Why Side Projects Suffer

And what you can do to help

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

My contention is that if you treat your product as a side hustle, it will never be anything else. Things don’t magically blow up without a lot of time, money and focus. But, to begin with, your future unicorn will probably start life as a side project. Whether you pivot to making it the main project will partly depend on its success during that time. So it’s worth digging into the challenges that side projects face and what you can do to not let them wither on the vine.

Problem 1. It’s the cool project that everyone wants to be a part of.

But that’s a good thing, right?

Yes and No. The problem comes when people consider it ‘cool’ in the way that having a games console at work is cool, or everyone in the office going out for drinks on a Friday afternoon is cool. In other words, it’s work, but it’s not real work. It’s fun because it’s our thing and we don’t have angry clients freaking out on us.

For me, it’s about setting the scene. If you announce to the company that you’re working on a new product, make it clear that this isn’t a fun distraction in your downtime. This is about changing the company’s future and it’s a serious investment. Even if you can’t commit much in the way of resources early on, people need to know that you’re deadly serious about this.

Problem 2. The client comes first.

You’ve had a good few months of new business and there is a lot of pressure on delivery. What happens to your internal projects? I’m not just talking about your side product here. Your own marketing, your website, your vacation plans, the office refurbishment, everything else gets put on the back burner.

The problem with this, if it isn’t obvious, is that it will take longer to get your side hustle up and running and then even if you do manage to launch it, it will be starved of the attention it needs in those early days.

It’s vital that you carve out time that is just as unmovable as client requirements. Because, your product is that important part of your future plans. And if it isn’t, then why even bother? It’s a mindset thing: clients are important, but your own stuff is arguably even more important. Definitely shouldn’t be the poor cousin to the client work.

Problem 3. Nobody’s being billed for my time.

If your team is measured on billable hours and you’re asking them to spend some of their time on the product, then are they anxious that their numbers aren’t going to look good? Are they doing the product work on top of all of the billable work? If so they might either feel anxious about not hitting numbers or resentful that they have to do this work alongside their day job.

Even if you say that they get a pass this month because they’ve done a lot of product work, it still doesn’t feel good as an employee to know you’re not hitting your target.

The key here is to bill the product for their time. It may just be a case of moving money around, but get them to invoice the product. When you do your monthly numbers presentation to the company, include that billing as if it were a normal client. Yes, your overall P&L might not be great, but when you look at what you billed this month, include the invoice that was raised for the product.

This has the dual effect of both counting towards individuals’ targets AND keeping a tag on exactly how much you’ve spent on your side product. If there’s one thing I could impart here, it’s don’t just think of your side product as something you do in your downtime.

Problem 4. There is no client.

If there’s no client then there’s no accountability (or at least less accountability). There’s no client sending unreasonable requests at 8pm on Friday evening. There’s no threat of escalation, or even of losing the account. In my experience it can mean slipped deadlines and, worse, poor work. Why? Because it’s not see as being as important as a real client project.

In an ideal world you would have someone external to the rest of the business managing the product who can act as the client (see next problem). But it most likely will have to be you as the founder who is the client. It comes back to mindset and setting the context internally. This is NOT the fun project. This is a serious and considered investment. Anyone thinking or behaving otherwise needs to be told why they’re wrong.

Problem 5. Nobody owns it 100%.

If nobody owns it, then nobody steps up to the plate when things get tough. When you started your agency and the whole time you’ve run it, you know that it’s down to you to fix problems: to be there during the good and the terrifying. It’s the reason why your business has flourished. Imagine if you’d started it as a side project to, maybe, your day job? Maybe you did. But I bet things didn’t really take off until you were able to give it your full attention.

In our case, we decided to do exactly that: get rid of our agency to focus full-time on our SaaS business. But if that’s not your plan, you need to understand that someone needs to own this. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

When we were producing side projects at our agency we would give the management of product to an account manager. But they had agency clients to deal with, too. As a result, our side projects did OK but quickly plateaued.

You have to engineer a way where someone wakes up in the morning and their entire focus (work-wise) is the product. If that can’t be you, then who is it going to be?

Problem 6. It doesn’t get your undivided love and attention.

Imagine if you won a new client and then ignored them for two months because you were too busy working on your side product? What would happen? They would be screaming at you or they would walk.

Well, your side product can’t scream or walk, but it’s withering on the vine just the same.

The two points above notwithstanding, even if you have brought people in to be the client and to own the project 100%, as the founder you need to care too. You can’t just expect people to do it for you.

How do you demonstrate that this is a priority for you even when you are distracted on other things? Carve out regular time slots to sit with the product team. Dive deeply into the blockers. Remind the team how important this is to you personally even if right now it looks like a minnow next to the wider business. Hire someone like me to come in for a couple of hours each month to help remove blockers and keep things on track(!)

Problem 7: Expecting it to pay its way as a toddler.

We had one product that we quickly built to delivering around $30k/month in subscription revenue. And all I could think was ‘Happy Days’. To my mind we’d done the hard work in building the product and now we just needed to sit back and enjoy the passive income.

But guess what? It got to $30k/month and never got any further. Then it started to go backwards. Why? Because I was thinking about it the wrong way. I thought we could just build a suite of products - each one taking a few months to create - and then enjoy the compounding fruits of our labour. I mean, build three $30k MRR products and you’re at $1m in ARR. Simple!

Not once did I think, we’ve got 3,000 paying customers (paying $10/month), what more could the product do for them? What other common problems could we solve? How do we find more people like that? How much should we spend on outbound to reach them?

ScreenCloud was (deliberately) loss-making for several years because we recognised that the product needed to evolve and growth required a constant effort. Expecting your product to be profitable after a few months is fine, but know that this will throttle future growth.

Problem 8: Boring! This is taking way too long.

Even where product is your entire focus, things often take longer than you at first think. At ScreenCloud we rebuilt the platform after a couple of years, thinking it would take six months and it ended up taking 18 months or more.

So as a side project, it is even more likely to drag on. And human beings get bored. The initial hype that you successfully conveyed to the company may be replaced by cynicism if the launch date keeps slipping or if, post launch, there isn’t much in the way of traction.

This is a really tough one. The only advice I could really give here is, as part of holding everyone accountable, you have clear monthly/quarterly targets and you report back on them publicly. Make sure you are always moving forward. If people start to sense you’ve given up, then you can be sure that they will lose interest themselves pretty quickly.

Problem 9: Fear of putting yourself out there.

I’ve personally done this and observed it more times than I can count: “95% done” is the very worst place you can be: it means you’ve done all the work and not received any of the rewards.

I’ve written elsewhere about why I think founders get fear around speaking to customers prior to building out a product idea. And I think a similar thing occurs with going live. There is a sense that you have one shot at this and if you mess it up, you’ll never get another one.

But this just isn’t true. It’s totally fine to put a very slim version of your eventual roadmap out there. In fact, many customers actually react well to this. They understand that it’s early days and they like the idea that they are early to the party and can even influence your direction.

We spent over a year building a product at our agency that should have been launched in a few months. By the time we finally dragged it over the line there was so much internal resentment that nobody wanted to touch it and it died a quick death. Such a waste of time and money.

Summary

You could sum this up in one thought really:

Do whatever you can to engineer a way for your Side Project to stop being a side project.

Because, for as long as you think like that, that’s all it will ever be.