5 Reasons Why Your Side Projects Are Failing

There are a few routes that you can take when it comes to web development. You can work for a company, you can freelance, or you can work on your own projects. The last option, to me, is the most exciting one because you get to work on something that you're passionate about and there's potential for massive payoff. However, side projects can be challenging, and they often fail. I would say more often than not.

Here is the video version of this article

One of my biggest inspirations is a developer named Pieter Levels, also known as levelsio. He's one of the most successful indie hackers and web dev entrepreneurs. He's a multi-millionaire and has created a number of successful side projects including Nomad List, Remote OK and PhotoAI. He made a Tweet a while ago with a list of all his side projects and said "Only 4 of 70+ projects made me money and grew". So 95% of his projects failed.

So in this video, I want to talk about why so many side projects fail and what you can avoid and do to increase your chances of success. Many of these points are pretty obvious, but I want to elaborate on them and give you some examples from my own experience.

About Me

Before we start, I just to give you a little history about myself. 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 courses and content. In that span, I've had many side projects. Most of them were before 2016 or so when I went full-time content. At one point, I had 20+ side projects. I was working on all of them at the same time. I was young and naive and I thought I could do it all. I had some really good success with a few including a copyright-free artist website that was getting 100,000+ visitors a month. A medical directory for addiction halfway houses, a web hosting review website and a Wordpress theme and plugin store. Ultimately, I ended up selling those assets and focusing on content creation. However, I've learned a lot from that point in my career.

1. Taking on Too Much

The biggest reason that I feel a lot of my projects failed is because I wanted to do too much. There's only so much time in the day and if you're working on 20 projects at the same time, you're not going to be able to give all of them or even any of them the attention that they need. You need to focus on one or two projects at a time and give them your all. If you're spreading yourself too thin, you're not going to be able to make any real progress.

I know that it can be tempting to take on a lot of projects, especially if you're passionate about them. I would learn something new and get a decent idea and I would just start working on it. I would get excited about the next idea and start working on that. I would get bored with the first idea and start working on the third. It was a vicious cycle that I couldn't break out of. At one point I had 100+ domain names registered for things that I planned to build. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that. This is also while I'm running a full-time freelancing business with two employees. I was working 80+ hours a week and I was burning out, which is another problem withing itself.

So be sure to focus on one or two projects at a time. Give them your all and see them through to completion. You'll be much more likely to succeed that way.

2. Lack Of Proper Planning

The next issue is lack of proper planning. Like I said, I would get a decent idea for a project and I would just start working on it. I would sometimes jump right into the design and coding, which is a huge mistake. Planning is critical if you want your project to be completed successfully.

This is just an example of a simple project plan that you could use:

• Define the project scope: What do you want to achieve with the project? Who is the target audience? Define specific metrics or criteria that will be used to measure the success of the project. Develop a plan for managing scope changes throughout the project.

• Define the project requirements: What do you need to complete the project? Figure our your tech stack, tools, design assets, etc. Obviously you need some kind of hosting infrastructure, domain names, etc.

• Define the project timeline: It can help to break down the project timeline into milestones or phases that represent a significant accomplishment or deliverable.

• Define the project budget: How much will it cost to complete the project? Break it up into cost categories like development, design, marketing, etc. Also, where will the money come from? Will you be funding it yourself or will you be seeking investors?

• Define the project risks: What could go wrong with the project? How can you mitigate those risks? Technical challenges, market and competitive risks, etc.

• Define the project deliverables: Identify the key functionalities, features, or modules that the project will deliver. Come up with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that you can launch with and build upon.

These are just some examples. There's so much more you could think about and plan, but you also don't want to overwhelm yourself with planning. I've seen people do the opposite of what I do and never get past the planning stage. They spend months or even years planning and never actually start building. You need to find a balance between just jumping in head first like I did and never getting started.

3. Unreasonable Expectations

This is a big one. A lot of people have this mentality that they need to build the next Facebook or Twitter. They want to build something that's going to be huge and make them millions of dollars. The problem with this is that it's very unlikely that you're going to build the next Facebook or Twitter. Those companies are outliers. They're the exception, not the rule.

Instead, you should focus on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the basic version of a new product that lets you learn the most from customers with minimal effort. Its goal is to test key business ideas quickly and help you start learning early in the process. You can then build upon that MVP and add features and functionality as you go.

The goal of an MVP is to:

• Validate Your Ideas: Test your business assumptions to see if people actually want what you're offering.
• Iterate and Improve: Begin with a simple version of your product and make it better over time based on what users tell you and what you learn from their behavior.
• Manage Resources Wisely: Spend your time and money wisely by focusing on features that matter most to your early users.

By setting realistic expectations and leveraging the MVP approach, you position yourself for long-term success.

4. Neglecting Market Research and Validation

This is another big mistake that I made and that is neglecting market research. I would come up with an idea and just start building it without doing much research to see if there was a market for it. I mean don't get me wrong, I wasn't a total idiot, I would do some research and look for similar products and if its been done before and what could I do differently. But I wasn't doing enough research to see if there was a demand for it.

You need to know who your target audience is, what their pain points are and what they're looking for in a product. You need to know who your competitors are and what they're doing. You need to know if there's a demand for your product and if people are willing to pay for it. You may be able to build a really cool app or website with really unique features that nobody has thought of yet, but if there's no demand for it, then it's not going to be successful. It may look good on your portfolio, but it's not going to make you any money.

So be sure to do your research and validate your ideas before you start building.

5. Lack of Marketing

This is another big one that kind of goes with the last point. You can build the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then it's not going to be successful. You need to have a marketing plan in place before you launch your product. 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.

Here are some things to consider:

• Content Marketing: Create blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc. that provide value to your audience. This can help establish you as an authority in your niche and drive traffic to your website.
• Social Media Marketing: Use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to promote your product and engage with your audience.
• Email Marketing: Build an email list and send out regular updates, newsletters, etc. to keep your audience engaged.
• Paid Advertising: Use platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. to reach a larger audience and drive traffic to your website.
• SEO: Optimize your website for search engines so that people can find you when they're looking for products or services like yours.

There are so many different marketing strategies that you can use. You need to figure out what works best for your product and your audience and then execute on it.

Another thing that I want to mention that relates to this last point, is that you should always be working on your online presence regardless of what you're doing. Even if you're a developer working at a company, you should be building an audience and engaging with them regularly. Because as a developer, you never know when you're going to want to launch your own product, service or content. Having an audience that you can reach out to is going to be a huge advantage. I'm a good example of this. I've worked on building an audience for years by creating tutorials and other content. If I decide to launch a SaaS product or something else, I already have an audience that I can reach out to. So just something to keep in mind.

I hope that you enjoyed this article and that you found it helpful.