What I learned from getting my side project acquired | Hacker News Reader

What I learned from getting my side project acquired

ianww.com

396 pointstyppo54 comments

This post reminded me of pg's advice for how to get startup ideas. Compare:

"I have 5+ side projects. I’d like to make businesses out of them, but I often lose interest after a couple weeks. Asterank was the only project that I’ve stuck with for over a year, and it paid off even though there wasn’t a clear path to monetization... It’s hard to predict what will be valuable as a side project. For hobbies, working on what you’re most passionate about is the best way to get a return." [1]

"Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe." [2]

1. http://www.ianww.com/blog/2013/10/08/lessons-from-getting-my...

2. http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I still have to figure out how to stick with something for over a year. :(

I'm not even past the 1 month bump yet.

find collaborators. If you can't, that's usually a sign the project is not interesting/challenging enough to keep YOU working on it for a year.

Don't just ping your friends because they're your friends, collaborators should share the passion that got you to start the project. Sometimes that's best found outside your normal network.

But he did not treat it as a throwaway side project - he mailed, he built community and products, he pushed for a year.

That massively increased his chances of a profitable outcome - my lesson here is even treat your side projects as in need of proper marketing

That's the difference between a 'hobby' and a 'side project.' One is a professional job you're just not paid for (yet). The other is something you happen to enjoy doing, on occasion.

This might be a stupid question, but what is the point in acquiring a side project that is MIT-licensed? Was it just a means of acqui-hiring?

The license on the code doesn't include trademarks on the name, or copyright on marketing materials, branding, etc. Depending on the project, the bulk of the value might actually be in that stuff and not in the code itself. Don't underestimate how valuable "brand recognition" is.

Also, and while it might not apply in this specific case, a startup / side-project that has paying customers will have value in terms of acquiring the accounts and the relationships, even if the code is open source.

Quote from the article: "Asterank is almost entirely open source." That "almost" might be important.

They might see potential value in a commercial fork aimed at Enterprise or Business clients. There is also the potential yearly service contracts that may be negotiated. Getting the original developer of a program to maintain it is a good idea for Enterprise clients. They can also develop a training package and sell it with his help.

My bet is: talent + reputation + data.

I'd guess that the real value is in the data. They've presumably gathered a bunch of size/composition/value data about asteroids that would almost certainly have value to a company that plans to exploit said asteroids.

I've had an (Apache licensed) open source project acquired. In my case it was the userbase that was valuable.

Interesting project.

I had similar hobby project: MapDB database engine. It started as simple data store for astronomical application. I wrote first patch for JDBM (old name) while observing at Atacama desert 4 years ago. I never advertised much, but now its my full time job and it generates decent email traffic.

Thanks for this post, very interesting. Personally, I badly want to get out of the software / "tech" industry, and get into the space industry some how.

I have no idea what I'll do, how I'll do this, or what I can offer. Only time will tell.

There are a lot of similarities though, rocket ships run on software.

That said, there are huge challenges in robot manipulators, signals management (space is noisy) and vacuum operations.

One of the things I've been noodling on is a self contained mineral extraction pipeline. You know you suck in raw material on one side and pull out some useful mineral or minerals out of the other. There are several challenges here, one being that many existing extraction processes rely on either an abundance of water or power or both, and often were designed assuming gravity worked :-). So for grins and giggles I've been noodling on "The Mosquito" which is a cross between a well auger and a science payload. It combines three things I find fascinating, robotics, space, and systems design so it is a lot of fun.

Interesting. Do you have a blog or website showing off what you have so far? I'd love to learn more.

I think 2 main things will drive space "exploration":

- mining resources from astroids - solar arrays for more efficient power generation

Actually its just notes in my notebook and stuff clipped into an Evernote notebook but it I'll see about putting something up on my robotics page.

A software job in aerospace (avionics or analysis) can be worse than a pure software position, because your managers understand your work even less. Also, there are huge gulfs between reading about X, studying X at the university level, and working in X industry. I see a lot of people entering aerospace programs with dreamy ambitions from Reddit, Neil Degrasse Tyson, SpaceX articles. Then they can't hack the physics and math and 200 page design reports. It's a bit like kids going into CS because they like playing video games.

Most aerospace jobs are pretty Dilbert/Office Space. At the megahuge defense contractor where I used to work, we had Office Space characterizations for many of our managers/coworkers. If you ever want your space dreams dashed, read Glassdoor reviews. We just hired an ex-SpaceXer who loved the mission but hated sacrificing his life as a 20-something to working 70-hour weeks.

