How side projects saved our startup | Hacker News Reader

How side projects saved our startup

blog.crew.co

325 pointsrmason43 comments

Interesting to note that while Unsplash's launch on HN led to it becoming a staple and a huge success, the comments from the HN community were overwhelmingly negative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083

As a happy subscriber to Unsplash since it first launched here, I'm glad that the team ignored the comments and kept making this.

The first comment in the linked thread says:

>>> It's amazing how much the title submission can influence comments.

>>> Original title: "Hated expensive, crappy stock photos so I made this."

>>> Current title: "Free hi-resolution photos for your website. 10 new photos every 10 days"

So that explains a lot, and puts a good emphasis on how important is the title. These type of titles work out pretty well in other areas but it is a gray area here in HN. It also makes me appreciate the original title rule which we have here in HN.

> As a happy subscriber to Unsplash since it first launched here, I'm glad that the team ignored the comments and kept making this.

I suspect a couple dozen paying customers made it really easy to ignore the negative comments from the peanut gallery. :)

Back in the day, HN's reaction to Dropbox was also extremely negative [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

One issue I have with posts like this, however awesome/uplifting/well-intentioned they may be, is that they attempt to generalize mostly anecdotal evidence to general advice.

Is this an engaging and inspiring story? Yes, and it's great that people feel free to share their stories (successes and otherwise) here.

Having read it, do I have a better idea how likely this strategy is to work for any given person/company? No, and I don't know that anything short of an exhaustive longitudinal study would help there. (There's some mention of studies on creative hobbies, but it's a bit of a leap from there to repeatable ROI.)

Bingo. And assuming somebody did actually have a really amazing and effective marketing strategy, they would be heavily disincentivized from sharing it. By its nature, marketing is about outcompeting other companies for attention and sales, so the less competition, the better.

So just based on bayesian probabilities, if you are reading marketing advice from somebody, it probably is bad (or wont apply to you). If you are reading a story about an effective marketing strategy somebody used in the past, it probably doesn't work as well anymore.

As you state, this doesn't take anything away from the entertainment value of the story, but it is just entertainment and marketing, not advice.

What If "the marketing advice" you're reading is the actual marketing?

no ifs involved: blog was specifically listed as one of their marketing platform and HN as their target audience.

Really? Create something small and useful for your primary audience that you can give away for free to drive referrals to your business. Raise awareness and build loyalty. Sounds pretty specific to me. They even included data on four side projects they've successfully used this strategy on.

This isn't general advice. I would say it's quite actionable.

Know your market and its audience. Build simple tools that provide value targeted towards your audience. Profit.

"Having read it, do I have a better idea how likely this strategy is to work for any given person/company? No"

Au contraire @candu.

The founders identified limited cash and made a decision to change tack. A new idea was tried on an observation and a hunch. A prototype was cheaply created, in both time and money and launched, then validated. The only question left unanswered is homework for the reader, "what idea" to try?

>One issue I have with posts like this, however awesome/uplifting/well-intentioned they may be, is that they attempt to generalize mostly anecdotal evidence to general advice.

That's the reader's job. It's they that can and should make appropriate generalizations from the multiple stories they read and listen to.

The posters job is to post their anecdotal evidence as true to what happened as they can, including giving any insights of what worked for them.

As businessmen we don't operate with perfectly accurate and complete data, detailed scientific models for every action and perfect confidence (those don't exist in business anyway).

What good businessmen do is make sense out of the chaos of empirical information, which includes both their experience and anecdotes, and use it AS IT applies and IF IT applies to their particular market and special circumstances.

"side projects as marketing" has a rather unfortunate acronym (:

Not quite as bad as runc though https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/issues/24 (admittedly not an acronym but entertaining nonetheless)

That's not even true. "Runka" means jerking off. No Swede would associate "runc" with that (c on its own is never pronounced like k), especially in this kind of context.

It works in Finnish though. My first thought when seeing "runc" was "that must be the comic book sound effect for jerking off"... :)

My teenage Norwegian mind (not body) did smirk at the runc name. Runk and runc are pronounced the same there and have the same meaning as in Swedish/Finnish...

Not offending someone in some language somewhere is hard. I remember Honda nearly launched the Jazz with a different name in Europe. http://www.carscoops.com/2007/09/why-honda-didnt-call-fit-ja...

I think the "side project as marketing" might only work if your side project is a good vertical for your product. People coming to a site that helps give referrals to designers (i think that's what Crew is) is definitely the same people who would be interested in UnSplashed.

If i'm working on a business for pharmacists, i'm not sure my side project playing around with neural networks is going to get me the right eyeballs.

This is too simple to be of interest. Only a few companies can have side projects like that, and with that amount of success.

Honestly, HN sometimes (but not always) feels like it is made up of a bunch of gold-diggers, clinging to the hope of one day making a big breakthrough, without proportional effort. It has a very shallow feel to it.

There are a few notable companies that were side projects. Twitter, Slack and Instagram are three I can remember offhand.

Instagram was more a pivot from Burbn than a side project.

We do similar things for http://www.staffsquared.com.

For example:

- What type of manager quiz are you: http://www.staffsquared.com/what-type-of-manager-are-you-qui...

- Timesheet calculator: http://www.staffsquared.com/timesheet-calculator/

- Maternity calculator: http://www.staffsquared.com/calculator/maternitycalulator/

...and much much more.

Generally these "side projects" take a few days to put together from concept through to launch. They're very minimal overhead, and they drive good numbers that convert to trials to the site.

