Why Your Coding Side Project Will Fail

So in my best individual year of my website, Hover, I did in the low hundreds of thousands of visitors to the website and made a little bit under 50 grand. Technically, the number's a little bit higher than what I have right here. It just won't let me go back more than two years. But point being, I'm not saying this to brag. In fact, if you're someone who runs like a business business, $50,000 is not that much. Even if you're just a programmer, you probably make a lot more than this just in your day job. But if you're someone who's in a spot like I was in just a couple of years ago, something like this felt impossibly far away. You know, I spent years before this building other things and just watching them go absolutely nowhere. And I see so many other programmers wanting to kind of make something like this for themselves, whether it's to fully escape their 9-to-5 or just to, you know, like for me, it was just to make some additional money on the side to, you know, make life a little bit more comfortable and, you know, buy some new furniture or whatever. But so many people just try really hard and then they never actually see any progress and it's really demotivating. Having, you know, not seen some huge success, but seeing where I was and seeing what it took to get to a point where I was making, you know, a decent little about of money for myself, it's very clear to me what I was getting wrong and I see similar patterns in a lot of other people. So I just wanted to kind of share some of my thoughts in case maybe it will help a couple of you guys get over the same hurdles that I had to get over for myself. So to

start, I have a little bit of a story from my childhood. This is going to feel like a tangent, but I promise it'll all tie back together in a second. In general, like a bunch of you guys, I have always just liked making stuff. When I was a kid, I was a huge fan of this guy named Tony Fisher. Tony Fisher is a guy who makes custom, like he invents custom twisty puzzles, like Rubik's Cubes. Like you might have seen pictures of them at some point. He's made the biggest 3x3 Rubik's Cube. He's made the highest order, the 100x100 usable Rubik's Cube. And when I was a kid, I was super into this stuff. I loved it. I would sit around with a Dremel and some putty and like make these custom little cubes and, you know, sell them for a couple of bucks to people online or whatever. So the first thing I ever did that was like, I made a thing and then I was able to, you know, see some value, have other people see some value in that little thing that I made. This turned into a bunch of other hobbies as I was growing up. Eventually, it turned into, probably the biggest one, for sure the biggest one outside of programming, which was making music. So, for years I made electronic music, and I DJ'd, and that was a similar thing, right? I loved making music. I was able to turn it into kind of a little thing for myself where I would DJ and make some money and whatever it might be, mix music for people, that type of stuff. And for both of these things, you know, for the through-line with all these things is I just love making a thing, and everything else was secondary to loving kind of making something. This, of course, eventually led to learning to program and getting into this career, which is unbelievable because we can get paid really, really well to make stuff. And as a programmer, we can monetize those things better than maybe other any other profession ever. And you know, a lot of us are drawn to that, this idea of like building something on the side for yourself on nights and weekends that eventually can, you know, either make a little bit of money for yourself or buy yourself out of a job or maybe you can turn it into a big startup and make millions or billions of dollars. But the through-line, just to kind of get to the end up front that I see so many people running into and that I for sure was running into, is that we try to turn this into just a programming problem. And I don't just mean like, oh, people avoid marketing and stuff because that's I mean, that's part of it. But the point to me is that things start as fun, they start as like me when I was a kid in a garage making Rubik's Cubes, and then the outcome of that was kind of what it was. The heart of it was just trying to make something good, and we try as programmers to optimize everything. Thank you, ChatGPT, for this scary optimization picture. You know, and I and optimization is great, it's what we do for a living, we optimize systems, but so many people, me included, try to optimize ourself out of just doing the things that we don't want to do to make whatever the thing is that we're making actually successful. And if you're not trying to make money, that's totally fine. get anyone to use something, that's totally fine. But I think most of us are. So, we kind of hyper intellectualize things. We make them, you know, more complicated than I think they need to be. And we end up just kicking our tires. I'm going to go way more in detail into what I mean. So, yeah, you know, the optimizations that we choose to make are the ones that help us avoid the stuff that we don't like doing. It's stuff that, you know, feels productive, but in the end of the day it isn't actually productive. And the most probable example of this to me is the 12 startups in 12 months thing. I don't know if you guys know about this. It's super popular. Comes from this guy named Peter Levels. Peter's amazing. He's like the king of side projects. And if you don't know what I mean when I say that, it's exactly what it sounds like. This it's this idea that you're just going to program yourself into making, you know, these quick little tools and spit them out and then just hope that something kind of sticks. And that's kind of the core idea. It's like I'm hoping that something sticks. There's definitely more merit to that than I'm kind of giving it credit for. You know, the idea, if you were I'm sure to ask someone like Peter about it, is that, you know, the idea is to just get you in motion and actually start building things, which is a lot of people's issue. But the discourse that this then turns into is like, "Oh, I'm just going to throw out whatever I can because I like programming and I'm really good at programming. So, I'm just going to make stuff and put it out into the world and then hope that somebody uses it. " And like on the surface, that's great. And I'm sure, you know, it's worked for some people. Obviously, it worked for Peter. But it ignores kind of the most important things to being successful, which is just time and persistence. Not just in making, you know, side projects. It's It sounds corny, but I think it's true. It's just have you put in the time? Have you given yourself enough time for the compounding of your efforts to actually turn into something? Jason Cohen, from WP Engine, I mean, he's a billion times smarter than me. He's started bootstrapped billion-dollar businesses. But he's talked about this recently. It's just kind of what got me thinking about this. You know, he says, "I'm building 12 startups in 12 months. You mean 12 projects in 12 months. The you know, with only a month of attention to each, it's impossible for any of it to become a startup. Do you feel bad for the seven customers of each that they're already using an abandoned project, right? This is kind of the key sentence here to me. It's with only a month of attention to each, it's impossible for any of these to become a startup. It's impossible for you to have done enough to actually see if anyone wants the thing, which is kind of the premise of it to start with. And I circle this back to everything I was talking about with the music stuff and the Rubik's Cube stuff because the only way to actually do something for a long time and be persistent with something is if you actually like doing it naturally. At least for me. Some people maybe can just power yourself through, but for me, I have to enjoy and understand the thing that I'm making and why I'm making it so that I can keep making it better and do the things that I might not be immediately drawn to doing like marketing or sales because I believe in the thing that I'm building and I want to make it good. You know, the 12 startups in 12 months thing helps you optimize yourself out of needing to have any actual conviction. It helps you optimize yourself out of actually having to go out of your comfort zone, whether it's making YouTube videos, I mean that's what I did or it's sales or writing SEO blog posts or whatever it might be. It lets you say, "I'm going to ignore all the things that I don't like doing. I'm just going to write code and I'm going to do that until it works. " which I it's pretty rare from what I've seen that actually really works out. Now, this doesn't mean that simple stuff can't work. I'm going to get to that in a second. It just means that if you only give it a month, it it's almost certainly not going to work. And fortunately, I feel like I can