That's exactly what I imagined. Especially since the entire industry basically works with the government.

I was thinking of working for or at one of space startups: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Virgin Galactic, and the mars one foundation.

The truth is, my goal is to eventually start my own company.

Can I suggest to just start - there are going to be a gazillion suppliers to SpaceX etc - if you want to be in the industry, you can be in.

If you want to put your stuff in space or even orbit, may I suggest looking at micro satellites - there is going to be a vast number of things people will want doing that are going to be within the capability of a large lump of silicon. And the big boys will happily take a dozen iphone equivalents and put them in LEO in passing.

That to me is the growth area

Edit: sorry seemed a bit off dumped the hobbyist reference - just thinking of the issues of orbital speed - until / if orbital speed is achievable for an cluster of iPhones dangling from a weather ballon, then everything depends on huge great rockets. And SpaceX and it's ilk, for all the impact, is only expecting to see a halving of launch costs. It is going to remain a big government big industry game for a very very long time.

Agreed, I should just start. Next year, I'm going to attend a few conferences, just to learn more about the industry, chat with people etc.

The cost do need to dramatically drop, for say, large scale mining operations to happen.

I think we'll ultimately need a space elevator or something extreme. Maybe that's possible with LOTS of advances in carbon nanotube tech... If so, I think several governments could be persuaded to put up funding in the future. Just like we did with the International Space Station.

I like this advice. I worked with someone who built an aerospace company around an ultra-reliable actuator design he developed with a friend. They had put hardware on dozens of missions, including some inter-planetary missions, before they were acquired a few years later.

A lot of the advice he gave me centered around understanding how supplier contracts are granted / won, and the importance of building relationships and a reputation in the industry. The biggest thing that stuck with me, though, was that it was even possible for a startup company to put hardware in space, let alone mission-critical stuff.

So, I second the "just start" suggestion. Maybe I'll take the same advice myself some day.

If the goal is to start your own company, then start your own company.

Kilroy, I'm the author of this post -- if you're a software engineer interested in space, maybe we should stay in touch (email in profile). I definitely had a hard time figuring out how to "break in" to commercial space and I get the sense there's a shortage of higher-level software talent in the industry. As commercial space matures, there is greater opportunity for people like us to get involved.

I agree that a lot of aerospace seems Dilbert-esque. I think (and hope) there will be opportunity to change that in the long term.

I would like to shoot you an email as well, if you don't mind. I left my defense aerospace job after 9.5 years because I just couldn't make it work in that kind of Dilbert-esque environment. I gave it 9.5 years because I really love the problems, the systems, and the technology.

I worked at a couple of major defense/aerospace companies in college, and you're spot on. At both places, I (the intern) and other junior engineers were doing meaningless paperwork that could be replaced by a relational database. At one of the jobs, I actually wrote that database and replaced myself, which made my manager very angry, as I wasn't doing what I was supposed to. I talked to a guy a year later and they were still using the thing I wrote.

On the other hand, one of my friends works at a small (~30 people) aerospace company that does various contract work for prototyping and research that the larger firms do, and I'm pretty sure it's a dream job. He does a mix of everything from cool analysis work to working with state of the art machining tools to build stuff. And he's not some PhD genius from MIT either, he has the same degree I do from a middling state school. He just had a lot of passion and drive and found the place that rewarded that.

I know that feel. I'm at a tiny aerospace firm that manages to move slower than any of the huge companies where I once worked. I'm in the process of trying to convince my analysis group to move to a real SQL database instead of hundreds of Excel files, but it's going to be tough. These people are technical in the sense they all have aerospace/mechanical engineering degrees, but know as much about databases as maybe my parents (i.e. nothing).

You first job is probably billing the government/tax player by the hours. The more hours, the higher the billing. Automation means less $ for your boss.

Actually, at large defense contractors there is significant pressure not to bill more than 40 hours per week. It (theoretically) keeps costs down and makes the contractor more appealing for future work. It skews the actuals all to hell, though, because on paper it looks like a project took X hours when it actually took 1.2X hours because everyone was working an average of 48 hours a week but only billing 40. In some cases it can skew even worse. I had a couple workaholic co-workers who regularly put in 25+ unpaid extra hours.

