Side Hustle Fails

Lots of developers think about having side projects. Whether it’s for the extra money, the opportunity to learn new things that you can’t learn at work, or simply to hedge your bets in an uncertain job market, a side project can often sound very appealing. However, if you make something on the side, you don’t want to waste time and money on a side project. You should understand from the beginning that if you are wasting time or money, you are also wasting money or time along with it. This concept underpins everything else in this discussion and is critical to understand before you attempt ANY side project. The failure modes for side projects are all oriented around this same concept. A bad project ultimately misuses time, money, or both, or puts you into a position to that does the same. In effect then, most of the ways that fail could simply be reduced to this. However, it’s never quite so simple, because the waste of time and money is often difficult to discover. Additionally, people become emotionally attached to side projects, and it’s easy to stay with something that doesn’t work for far longer than is reasonable. Finally, being focused on a bad side project can mean that you don’t even notice the opportunity that a better side project might present. Now, you may be asking yourself, “what’s the point of this if I’m not planning on starting a business?”. The answer is simple – you’ll see these antipatterns EVERYWHERE once you understand them, including in established businesses that are hiring you to work on new projects. Even if you aren’t in a management position, these antipatterns will tend to show up and bite you anyway. You are far better off knowing how to mitigate or avoid these things if you can. At the very least, it gives you time to prepare for layoffs. Profitable coding side projects where you build an application, service, or plugin are great things for developers to try. However, you can’t just jump into it without sufficient preparation. Given personal experience, you may find that most of the work involved in building an app that you can make money from isn’t the code. Rather it’s all the stuff that you happily get to ignore during you day job. However, if you don’t pay attention before you start something, you can waste years of your life, strain friendships, burn yourself out, and lose tons of money. Episode Breakdown You don’t have a way to make enough money on it to keep it running. If you don’t have a way to make enough money on a coding side project to make it worth your time and keep it running, then it’s a hobby. This can be the case even if you think you can make *some* money from the project. Note that this objection doesn’t mean that you don’t do the project, but it does mean that you shouldn’t expect the project to pay for your time. If it’s still worth doing under those considerations, do it. The project requires marketing to two (or more) sides of a marketplace Second to not having a market at all, a project that requires that you market well to two or more markets in order to be successful is probably not a good software side project. Not only does this make the project exponentially more difficult to market, but it makes it at least that much more difficult to write code as well. Remember, you want to keep your minimum viable project size as small as possible so that you can quickly show it to potential users. The two (or more) sided market is part of the reason you don’t want to build your own marketplace or social network. These types of projects rely on network effects to be valuable and are difficult to get going on your own with minimal investment. If such a project is viable for anyone,