How to pick a perfect side project idea and stay sane

Side projects are tempting but hard…

We all have a lot of shiny ideas we want to work on instead of important things (e.g marketing 😀)

But sometimes side projects may be a great way to grow your “main” project. Of course, there are some pitfalls that you should avoid.

Picking the right idea is extremely important, because for side projects you always have very few time and resources. It should worth a shot.

Here at crowd.dev I spent some time building and growing side projects (analyzemyrepo.com, ossjobs.dev ) and want to share my learnings which should help you to pick a perfect side project idea.

How relevant is your side project to your main product?

There is no point spending time on a side project if its audience is completely irrelevant to your main product. Even if the side project is successful, you main product won't get a lot of growth if their audiences don't overlap enough.

How difficult is it to grow your side project?

Side project ideas may be very different when it comes to growth. Some are very easy to grow, some not. But remember, it is just a side project and you have a main product to grow, so growing a side project should be significantly easier than growing a main product — there is no point in getting yourself another burden.

Ideally, side project should have a viral potential and ability to grow almost on its own after a launch (SEO, word of mouth, etc) 🚀

Is it a right time to launch your side project?

Remember ChatGPT craziness earlier this year? Probably this was a very good time to launch a side project around GPT, because you would have got traffic just from a hype around GPT.

Obviously, you shouldn't endlessly wait for a perfect timing to launch a side project. But sometimes it is a good idea to embrace the hype and get some traffic from it 🏆

How difficult is it to build and maintain your side project?

It is obvious, but side projects shouldn't take months to build. From my personal experience, I would say it should take no more than a week to build an MVP. Otherwise, you might simply never launch it.

Another important thing to consider is time needed to maintain the project.

• Do you need engineers to maintain the project? 👨‍💻

• Do you need to fix bugs? 🪲

• Do you need to moderate the content? 📒

• How often you will have to update listings, jobs, links etc? 🔁

These are very important aspects, because the whole idea of side projects is to get more eyes to see your main product, and if your side project is broken, stale or outdated, not only it wouldn't help, but it also can cause some harm to your main product.

What are the goals of your side project?

Last but not least is a goal of a side project. Do you have a clear understanding of the goals of your side project?

Goals may be very different:

• Getting more traffic / sign ups 📥

• Getting more GitHub stars ⭐

• Getting more users 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

• Getting more sales 🤑

• Getting more followers on your social media #️⃣

• Raising brand awareness 🏅

Your side project idea might work well for one goal, and be absolutely useless for another one. Always consider your goals and optimize side projects accordingly for the best results.

I hope these learnings will help you to pick the right side project idea 😀

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