even show some pretty definitive proof of what I mean when I'm talking about like time and persistence as it pertains to building things like this. So, my main quote unquote growth channel for Hover feels like an optimization saying growth channel like the but point being the way that I get people to come to how Hover and see it and use it and find value out of it is obviously from these YouTube videos. Couple of other things, but the main one for sure is YouTube. And here, let me go actually to Excalidraw really quick. You know, the way that people seem to think that content creation works, and I guess it can sometimes, but you know, the way that people think that it works is like, "Okay, you release a video, it gets some views, and then you get nothing. And then you release another video, and it gets some views, and then you get nothing. " And for me, for my experience, that is not how it actually works. What it actually looks like is more something like this. Let me undo this. So, you release a video, and it gets a little bit of views, and then and if it sucks, maybe it slows down, and you end up just getting you know, a couple of views over time, something like this, right? But, it keeps getting views forever. As long as it's not horrible, it's going to keep getting, you know, it maybe it gets five views a week, maybe it gets 50, maybe it gets 500, but it's going to get something. And then, you know, maybe the next week, you release something else, and maybe that does a little bit better, and it goes like this. And then, you know, you're getting more and more views like this. And then, you release another video a little bit later, right? And that starts really slow, and for, you know, maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe years, it doesn't get much, but then eventually it does pick up, and then that starts to get more. And you do this again and again, and the area under all of these curves stack on top of each other. So, it's not like, "Oh, yeah, I get 50,000 views every time I release something. " It's, "I get 500,000 views every month by not actually even making any new content. " But, it takes time to build that engine. So, I can even show you guys on a YouTube video. So, this is a video I released years ago, over 3 years ago. It's one of the first YouTube videos I ever made. And if I come back over here, and I look at the beginning, in the first days, even the first weeks, it got in the low hundreds of views. But, eventually, it caught on, and it caught whatever the trend is, and for a couple of years, it steadily gained more and more views. So, it was like, week one, 1,000 views. Year one, 100,000 views. Year two, 200,000 views. This is a standout one. This is one of my biggest videos. Another example of something like this. So, this is you know, people are obviously searching for frame or motion course, so this makes a lot of sense if people are looking for this and just over time it keeps going up and up. But this is the trend that I see with pretty much everything that I've made. You know, sometimes it's not 76 views, it's 760 for a while and then it trends down. Sometimes it's five views. But all these things build on each other to the point where, you know, I've released very little over the last handful of the last whatever 14 months or so. I've just started kind of coming back again. But if we come and look over here, it's like, okay, I'm still getting, you know, 500 or 1,000 views or whatever depending on if I release something, 40,000 views a month. At my peak, this was probably 200, 300,000 views a month, something like that. And hopefully we can get back to that here pretty soon now that I'm posting again. But point is it takes a long time. You can't see the success in 30 days. It took me a year, I think, to get 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. And I was I didn't even have Hover. I wasn't making any money. I was just doing it for a long time to build up this audience and I enjoyed making videos, so I stuck with it. And eventually, I built up to a point where I could actually, you know, get something substantial out of it for myself. And this, you know, this isn't complicated. It's just hard. So that's kind of the point I want to drive home here at the end. It's like it's not doing, you know, getting these views that I got over here. If you want, go back and watch this video that I just pointed out a second ago. Like this isn't some unbelievable, like, you know, insane high-level content. This is, you know, I just made something useful. I tried to make a lot of things that are useful. It's all surrounded in a topic that I enjoy talking about. So hopefully that comes across whenever I'm making videos. People find it useful. They watch it. The more people watch it, the more I can kind of build something off of that. We're not talking about building YouTube channels here. I just happened to use YouTube to kind of feed into Hover, but replace it with whatever you want. Maybe you're doing SEO to grow. Maybe you're posting stuff on Twitter. Maybe you're doing B2B sales and calling cold calling people on the phone for, you know, your SaaS app or whatever it might be. You'll never be able to in 30 days get to a point where you understand it well enough that you can actually gauge if it's working in a couple of weeks. One other quick side note that