The government doesn't particularly like this, but they usually don't clamp down on the practice. They do get upset when contractors knowingly distort their bids with estimates of this, though. Marietta, before they got rolled up into Lockheed Martin via mergers, once got in trouble because they submitted a bid wherein they assumed "full-time" would be 43 hours per week and set their time projections accordingly. The government auditors were pissed when they found out.

Lesson 7: You need to stick with it

I'm trying to do this right now. I challenged myself to do 100 consecutive days of commits to my side projects and I'm currently at day 94. Unfortunately, my private repos don't show up in my streak unless I'm logged in, but most of them are here: https://github.com/jonstjohn .

I've still bounced between about 3 projects in the past 3 months. I struggle with what seems like it should be the last 5-10%, although I'm looking at forcing myself to launch even if I'm not happy with everything.

If you want to make the challenge even more intense, you can try a service like Beeminder that'll charge you if you don't commit every day. It can hook into Github, I believe.

https://www.beeminder.com/gitminder

The founders actually use this themselves, making a mandatory UVI (user-visible improvement) every day, inspired by pg's advice "startups rarely die mid-keystroke... so keep typing!" See here for more on that: http://blog.beeminder.com/rails/

These are great! I think I've seen Bee Minder before. Honestly, it has helped me out tremendously to just keep committing. I have days where I commit some really trivial bit of code, just to keep things going, but first thing in the morning I'm thinking about what I plan to commit that day. It keeps me focused on my side projects.

If no one notices your project but it is genuinely interesting, just blog about it until they notice. I posted Asterank Discover on HN and it got 5 points. Then I wrote a blog post about it that made the front page. Go figure.

I think this might be that people tend to prefer reading about stories on products rather than a product landing page ?

Congrats Ian, and a huge thanks for blogging your experience building AsterRank. You definitely helped some friends and me out with a space game we're working on!

Q: is it necessary to incorporate a side project like this from the beginning ?

I'm planning to found a company that will build several products. If one of them achieves traction and revenue growth, I'm wondering if there are any issues in making it easily acquirable. I suppose shared code is an issue.

If you want it to be easily acquirable, the only thing that matters is simple ownership. If you as an individual own everything, there's no need to incorporate. You may want to incorporate for tax, liability, or employment reasons, of course; but you can usually wait for those to be a real issue (income tax treatment isn't a huge deal if you have no income)

Thank you for the post. It is always helpful and inspiring to hear a another's success story.

Funny I'm listening to Peter Diamandis give a lecture in the next room over as I read this.

you earned a point from me, even if I have no idea what it is you do (ok, I know you catalog space stuff)

most of all this little guide you posted is very transferable, thanks a ton.

thanks Ian. learnt a lot from your article.

Blog about your technical issues! Yes!

Congrats Ian. Perseverence is key!

What was the acquisition price (range) ?

I was wondering the same. My guess is it's "Enough to finance the next project" rather than "Enough for a new life" but Im' interested in the outcome.

Good story no matter what!

Sounds like the author was acquired as well: "I’ve accepted a Software Engineer position at Planetary Resources starting in November"

Sounds like not at the same time, though. He said the site was acquired in May 2013 [1], while this post says he is starting there in November, and his front page still says he works at room77.com [2]. Makes me curious.

1. http://www.asterank.com/about

2. http://www.ianww.com

I do believe getting a position at Planetary Resources itself is worth having done the project.

Indeed. Really the story could be, "How my side project landed me my dream job."

I'm the OP/author, and you are pretty much right. It's probably not the sort of deal you'd read about in TechCrunch or the WSJ, but it made the work I did in the past year totally worth it. And it got me my "dream job," which counts for a lot.

And it got me my "dream job," which counts for a lot.

I think that's the true lesson of the story. Thanks for sharing it!

Thanks for the vitamin C shot of inspiration. I'm working on a project to dramatically diminish the need for animal-testing in science experiments[1], and the process has been humbling. I know little about science.

As you recommended in the article, I've been speaking with scientists from around the world (and anyone else who will listen) and learning as much as I can, as fast as I can.

Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki was right, "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few".

[1]http://selfexperiments.com

"I'm working on a project to dramatically diminish the need for animal-testing in science experiments"

That sounds straight up crazy since animal-testing is an improvement on human testing but big ideas are always intimidating.

Love the project! And of course, for those side projects that do get abandoned, you can find them at http://sideprojectors.com

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