The best side projects don't just link back to the website you're actually selling, but somehow draw users in. A good example of this is the http://invoiceomatic.io/ by Freeagent. They grab you by giving you the opportunity to create an invoice, next thing you know you're knee deep creating a Freeagent account...it works.

It's very meta to realize that this blog post is marketing too. Great execution of the "useful marketing" idea.

This is nice. I experienced something similar. I live in Algeria and the banking system is deplorable. I wanted to be able to buy things online and needed a debit card. It took forever to find a bank that proposed them (sometimes, the bank employees themselves didn't know their own bank proposed such a service).

Anyway, after all the fuss and after gathering all the necessary documents to open an account and get a card, I thought that a lot of people were in a similar situation.

I created a wordpress.com blog and listed all the necessary documents. I created a PDF the bank required but didn't even bother to ask for until you went there (so extra trip) with fillable fields and all and uploaded it there. The whole thing. It was so frustrating to me that I went overboard and listed other options like comparing other card providers to the specific context of the country, and how each one could be used differently.

After that, I got proper hosting and redirected the .wordpress there. There were about 300 people daily on the site. Not much, but that's 100k people who read a very long post. The post alone had more than 700 comments (I changed to Disqus) and I replied to 99.99% of them. The remaining was spam. Soon, other readers were answering questions of "new" readers. They also sent me different documents to attach to the article. The site was linked to from a whole bunch of geek sites in the country. Sites to buy cars linked to it, too (they were interested in buying car accessories).

Often times, people I knew would read the article and then read the author's name and laugh because they knew me personally. Another contacted me and said good things and asked if I was related to an author/Gynechology Professor (my uncle) and he said he avoided his wife a couple years of prison time (she was to be jailed for medical mistake and my uncle apparently made a report it wasn't, the investigation was reopened). Others said it would be cool to meet IRL for coffee, etc. Others said I should monetize it.

The site ranked 1 on Google for "MasterCard Algérie" (it's not anymore as I was too busy to renew hosting, etc. But the wordpress.com blog ranks 7th).

It all came because I was too frustrated by the paperwork and the 18th century style banks have to do business.

The point is: It might not seem like it's a big thing (I mean, it's only a darn card, right).. But you never know how bad the itch is for someone else. A good indication is how it is bad for you, though. It doesn't matter if it's not revolutionary, only that it needs violent scratching.

Good luck with your projects.

This is a very interesting marketing (unmarketing?) strategy. I'm in a similar spot as Crew were when they posted that project, I even remember seeing it on hn at the time.

Andrew recently posted an interview [1] with the founder of betalist.com, which was also born out of desperation and as a side project. Marc talks about his betalist experiment and the impact it had [2].

I would love to see other examples and write-ups about this. Was it accidental or strategic? I'm the sole developer of our product right now, but we're also struggling with marketing at the moment. How much does it make sense for me to put the effort into such side projects?

[1] http://mixergy.com/interviews/marc-kohlbrugge-betalist/ [2] https://medium.com/beta-list/how-i-tricked-techcrunch-into-w...

For Unsplash, could we get soft-links (i.e. https://unsplash.com/photo/1 would always link to photo 1 of the set of 10 for that week)? Then I could set up a script to update my wallpaper weekly, because these are gorgeous! :)

> The best marketing is when you don’t know it’s marketing

There's an entire industry that revolve around this idea.

We call the people that work in that industry "publicists".

The "you" in the sentence is the creator of the product, not the target

I don't know Mikael's intent, but even if it was meant that way, the statement applies just as well to the viewer/target. It's arguably a lot more generalizable.

Thank you for this post: I've been feeling especially down on myself today since I've a lot of learning to do when it comes to marketing and managing side projects, but the ideas in the post were gold. Kudos!

Very good insights about marketing material that is "useful".

The idea reminds me of Vaynerchuk’s Jab, jab, right hook strategy http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/10/11/13-memora... (sorry for the popups)

I've been using unsplash for a while and I was amazed the first time I used it, and am still amazed today. Enjoyed learning a little more about how they started.

The content is some times a little repetitive (just how many shots of amazing, beautiful scenery could one need?), but it has become an absolute go-to for me.

Article is old, but still like hearing about Unsplash

What kind of images would make a change?

I think that still life images of old things might fit in with the motivation for the site (free images to use on Web sites &c).

I'm not sure -- there is a site that specializes in what you are talking about though:

http://nos.twnsnd.co/

This is a very common seo tactic most often referred to as "tools". See quicksprout.com for a high profile example.

cueyoutube.com has been a good source of seo juice work workingsoftware.com.au but beware tools that have a maintenance overhead: youtube updated their api weeks ago and i haven't had time to fix it.

Candu- excuses excuses, time to just get out there and do it. Try something, you might strike gold first time like Crew did, but probably not. Invest little and expect little back, that's the lesson here. If it works, then shine a light on it.

This is some great advice, nice post!

Too bad the article only focuses on the success stories. I for one would be really interested to know how many failed/abandoned side projects they created and how they relate to the successful ones.

Oh wow! This was you who created it. I had been looking around for nice stock images to use for a product and stumbled upon "Unsplash". I was like sweet! Awesome work and thank you again!

Very interesting post and seems to be the best way forward for "marketing" and creating the right culture at a start-up.

btw, Github was also a side project once.[0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772357

This isn't clear on the page, but if you look at the metadata - this article is from October 2014

Also love what Hubspot did w/ Sidekick.

I'm sure this breaks some HN rule, but consider visiting this discussion:

The Nigerian Teenagers Who Built Crocodile Browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9787010

One of the teens found his/her way to HN, but all that's in the thread is nitpicking about their website. It would be great if he/she got some engagement and encouragement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com