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99.999% of your ideas are side-project ideas, not startup ideas!

  1. 4

    There are many approaches to "how to startup".
    In our case, we started as a small side project for ourselves, that should ease the pain for a good note-taking and documentation tool for developers. Soon after we saw that fellow developers have the same need as we do. So we shared it with our friends and co-workers and now we have 400 users + and soon we are out of beta.

    Working 20h and more per week. Sure you can consider it a side project but I think at a certain point it turns into a startup, especially if you have business ambitions.

    If you also feel the need for an easy to use, privacy-first and developer-in-mind note-taking solution - you can check out ERA.

    1. 2

      This is impressive!

      Would love to hear about your journey and featuring it on my site: MarktStash.com

      I have curated various reports of marketing strategies posted by indie founders and I have a list of stories of indie founders starting & growing Side Projects .

      1. 1

        I will send you an email :-)

  2. 2

    Great Idea! But as there is much more demand for startups than side projects. Startup ideas are the best way to secure the future of your business. I hereby was looking for the best startup ideas to start with, so I came across this idea of the Best Mobile Apps ideas to go for 2023: https://www.apurple.co/best-mobile-app-ideas/

  3. 2

    Nice post! I realized this when I worked on personal project and startup. Personal projects don't need to make business sense but just for the sheer fun of it, but startups, you have to do a lot of research and entrepreneurial stuff.

  4. 2

    I agree - treating side projects like businesses can really lead to minimized fun.

    On the other hand, if you want to start a business, now you can't just code away the fun stuff, you'll have to do validation first (I just happen to build a tool that helps you validate your idea, https://validate.run) and only if you have a few people commited to pay, you should actually invest more time.

    Everything else is a side project and you should (as you said it), treat it as such.

  5. 2

    It feels like you're yelling at me personally... My ideas are definitely startup ideas!

  6. 1

    Agree.
    Side projects are super rewarding and ideas don't always have to be world changing.

    PS: If you want feedback on your idea, get it here with AI:
    www.validatorai.com

    Side project of mine :D
    Aron

  7. 1

    Agree. Everything starts with the first step.

  8. 1

    I agree with the sentiment. Ideas can be really exciting and compelling to the person who ruminates on them, but to be compelling enough to build a business, they have to be validated, tested, and refined constantly. This might be one of the biggest pitfalls in early stage ventures.

  9. 1

    Just get the thing going and get some revenue in the door, startup v side project, who cares. It'll either grow like a startup or a side project & you can have impact in whichever direction it goes. Once it's live, sometimes, not always..."magic happens here" and it becomes much more of a startup

    1. 1

      This comment was deleted a year ago.

  10. 1

    I would disagree on that. Because I think products that were build by a full-time dedicated team has a higher success rate than products that are side project. And the products that users (we) actually hear about or even use are the ones who succeeds. So naturally there are way more products that are not a side projects than 0.001%.:)

    Actually I will release my side project product next week that I have been building for a while (at least half of a year or more pure programming during my free time). And I have to say, that knowing how much time it takes to build a product by yourself and even not knowing whether it will be profitable or not, makes me think that maybe it is better to work in a team or hire freelancers to do it. But we will see :)

    1. 4

      This comment was deleted a year ago.

  11. 1

    This is very interesting and very true as well, I think one thing that we need to understand is that not everything should be coded from scratch as well haha

  12. 1

    This is one of very few areas that I feel like I had a better-than-average experience when starting out. I didn't necessarily think of it in these same terms but my goal from the start had been to stay small and I'm glad I did, looking back I think it reduced the pressure and allowed me to focus on getting something out there. Even still, it took me a lot more time and effort than I originally thought.

  13. 1

    I just released my first side project. As someone who identifies with this part of the article: - "only to give up when a new “ground-breaking world-changing idea” comes to them" - this is a huge achievement in itself, even if I'll never get a single customer. Forcing myself to stay focused on one single project also helped me ranking all the new ideas that popped in my mind: if you can't start working on them right away they slowly deflate and you'll see them from a more realistic point of view.

  14. 0

    Here's a free financial modeling tool to determine if it's a side project or startup:
    https://increnovation.azurewebsites.net/fermi/highlevel

  15. 0

    In case you're looking for some project inspo, especially in NoCode, you can check this one out

    https://www.nocodejournal.com/posts/9-nocode-projects-you-didnt-know-you-could-make

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