How to Actually Ship Side Projects

2024-08-21

How to ship side projects instead of letting them sit idle.

I worked on many side projects over the years. Most of them failed because I never shipped them. Why did I not ship them?

When I was looking for a new job after failing my startup, I wanted to find a company with a good work life balance. I thought I would use the extra time and energy I had to work on my side projects and actually turn one of them into a successful business this time. After a couple of months of job search, I did end up finding a job at a company that was known to promote a good work life balance.

Like I had hoped, the company did have a good work life balance: I rarely had to work for more than 40 hours per week to perform well. I earned enough trust from my team to be as autonomous as possible. I kept a tight communication loop to make sure every stakeholder knew exactly how my projects were progressing and wouldn’t have to ask me questions. I was in an ideal set up to be able to work on my side projects while having the stability that my job provided.

But with the extra time that I had, I was not able to make any meaningful progress with my side projects. I tried working in different schedules to see if it would make me more productive. I tried having all of my meetings only on certain days of the week so I could focus on building on the rest of the days. I tried working at different places, away from my home. None of these helped me make progress on my side projects despite all the extra time I thought I reserved from keeping a good work life balance.

To my surprise, I finally started shipping when I chose something drastically different from coding as my project: publishing videos on YouTube. My product was no longer always in a half baked state where it was kind of working but not production ready. I stayed productive after work and consistently shipped (i.e. publishing videos). Not coding after work kept the project interesting and made me enjoy coding even more during the day. I thought since I am a software developer, I should stick to building software for my side projects to leverage my skills to their full potential. But it turned out that was exactly what was hurting my productivity.

I realized it was because I only have a limited number of hours I can do some activity, like coding, per day. While doing my (day) job well did not feel all that consuming, it often did require me to spend all of the time I could spend on coding by the end of business hours. When I had to code again for my side projects, I found myself wanting to do anything but code, especially after I exhausted the initial productivity boost I got when starting a new project.

If you are failing to ship your side projects, it might be because you are doing too much of the same activity every day. Try changing things up and see if it helps you ship more.