Sales-Driven Side Projects | Hacker News Reader

Sales-Driven Side Projects

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86 pointslloydarmbrust19 comments

By the article's own logic, the examples of Twitter and Gmail probably wouldn't have come into being if they were sales-driven side projects.

I don't think Vinicius' article was making a general statement about side projects being bad. His experience was that they can be dangerous distractions while you are still in the "startup transition cycle".

- Vinicius's article was great advice, so please don't consider this a knock on it.

- I wasn't really trying to outline sales-driven side projects in that part of the article, merely successful ones.

- For truly mature companies (ones who are out of the startup phase), side projects are a healthy thing to encourage because they can afford to take risks with their time and money. We were looking for a standard by which a startup like ours could tackle a side project. This is the standard we hit on that seems to be working for us. Of course there are others. And in different kinds of companies with different kinds of cultures, we'd expect variation.

"We were looking for a standard by which a startup like ours could tackle a side project." - Thanks for the clarification.

This is a good article, but it goes a bit too far. The concept of a sales driven side project is a good one, but it's an attribute of a side project, not a requirement.

The value of this post is that it should bring into focus the two types of side projects: those that are sales driven, and those that are not. Both have their place when growing a company!

Can you tell us about what you are working on?

We're not really in the habit of announcing products before we've launched them (although we've already pre-sold this product to several customers). If you work with a newspaper we're not already working with, give us a call at (888) 850-2497. We'll schedule a demo for you after we've launched our initial customers.

I think the developer version of this phrase is "getting the customer to pay for R&D" or, more simply, consulting* .

It sounds like you're suggesting doing fixed price software development bids... In my experience that's not a great way to avoid painful outcomes.

*with an ownership clause.

It might seem like it, but it's not. We won't build one-off projects and nothing we do is a one-time fee. Almost everything we do (except for setup fees and training fees) is recurring revenue. These projects have to be generally applicable to our market and it must be sold to at least one of our existing customers beforehand with others who have expressed interest.

If we were doing fixed price development bids, I would agree that we'd be facing some serious pain down the road.

Sales-driven everything.

Son, sorry, you aren't bringing in the bucks in pre-school. You have a week to increase sales or you're out on the street.

Applejuice is for closers.

Deleted comment

I wasn't aware of this. I was pretty sure DHH was working at 37signals for a few years before Basecamp started.

Update: Yep, he was working there for two years before Basecamp according to DHH's bio. http://www.loudthinking.com/

That was really stupid of me.

No need to be so hard on yourself.

Can someday confirm, then let the author know that disqus comments make the article unreadable on iPad because the text is covered with a big white square. When it loads you cant see the text of the main body. I've seen it on several blogs now.

This also occurs on andriod devices. Very annoying I couldn't read it after a couple of seconds

Thanks for letting us know. We'll take a look.

It the disqus element up the top alongside the headline.

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