Side Projects
avc.com
avc.com
As far as I'm aware, only one attendee has been acquired by Yahoo. HN is aware of maybe 10 of them. The next 200? You don't know about them for the same reason you don't know about Petersen Underwriters or Shiodome Accounting. (Who? The most recent two businesses which have had their yearly revenue chart moved not-at-all when I cut them a $1k+ check.)
It has not gotten harder to do side projects. Back in 2006, over 25% of my launch budget was to send a fax internationally to send a paper contract to eSellerate (remember them?) for payment processing. These days Stripe exists, and it is better all around.
It has not gotten harder to do web development since 2004. Remember when your only options were shared hosting for $4 a month on servers which had two nines of uptime or buying a Dell and learning what colocation meant? These days you can get a reliably hosted VPS for ~$20.
Remember when your only option for interactive scripts on the Internet was teaching yourself perl and /cgi-bin/? Rails exists now. Rails is a much, much more productive environment.
Remember when shareware marketing consisted of paying $200 to magazines so you could get a little ad in the back of them and pray that 20+ people bought your think, such that 20 * $25 > $200? These days you do scalable online marketing approaches and sell products which have the same technical complexity as $25 shareware but, crucially, have LTVs in the mid-thousands or higher. (SaaS billing!)
My personal experience: it got easier to build (although not that much since 2008 or so, to be honest), but my feeling is that there's just TOO MANY projects happening, and too few people actually looking at them at all. I feel people are just saturated, and that's a direct reflection of all that easiness (is that a word?) + the web and mobile converging to a handful of very addictive gatekeepers.
My first couple side-projects (launched in 2006 and 2008) turned into respectable revenue sources (at least for a long while) with very little effort - and a small user-base (both were ad supported). I launched other stuff ever since - a terribly designed mobile app in 2010, on a niche field (QR code reading!) netted thousands of downloads. Then it started to get crowded. My most recent toy apps barely got a download. Some web experiments got dozens to thousands of signups (after, say, a product hunt launch), but retention is just tending to zero. On the flipside of that (as an early adopter), I find myself signing up to more and more landing pages of things that either never launch or I just lose interest when they do. Dunno why.
It's just a point of data, of course. Maybe I ran out of good ideas or I'm just barking the wrong tree. Anyway, just my 2 grouchy cents.
My take is that it has gotten easier enough that fewer folks are pursuing VC, opting to bootstrap instead. It's not that fewer side projects are happening - more side projects are happening. Fewer of them need VC money to succeed/scale/generate meaningful revenue, so VCs are seeing fewer side projects.
No, it's just that getting attention is a lot harder. Side projects – by its very nature – are exactly that: Some stuff happening on the side and the trash can is an even more certain path than for most startups.
Without any visibility, side projects won't turn into companies. This doesn't mean that there are no side projects. There are probably more than ever, because everybody tries to get into the startup hamster wheel with their little idea.
Even if you launch a product in English, there's HN, there's PH and that's about it. You better have another way to reach an audience, because HN & PH are one-shots – especially if you just try a thing or two marketing-wise for your side-project, but don't spend too much time and money on marketing.
With that said, who'd be interested in making a more democratized version of PH? Where we share together our own creations and help promote them with eachother? Kind of like r/entrepreneur but more focused. Could be cool. PM me.
Now getting _attention_? I feel everything is competing with autoplay videos on Facebook now. Microseconds of mindshare.
That's a great point, and is a major factor that led me into startups. Doing a startup is the only time I've ever had a job that feels like my time is not being wasted. With everything else I feel under-challenged, under-utilized, and pigeonholed.
Life is all about tradeoffs. Just because someone else's is different than yours, doesn't make it bad/wrong/illegal.
This mentality can be used to justify far too many stupid things.
As a society, we have laws that make it illegal to cross certain boundaries.
As an individual, I'm free to set my own limits on what I'll do. For one, I don't work at facebook or other adtech companies because I think the world has enough advertising and I don't like how phone-addicted people are.
I just think it's incredibly naive to assume you can have whatever lifestyle you want and be commercially successful. Success is costly ; you have to, almost by definition, be willing to do things other people aren't. I don't know where this idea that you somehow "deserve" to work "only 60 hours per week" comes from -- I just know that there are a lot of incredibly hard-working people in tech, and it's a high-stakes, high-money game, so you're going to get some outliers.
Perhaps you missed labor regulations over the last 200 years during the industrial revolution? That's where these ideas come from, that someone can have a solid quality of life without trading 60-100 hours a week of their life away.
I don't but you seem to, I wonder why?
My rudimentary understanding of labor law suggests it's not really clear what we are right now.
If they're owners, founders, or have significant equity? No. That's not the vast majority of tech workers though. They're (we? I'm a tech worker) just higher up in the caste system.
Is this labor in the "classic sense"? "Yes" if you're talking about the capital/labor division. "Conditional no" if you're talking about industrial labor.
Capital loves how easy it is these days to get motivated and fairly intelligent people to work for incredibly low wages, especially in the Bay Area. Some of those people actually create value that can be capitalized on.
