mean they won’t work.

Uber was such an unconventional idea that Travis Kalanick passed it on to Ryan Graves for testing because Kalanick wanted to continue to focus on other projects. Kalanick only took Uber back over once Graves had shown substantial initial traction. You’re not always going to be able to spot a world altering idea when you have one.

First off you need to outline an idea, and don’t get caught up in the myth that once-in-a-generation companies come from once-in-a-generation-ideas.

Yes, your idea is important but not as important as your execution (plus, not everything is going to turn out to be Facebook, that’s why we test things).

You won’t know for sure what works and what doesn’t if you don’t test it. Luckily, it has never been cheaper in the history of the world to test an idea you’re excited about.

So go dust off those old ideas you have filed away somewhere, and let’s get going.

2. What is the MVP, and how can you avoid building one before validating it?

KISSmetrics pulled this off with a “Coming Soon” landing page where people could enter their email and receive updates on an eventual product launch. The page has since become rather internet famous.

MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, which is the most stripped down version of your product you can possibly build while still capturing the spirit of your vision.

MVPs are great, but I’m a big fan of skipping the process of actually building one once its properly outlined. Once you have a detailed enough description of your MVP, you can then pull together a landing page describing your product while emphasizing that it is “coming soon.”

This Pre-Prototype MVP lets you run tests to assess market interest before actually paying to have anything built.

If your landing page generates enough initial attention to pass your tests, you can sit down and figure out how to actually build your MVP once you have a strong suspicion that someone wants to pay you for it.

Nothing is worse than investing a substantial amount of money into building a product before finding out that the market simply isn’t interested in what you have to offer so you need to find a way to get a clue as to market sentiment before diving too deep into development.

3. Time to get to testing

Alright, you have your idea and your Pre-Prototype MVP.

Now we need to set some goals, make it look real, and drum up enough traffic to test if there’s enough interest to justify a build out.

3a. Set some achievable goals and, for the love of God, write them down

Teespring founders Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton set out to supply 200 people with t-shirts to commemorate the closing of a local bar. By the time the dust had settled, more than 400 people had ordered shirts on their landing page and Teespring was born.

The first step in testing your idea is writing down a goal that when reached, would indicate that your project worth diving into for real.

There’s a natural tendency to rationalize the experimental results you receive as what you would have needed to call the test a success. Keep a specific document predating your experiment that you can refer to in order to remind yourself if you’re a failure (or confirm you’re a success).

Some good examples of achievable goals are:

• X number of email sign ups
• X number of people adding themselves to the waiting list
• X number of preorders (this one is only an option if you’re a bit of an overachiever and set up a payment system on your landing page, but this should be avoided if you can’t yet reasonably guarantee you will deliver)

Actual numbers to use as your goal will vary based on what your side project is, but don’t be afraid to get ambitious with them they could end up saving you a lot of time and money in the end.

3B. Build your landing page

Sometimes there’s an even less development intense way to get going than with a landing page: Product Hunt got its start as an email list before generating enough interest to justify launching its own site.

Now that you have your Pre-Prototype MVP and have defined success and failure parameters, it’s time to put together a destination where you can point all the traffic you’re going to generate from your experiment.

If you have some coding chops you can build this from the ground up and host everything on Github for the price of a domain name.

If you’re like me and you would prefer to not spend two weeks yelling at your monitor because your CSS won’t listen to you, here are some helpful sites that let you cheat by using landing page editors:

• Instapage — pretty simple to pick up, and it has some free options, but setting up a custom domain is a little tricky.
• Carrd — beautiful (although slightly restrictive) templates that you can set up in about 15 minutes with a custom domain. This is what I used to set up my April Fools prank, Airbnbnp, that looked so good that multiple people contacted me thinking it was real.
• Tilda — there are more customization options on Tilda than there are on Carrd but you need to pay $15 per month for the relatively extensive premium features, which include a custom URL. This is where I host my portfolio site.
• Cratejoy — if you’re doing any sort of subscription shipping, I highly recommend going this route. Cratejoy has a whole payment / inventory management system that’s really going to make your life easier.

With all these tools you should be able to pull together a decent looking site fairly quickly, even if you’re as horrible of a visual designer as I am. It’s never a bad idea to take some time at this point to run your page by a few friends for notes.

