Office Hours 05: Building and Growing Side Projects

In last week’s office hours, Jason Schuller joined us to talk about building and growing your own side projects. Jason currently works primarily on a number of projects for Microsoft, but he has a long history of building his own startups and small projects, growing them, and then selling them.

You can watch a full replay below:

What we talked about:

• How to choose what to work on.
• What are the biggest challenges in working on your side projects.
• How to validate ideas and determine if there is a need for the projects we want to work on.
• How to market your side projects and find partners.
• How to decide when it’s the right time to sell your projects.
• Where to find buyers and what the selling process looks like.

Key takeaways from our discussion:

1. Choose a project that you’re passionate about, but even if money is not the primary goal, remember that the project needs to have measurable results that will fuel your motivation.
2. Keep your side projects simple and focus on a single solution first and grow it later instead of overthinking it with a number of features right from the beginning.
3. Don’t feel discouraged too soon. Give it a chance by focusing more on marketing.
4. If you enjoy only the building process, consider partnering up with a marketer that can offer strategies, giving you more courage to help you sell your product.
5. Don’t be afraid to charge for your product. Putting a price on your product, even if small, can help you filter your clients by those who value your work – and then you’ll get better quality feedback.
6. Validate your idea by sharing it with a small number of marketers that you know and trust. See if they would be interested in selling it and partnering up with you. If so, you can form a partnership or offer an exclusive affiliate rate.
7. Try to validate your idea by sharing it on social media or creating a prototype in order to gauge the response from the audience. Are people excited about it? Are they asking and checking with you when it’s ready?
8. Consider a crowdfunding campaign to validate your ideas and raise funds that will help you focus on building the project without investing too much of your own money.
9. Remember that building your own side projects requires you to invest your own time that could be spent on a client’s work or other projects and earn you a significant amount of money. Consider that as your own investment.

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