I personally consider this an abuse of labor. I imagine that industrial-style regulation is not needed, as the curtain hiding the grossly misaligned relationships will eventually be pulled back -- most likely in the next big economic downturn.
They do not entitle you to be a successful startup founder for only X hours of work per week. You're not an employee when you're working for yourself.
I did the same thing for about a year before I finally quit my day job. I haven't work those kind of hours for many years.
If you aren't willing to sacrifice your free time, you probably won't succeed as a business owner and you are better off just working a regular job.
> Contrary to what this VC believes, it is NOT okay to expect someone to "work 60 hours a week at Facebook"
Let's get one of these already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive
What they don't have is the ability to prevent others from doing it. Personally, I like that and hated working in Germany where I was forced to stop working because of an arbitrary hours limit per week.
Yes they do. They have a law.
I can create my very own unique solution to a problem, rather than just being a cog in someone else's machine.
Edit: not that I mind being a cog if I get a paycheck, but it's not as awesome as creating something new
Edit2: and quitting my day job and raising capital would screw everything up for most projects.
I want to use the language, platform and philosophy of my choice when working on things for myself. It reminds me of why I got into this field in the first place.
Nowadays an MVP needs to be fairly polished to be useful at all, and often needs to support multiple platforms. And, CRUCIALLY, if you're asking for people's money, there is an expectation of ongoing support. If the business is visibly a side project, clients will be unlikely to purchase from it over a competitor that has a dedicated team working on a similar product. How do your customers know that your side project will not disappear tomorrow?
I suspect there is a "chilling effect" that causes a sort of paralysis in developers who are not ready to release their side project unless it's "perfect," because they need to build the product well enough that it does not require constantly supporting customers, responding to help-desk tickets, etc. An MVP is not enough to get real customers on a side project, simply because the barebones nature of it will amplify the support costs, causing strain on the developer and taking time away from perfecting the product.
The modern software developer has to be something of a swiss army knife. Of course, you need to write code that fulfills customer functional requirements. It needs to be fast. Further you are expected to write this code to be comprehensible and extensible: sufficiently flexible to allow for the evolutionary nature of IT demands, but stable and reliable. You need to be able to lay out a useable interface, optimize a database, and often set up and maintain a delivery pipeline. You need to be able to get these things done by yesterday. Somewhere, way down at the bottom of the list of requirements, behind, fast, cheap, and flexible is “secure”.
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I'd add to this list, if you are doing a side-project: marketing, SEO, customer acquisition, advertising, customer support, infrastructure support, ...
How can you be expected to see your product, company, mission, etc. as part of a larger world if it is your entire world? Most people I meet in SV cannot, and a large part appears to be what percent of their life is wrapped up in their work.
The latest is just a database of local parks that will be sortable by the various features (bbq grills, play grounds, etc). The official city website was terrible, I'll get to have the joy of using it because it was something I wanted, and I learned a few new things about WordPress which is what I work in for my primary job.
Jonathan Blow's talk on Deep Work also recommends doing that to recharge your creative batteries and help break up a long project, and mentions a couple side projects he worked on during The Witness: https://vimeo.com/94259578
What website were you looking at? We don't do that specifically, but we're friends with proudcity.com who do city websites.
Skipping that garage weekends step makes good sense. Good for your health, good for the project. Only not so good for VCs...
Importantly, a startup with enough sweat put into it that it's now executing on a business model instead of searching for a viable business model is no longer a startup; and if that's the only thing a VC is funding, then that person is not actually a VC, but rather a private-equity investor.
(And you could go further, and point out that the whole concept of "private equity" was just for the sake of startups with market risk; and that, having validated their market and eliminated such risk, companies should—according to the spirit of the law—immediately do their IPO. These "venture capitalists"—really just plain-old "capitalists" at this point—would then be forced to compete with every other schlub who wants a piece of the company.
This is a side effect of the "always-assumed-on-duty" nature of todays' white-collar workers.
If you do something blatantly competitive, e.g. launch a product that competes with your employer's product, try to use employer's customer relationships, you'll get sued. If you do something outright illegal, like steal IP, you're probably going to jail.
But most managers I've worked for don't really care if it doesn't affect your day job, and in fact, might quietly encourage it as it lets you scout the new hotness and then bring it back to your day job, if it's good.
I suspect the norms around this depend highly on where you work, but I think this attitude is pretty common in SF tech.
It's fine to do side projects anytime you want - it's not like the company has the ability to restrict what you can do in your free time. But if it looks like the side project may turn into something more than a side project, it may be a good idea to quit your job, throw away the code, and rewrite everything from scratch.
Everyone throws around the phrase "due diligence", but what exactly does that mean? How is this kind of thing showing up in "due diligence", assuming a side project could be at any stage? Do they interview employees? Go through their social accounts? Github repositories? Lurk at IRC chat rooms?