3C. Get enough people to notice your landing page to be able to draw some conclusions on your experiment

iCracked generated its initial interest when founder AJ Forsythe employed the help of his frat brothers to pull together some flyers using MS Paint, and now they generate over $25 million annually. There’s no wrong way to get initial eyes on your product.

This part requires you to get a little creative. You’re going to need to generate some traffic to your site which is probably going to require you to try several different experiments. Different channels tend to work better for different companies so it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions when you just run one or two similar tests.

Here are some ways you can get going:

• If you’re willing to spend some money to test your idea quickly, I would recommend running some paid ads on Facebook. Out of all the paid ad platforms out there, Facebook is probably the simplest to pick up and run with (and audience targeting is a breeze, even for people who have never used the platform before).
• If you’re not looking to spend in order to test your page, there are sites like Product Hunt that are specifically designed to get new ideas some initial traction.
• A slightly more technical way to do this could be to find a list of email addresses online (depending on who you’re targeting this may be easier or harder to do), and use a tool like Import.io to pull the addresses off the website and onto a CVS file you can then upload to an email platform. Once you have an email list, there are several different services on which you can build out drip campaigns, but MailChimp is probably one of the faster free options to get up and running.

Odds are your initial traffic test is going to be unique to your product, but the important thing is to go out and do one.

With each growth experiment you run on your side project, you’re going to want to document your set up, hypothesis, and results. Here’s a template we used for documenting the success of our email campaigns. Feel free to take it and use it yourself.

4. Are you a success or failure (on this particular project)?

Robin Chase, Co-Founder of Zipcar, launched her second company GoLoco, a social ridesharing app and found out that the market wasn’t really interested after investing a substantial amount of money into building out the site and service. She openly talks about how more initial testing and listening to the results could have saved her a lot of time and money.

This is always a painful part of entrepreneurship, but sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to let go of an idea if it continues to under perform compared to your expectations.

You will have other ideas and clutching to one that the market isn’t ready for can have the same effect as refusing to let go of an anchor while trying to tread water.

That said, ideally your idea smashed all your reasonable goals, and, at this point you should think about ramping up your commitment.

5. Build out

Airbnb started when some roommates couldn’t pay rent so they set up a landing page offering an air mattress in their living room for $80 per night per person. It wasn’t until a year (and a substantial amount of house guests) later that they built any sort of platform.

Well, well. Look at you.

You passed your tests. The market looks like its intrigued so, now it’s time to get to work and build your actual MVP.

Hopefully at this point you’ve done enough to attract a technical cofounder or, in an even more ideal world, you are one yourself and can just get to work.

If you don’t fall into either of those buckets, here are some options to find the technical help you need:

• Gigster — a great resource for world class developers and Project Managers. Gigster aims their business more towards companies with some access to funding so, while you get a top notch product, you should expect to pay a little more than some of these other options.
• Text A Coder — using this service you simply text the details of your project to (202) 683–8384 to receive a quote. Once you pay they get right to work. Their work is a little less technical than Gigster but if your project is on the simpler side of things, I would check them out.
• LinkedIn ProFinder — this lets you hire a vetted professional to work directly with you on your project. Its a little more hands on than these other options but if you want direct oversight for the duration of the project this might be where you look.
• Use LinkedIn to track down your technical friends and beg them to come help you. Your test results should provide compelling evidence that your idea has potential. Don’t be afraid to use them shamelessly to convince someone to come on board with you.

However you choose to pursue your build out, you’re in good hands knowing that you’ve validated your side project and generated enough initial interest to warrant pouring time and resources into something you are passionate about.

Congratulations! <— now, if you’re just reading this post instead of following along while developing your own company, don’t read that until after you’ve done it successfully. You have to earn it.

Marshall Darr is currently wrapping up his tenure as Tradecraft Labs Entrepreneur in Residence where he launched the company Captivate Real Estate. If you have any questions on any part of this article, feel free to reach out to him at darr.marshall@gmail.com.

If you’d like to know a little bit more about him, feel free to check out this snazzy landing page he just completed to condense his entire professional life into five minutes’ worth of reading.