Is early traction the key to a successful side project?

I’ve been working on side projects for my entire career.

Inspired by Indie Hackers, and people like Daniel Vasallo, I wanted to get more than one income stream, so I started to build things next to my day job. I’ve started a lot of things: from a recipe app to a copyright tool. All of the side-projects I did till 2020 miserably failed; I either didn’t ship them, or they didn't make anything. It will probably sound familiar to many of you?

CloudEMDR, as the tool is called, was my first“hit” side project. I started it in 2020 and it has made over 35K to date and is doing about 2K a month in recurring revenue, while I currently spend no more than 1 hour a week on it. Reflecting on this, I think I’ve finally cracked the code on how to build a successful side project, and how you can do this too.

The most important goal, get traction ASAP

So the biggest thing I learned is that building a successful side project is all about maintaining positive energy. This sounds very spiritual, but it’s actually very simple: In order to build a habit, it has to feel rewarding, just like going to the gym feels. It isn’t like running a startup or a job, which is much more part of your routine, so you shouldn’t treat it as such.

These projects often start with a lot of creative energy, but that soon wears out and then you either stop with the project or move very slow. So how do you get new energy? In my opinion, that’s traction. It’s anything that shows that you’re onto something: Your first real users, your first feedback, your first revenue. I think you should build something that can reach any of these milestones within the first week. If you don’t, just stop the project and start on something else.

With CloudEMDR, I built the first prototype in a few hours and had real users 24 hours after shipping it. This kept the momentum up, after that, I could work on monetization and other stuff.

No logo, no name

This also means that you shouldn’t waste any time thinking about your logo, your name, or other irrelevant stuff. The only person that cares about that stuff is you - your users only care about the problem you're solving, so spend your time on that. The rest will eventually come.

Solve an existing and real problem

Getting your first traction quickly is hard - but there are shortcuts. My biggest learning is: don’t try to be unique in the problem that you’re solving. Solve a problem that people have, and that they know they have and are looking for a solution for. It’s totally fine if it’s already a crowded space, that often just means it’s a good problem to solve.

Example: Even though the market has been around for 15+ years, I’m sure you can still have fun and make money with an email marketing tool. If you’re smart about it focus on the niche you know well, like making an e-mail marketing tool for restaurants. Give it to your favorite places for free and see how it goes.

It doesn’t have to be complex

Because I come from an engineering background, I used to think that all successful tech products were hard to build and had to be technically complex of some sort. This is not true. The most important thing is that you provide value. Your customers don’t care how you do that. So, build it in a way that it’s easy for you, using tech you already know for example. Don’t bother if it’s not a technically hard thing to build, that’s an advantage!

CloudEMDR is literally a tool that allows you to share your screen with a moving dot, and it makes a lot of money. The core javascript script for the tool is less than 200 lines. Let that sink in.

Make it easy to maintain

Once your project is running and (hopefully) making a little money, spend some time to make every mundane repeatable task automated. This is great, because it means you can dedicate all your “side project time” to building stuff, and having fun.

This doesn’t only mean making sure people can sign-up and cancel without e-mailing you, and setting up bots to do certain tasks, I mean it in a wider sense: with CloudEMDR I got a lot of support requests in the beginning. Instead of answering all of these emails, I made text and video tutorials. When people sign up for the service, they get an email with a link to those tutorials, and now I receive 1 support request every 14 days.

What’s next?

I hope this helps someone with their next side project. I’m actually at a stage now where I don’t get as much energy from this project anymore, so I’m looking at what could give me that in this project. If I can’t find it, I will start something new :) following this playbook.