If the documentation is inconsistent or missing, you will be grilled on it. For things like missing partner or employee agreements, you will have to go back to those people and get them to sign the appropriate agreements. For audited financials, if there is an inconsistency you may have to restate earnings. If your commit logs show that some of your code was written by a person who was not an employee of the company at the time of the commit, you will be asked to produce a license or otherwise explain how you can legally use that code. If it turns out that they were an employee of some other company at the time, with IP assignment to their employer, then you'll have to go to that company and get them to sign a release or license agreement to use that code, and if they won't do that, it may torpedo the deal.
For each customer agreement, it has to be either assignable, or you will have to go to that customer and get them to agree to make it assignable. Each customer that doesn't so agree, or each customer that is slow to respond, will have to be individually negotiated with the acquirer in the period before the deal closes.
I'd imagine that one of the big risks acquirers of small companies care about is the company somehow fucked up and doesn't own, or there is a colorable claim they don't own, their source code. Having an overlap of git commits with your previous employer could cause you a lot of heartburn at minimum. And good luck getting a timely response from your previous employer that they don't own that code. Your previous employer, even if they have no intentions of being dicks, simply have no incentive to sign (and definitely no incentive to promptly sign) such an agreement.
Or, you could perhaps ask the people in charge to (on paper) waive certain provisions in your non-compete, or IP-sections in your work contract. They are human, and if it doesn't work, you would have learnt a great deal about your current employer just from trying.
(Happened to me. I won't elaborate any further.)
Though YC is probably a small fraction of overall seed funding, the fact that the acceptance ratio into YC is so so small is an indication that the vast majority of people/projects who want seed funding are not getting it.
The point is also ridiculous for another reason, which is if you get 250k in seed funding that doesn't mean you can pay yourself a 100k salary. In the short term at least, it is much better for you and your family to get 100k salary+benefits from somewhere else and then work on a project on the side than it would be to quit your job and raise 250k for your side project.
And if the project pans out, great! If not, hopefully the side project was you doing something you love anyway so you still had fun and gained a lot of experience.
The fact it's now easier (cheaper startup costs for many types of work) to start side projects is a boon for the rest of us. It means every once in a while, someone who would never had considered starting a biz right away but would create something for fun may end up bringing a truly valuable product or service to the world.
I started my biz (http://www.artofemails.com) as a side project. I think seeing it as a side project in the very beginning freed me from feeling I had to do market validation and the whole launch a biz laundry list to just put it (in my case sales email templates) out there. Once it was up and I got really positive feedback, that's when I committed to growing it as a fully fledged business.
Just because it's a side project doesn't mean you don't think about it in the shower. I never think of dayjob work outside of office hours, rest of the time I'm always thinking about my project, including when I shower.
If you're good enough and dedicated enough to execute on your ideas yourself, chances are you were paid pretty well in your past life and have decent savings. (If you weren't, it often makes sense to do a two-step path into a startup, where you write a side project that is impressive but not lucrative, use that as leverage to get a Google/Facebook/etc. job offer, save up a bunch of money, and then seed fund yourself.) And if you've got decent savings, it can often make more sense to avoid the dilution and investor-relations hassles that come with taking investment.
This may be the first time I've liked a Web 2.0-style name like that :-) - since Web 2 started in 2006-odd.
I kid you not.
Some of it might just be that I had demanding jobs. It's true that the network service provider arena is particularly 24/7. However, I went through half a dozen jobs between 18 and 22, and some afforded me plenty of free time outside the 9-5. With the easy jobs, I was demoralised, frustrated and/or bored, which didn't lead to a lot of spiritual energy for pursuing side projects diligently. With the more intense jobs, I was so busy that I had to try to squeeze in my side projects in the after-10 PM bracket. This all presumed no social life to speak of, by the way; the moment life even vaguely threatened social engagements, it was all out the window. Worse yet, staying up till 5 AM working on my side projects and trying to make it in at 9 AM for my actual job wasn't sustainable. It was arguably the immediate reason that led to my firing from the last job I actually had. It's not just a time thing, of course; sitting in an office all day is draining, even if one's job isn't very demanding. Even with my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed energy at 20, I often came home exhausted and would often spend my side project time just looking at the screen without getting much done. And, as I said, this is _without_ factoring in any other concerns whatsoever -- social life, personal life, working out, errands, grocery shopping, etc.
Anyway, maybe some people can do it, but in my view, this is no way to build something serious. I didn't start really making progress until I could afford to go "all in" with my time and energy. Also, it's important to remember that one is competing with folks who _do_ have the luxury of working on their venture on a full time-ish basis. That's quadruply important if go-to-market time is a serious linchpin of the venture.
Of course, the problem of bootstrapping while having a relatively high personal expense base is that the inevitable consulting required to support it sucks up all of one's time in the same way the day job used to (but with much higher economic stress and cash flow volatility), so it's not that going into business for myself opened up unparalleled opportunities to build product, either. However, even so, it beat grinding myself to powder.
EDIT: In one of my less intense jobs, I tried the approach of crashing out as soon as I came home (e.g. 7 PM) and waking up at 2 AM to spend my "best hours" on development. The actual day job could have the sloppy seconds; it wasn't a development job and didn't ask much of me. That was all good and fine, as long as one is comfortable with exactly two modes of existence: sleeping or sitting at a computer.