5 Reasons Why Your Side Projects Are Failing

hey what's going on guys so when it comes to having a career as a web developer there's a few routes you can take you can work for a company you can freelance but you can also work on your own projects either full-time or part-time while you do something else and side projects are exciting because you get to work on something that you're passionate about and there's also potential for a massive payoff however s projects can be very challenging and they often fail I would say that a lot more often than not so one of my biggest inspirations for this type of thing is a developer named Peter levels also known as levels.io and he's one of the most successful Indie hackers and web webdev entrepreneurs he's I believe he's a multi-millionaire he's created a number of successful side projects including noad lists uh remote okay photo AI he made a tweet a while ago and had a list of all his projects like 70 80 projects and said that only four of those actually made him money and grew so 95% of his projects failed so in this video I want to talk about why so many projects fail side projects and what you can avoid to uh to increase your chances of success and many of these points are pretty standard pretty obvious but I want to elaborate on them and just give you some examples from my own experience as well all right so let's get into it all right so before we start I just want to give you a little bit of history of about myself when it comes to this kind of thing so I learned to code back in 2007 or so and since then I've worked for companies I had a freelancing business and of course I create content tutorials courses and in that span I've had many side projects most of them I'd say were before 2016 2017 or so because that's when I decided to do full-time content and at one point I had 15 maybe even 20 side projects and I was working on them all at once you know I was young young naive and just thought I could do it all so I had some really good success with a few including a copyright free article sales website a medical directory for addiction halfway houses a web hosting review site a WordPress theme and plug-in store but I've had dozens or even I I don't know maybe even hundreds that failed if you include the really small ones uh ultimately I ended up selling those assets uh the ones that were successful and got into you know full-time content but I've learned lot from that point in my career so number one is taking on too much which I just kind of talked about and my mistake was just not understanding that there's only a certain amount of time in the day and when you work on 15 projects at the same time you can't give them all the attention that they need you need to focus on in my opinion one or two or three at the most uh projects at the same time and if you're spreading yourself too thin you're not going to be able to make any real progress and I know it can be tempting to take on a lot of projects especially when you're really passionate about them and you know I would learn something new and get a decent idea and I would just start working on it I'd get excited about it about uh the next idea I'd start working on that and I would get bored with the first idea and the the cycle would just go on and at one point I had 100 plus domain names registered for things that I plan to build and this is also while I'm running a you know a full-time freelancing business this with two employees and I was working 80 plus hours a week burning out which is another problem in itself so just be sure to focus on you know one or two projects at a time and give them your all see them through to completion and you'll be much more likely to succeed not saying you will at all you probably won't but I mean it takes failure to to get to success number two is lack of proper planning like I said I I would get a decent idea and I would just run with it and sometimes I would jump right into the code or right into the design and layout which is a huge mistake because planning is critical when if you want your project to be successful so this is an example of a simple project plan that you could use so number one you want to define the project scope so what do you want to achieve with that with the project who's the target audience um describe specific metrics or criteria that will be used to measure the success of the project number two Define the project requirements what do you need to complete it um figure out your Tex stack your tools Your Design assets and obviously you need some kind of Hosting infrastructure domain names things like that uh number three Define the project timeline it can help to kind of break down the timeline into mil stones or phases that represent significant accomplishments or deliverables and you want to define the project budget how much will it cost to complete break it up into cost categories like development design marketing also where's that money going to come from are you funding it yourself uh are you going to be seeking investors and then Define the project risks so what could go wrong uh how how can you mitigate those risks technical challenges market and competitive risks Etc and then finally Define the project deliverables so identify the key functionalities features or modules that the the project will deliver and come up with what's called an MVP a minimal viable minimum viable product that you can launch in and you can build upon and I'll talk more about MVPs in the next one but these are just some examples there's there's so much more that you could plan but uh you also don't want to overwhelm yourself with planning and I've seen a lot of people do that as well they get stuck in that planning stage they'll spend months or even years planning and never actually start building so you need to kind of find a balance um between just jumping in head first like I did and never getting started at all so number number three is unreasonable expectations this is a big one a lot of people kind of have this mentality that they're going to create the next Facebook or Twitter um they want to build something that's going to just blow up and make them millions of dollars but the problem is that that's very unlikely that you're going to do that um those companies are outliers they're the exception not the rule instead like I mentioned you should focus on building a minimum viable product or an MVP which is the basic version of a new product that lets you learn the most from customers with minimal effort and its goal is to test key business ideas quickly and and help you start learning in the process so you can then build upon that mvp add features add functionality as you go so I just did a quick outline of the goal of an MVP so first validate your ideas so test your business assumptions um to see if people actually want what you're offering then you want to iterate and improve so begin with a simple version of your product and make it better over time based on what your users tell you and what you learn from their behavior and then finally manage resources wisely so you want to spend your time spend your money wisely by focusing on the features that matter the most to your early users and by setting realistic expectations and leveraging this MVP approach you POS position yourself for a long-term success again not saying it's going to be successful but you have a better chance so number four is neglecting market research and validation this is something that I definitely could have done much more of um I would start building without doing much research at all uh I did do a little bit to see you know what kind of competition was out there but definitely not what I should have so you need to know who your target audience is what their uh pain points are and what they're looking for in a product you should know what your competition is doing um is there a demand for the product and are people willing to pay for it because I mean yeah you can build a really cool app maybe you have a really good idea that you know no one's even thought of yet have really unique features but if nobody wants it if there's no demand for it then it's not going to be successful you know it might look good on your portfolio but uh it's not going to make you any money so just be sure to do your research and validate your ideas before you actually start building and then number five is lack of marketing and this is another one that kind of goes into my last point you can build the best product in the world but if nobody knows about it then it's not going to go anywhere so you need to have a marketing plan in place before you launch your product and in the last point I talked about doing market research to see if there's a demand for your product now you need to figure out how you're going to reach that audience since you know that there is a demand and and I just jotted some things down that you can consider these are pretty standard but you can do content marketing so create blog posts videos podcasts Etc um these will Pro provide value to your audience they can help establish you as an authority in that Niche and drive traffic to your website and of course social media marketing so platforms like Twitter Facebook Instagram promote your product and engage with your audience and you got email marketing so you want to build an email list and send out regular updates newsletters Etc keep your audience engaged paid advertising so you can use platforms like Google ads Facebook ads uh to reach a larger audience and drive traffic to your website and of course SEO you know you want to optimize your website for search engines so that people can find you and find the products or services that you're offering I mean there's so many different marketing strategies that you can use you need to figure out what works best for your product because they're all different um and find your audience and another thing that I I just want to mention that I think relates to this is no matter what you're doing even if you're you're a developer at a company and you've been there for years you plan on being there for years maybe you're not even thinking of side projects I still think that you should work on building uh an online presence a web presence because as a developer you never know when you're going to want to launch your own product you could just get an idea overnight and want to execute that so if you are building an audience over time then when you when that comes out when you're ready you can advertise to that audience you know and and I'm a good example of that I've been building an audience for year a decade or more now so if I were to launch a SAS product or something like that I already have an audience that I can reach out to so just just something to keep in mind anyway those are some reasons why I feel like a lot of side projects fail including my own I would say that I've had issues with all of these and that's really why I'm mentioning them so if you have any other suggestions or reasons why you know your side projects have failed let us know in the comments but thanks for watching and that's it