is, you know, funny that it's even worth mentioning, but definitely against the discourse sometimes, is that whatever you build has to be good. At least if you, you know, you want other people to have if you want to have a chance of other people using it. Which, you know, if you only spend a month on something and then you never touch it again, it's probably pretty hard to actually make something good. You know, people can tell, I feel like, that you don't care. You can I'm sure all of you guys agree if you've been looking at any of these vibe-coded products and stuff that are coming out. It's like, you can tell that this person doesn't care and why am I going to give you my money for something you don't care about? And it's a pretty kind of simple thing to figure out for yourself is like, ask yourself, would I pay for this thing that I made and I'm trying to get other people to give me money for? Whether or not it's even money. Maybe it's a video you're making. Would I get any value out of this video that I'm making? If the answer is no, then your probably something in your chain of thinking is probably broken somewhere. Now, I don't The reason I have this blog open right now is I Karri Saarinen, who's the CEO of Linear, which is known for making a fantastic software, writes a lot about this topic and just writes about like craft and quality. Definitely go and check out Linear's blog because it's really interesting and it's rewired my brain a lot. I won't talk about this too much more cuz I think it's pretty obvious, but yeah, go check out the

Linear blog. And really that leads me to my next point, which is just that you can make whatever you want. Like, you can make anything work. You know, if you're like me and you have a notes app with a million different ideas in it, I'm sure you spend a bunch of time sitting there weighing all of your different ideas next to each other and kind of arguing with yourself in the head in your head. Don't get me wrong, don't you should think about what you're going to build, sure, but if one of those primary, you know, weights is like, "Oh, I'll never be able to make money off of this thing that I really want to make. " That's nonsense. You know, there's there are people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of online solitaire for free games, right? There are like Petri Luomanen, super famous for his bingo card creator. There are a million note-taking apps and planner apps and whatever it might be that do make a good amount of money. Is it going to be a big venture exit? Probably not. But if that's not, you know, the thing that you're trying to build, you're trying to build something for yourself, it's fine. You know, I love this idea. I think I have it up here. Yeah, here we go. So this idea of follow your blisters, right? There's a lot more to this. I'm sure you can look up the quote and find what I'm talking about. The original's like follow your bliss and that's kind of turned to follow your blisters, which is like the way that I interpret it is like follow the things that you'll do even if you're kind of uncomfortable, which, you know, like if you deeply in your heart want to make a calorie tracking app and the reason that you're not making a calorie tracking app is because someone told you it's stupid and there's a bunch other competition, but you will spend a lot of time on it and you will try to make it really good. Then of course you can make a calorie tracker app. There's a hundred There's probably a thousand of them that make good money. Some of them are huge. Some of them make millions and millions of dollars. a couple hundred bucks a month and for you maybe that's a great. Will you have higher potential if you're going to go and make a B2B AI SaaS app right now? Sure, but only if you're actually going to do it, right? If you have this great idea, but you hate it and you're not actually going to try, then it doesn't matter that it's like a quote unquote better idea if you don't know it know anything about it and you're not going to learn about it, then of course it's not going to work just because it's a quote unquote good idea. Like the amount of people that I've seen that are building like AI for teachers and they're not a teacher and they don't know any teachers, but it feels like oh, that's a good idea. Like you're probably better off building that to-do app that you actually understand what you're making and want to be making and will try and make it good. Now with all

that said, you probably don't want to be stuck working on something completely useless forever. So like where is the line where you should actually quit what you're doing and go start working on something else. I mean, if you truly That's not what I want to do. If you truly love what you're making and you're making it for yourself and you're not trying to make money, then who cares? Like work on it forever. Who cares if anyone else ever uses it? You don't even have to release it to anyone. That's totally fine. But if you've been working on something for a while and you're trying to get people to use it and no one seems like they want it, I think there's a couple of questions that you can ask yourself which will help you determine whether or not you should just move on or you should keep going with what you're doing. So these are pretty simple. I'm just going to write them down. So number one, have I actually tried everything to make this work? You know, and I highlight this. I highlight the everything because I think people just are afraid of the things that maybe they know will actually make what they're doing potentially more successful. Maybe it's you're afraid of sales or you're afraid of marketing or whatever it is. So you just actually don't do that thing. You know, if you haven't actually truly, you know, tried all of those things, try them before you give up and go on something else. Especially if you love what the thing is that you're building otherwise. Number two is coming back, is it actually good? Right? So I if you've spent a bunch of time on it, but it's still not that good, then maybe you just need to keep working on it. The way you judge this though, you can only really judge this if you've done number one well, right? Like how do I know if it's good? Like I can't know if it's good unless, you know, other people have tried it. And if you're scared to get other people to try it or you're scared, of marketing or sales or whatever it is, then it's hard to actually know, right? Like you need a lot of top of funnel before you can tell if people actually like the thing. You know, I see this often with like the Indie Hacker folks or like the 12 startups in 12 months people who'll be like, "Well, you know, I got 500 people to my landing page and only one of them signed up. " It's like, that is not statistically significant evidence. You need a lot more time and a lot more people. And number three is just or are you just bored? Now, if these previous two are true, you have tried everything and you've confirmed that it's good, but it's you're just bored, then cool. That's totally fine, but I don't think people normally actually get to that point. I think they get to bored and they haven't actually done these things yet. And that's fine. Maybe that's a sign that the thing you're working on isn't the right thing, but if you're going from boring B2B SaaS app number one to two, just know that you're going to run into the same wall and you're going to get bored again run into these same things. You're not going to go and, you know, try to market the thing. You're not going to actually make it good. You're not going to get it in other people's hands and see them actually working it and iterate on it and whatever it might be. So, just before you quit because you're bored, make sure you understand why you're bored. Try to think it through. Even if you're building something you like, you can get bored. Maybe you just need to take for a little bit. But, make sure you understand kind of your own psychology a little bit and you're not just going to go and spend another couple of months trying to build something else just to have the same outcome. And finally, if

the thing that you're going for is just making money, like there's probably better stuff that you can do. You know, you hear the number all the time that's like, "I just want to make 10K a month. " If you month, don't make a micro SaaS thing. Like, there's easier ways. Go start a service business. Go mow somebody's lawn. Go make websites for people. That's fine. You can still do that and it'll be a lot easier to make 10 thousand bucks a month doing that than trying to make, you know, some small app that you don't actually care about. Don't get me wrong, there's a plenty of big payout for making software, but if you're not actually going to care about it and you just want to make money, there are easier ways. You can go paint lines on the road. And if you want to build a huge startup, probably don't listen to any of what I just said, right? Like, your job as a CEO of a massive startup that's going to go raise a bunch of money has a lot more to do with a lot of other things outside of just, do I love this specific part of my my, you know, five to nine after work? It's, you know, about hiring and it's about, you know, total impact size. Like, it's there's a bunch of other things that are maybe not relevant. So, if that's you, ignore me. But, if you're someone like me a couple of years ago who just wants to make something cool for yourself and make a little bit extra money, maybe one day you can turn it into, you know, an actual business for yourself. Maybe you just want to pay some extra bills. Stop over intellectualizing it. Make something that you like. If you don't know what you like, just go start making a bunch of stuff and you'll figure it out. Don't, you know, set these rules on yourself because you read some books. I mean, I do that all the time where it's like, "Oh, you know, this person says you shouldn't do B2C. " Do you like B2C? Are you actually going to do it? Then you should probably do that. And you can, you know, you can make whatever you want. You can make anything work. You can make a planner app, you can make calorie B2B SaaS. It's whatever you want to do, whatever's fun for you, that will come across way better than trying to, you know, follow some prescription. You know, people less, you know, capable than you, I promise, are out there right now, much more successful than you by just doing the simple things consistently for 10 years and not giving up on them. So, yeah, anyways, that's all I got.