Larder

What's in your Larder #04: Side projects

Larder is our bookmarking service for developers.

This week I’ve been reading a lot about how to successfully get a side project up-and-running. Here are some of the best reads on side projects that I saved to my larder

Making time for side projects

Rachel Andrew

After building Perch CMS up from a side project into her company’s main focus, Rachel knows a thing or two about finding time for your side projects.

Make your side projects wildly successful: Treat them like experiments

Paul Jarvis

Putting aside the hyperbolic title, Paul’s approach to side projects is really clever:

Experiments don’t “fail”—they simply prove or disprove a hypothesis. For example, despite my day job as a designer I had the hypothesis that I could also write an e-book. I then simply started writing. I didn’t focus on the outcome, how the book would be received or what others would think of it.

How side projects saved our startup

Mikael Cho

For company side projects, this is one of the best articles I’ve read. Mikael, CEO of Crew, created Unsplash on a whim when Crew was almost out of money. The success of Unsplash, which collects high-quality, royalty-free stock photos using a Tumblr blog, helped turn around Crew’s future. Mikael shares some important lessons in this article about building side projects as marketing for your company.

Making your product a first class citizen

Rachel Andrew

Another article by Rachel Andrew on the perspective of building a product as a side project within a consulting company. I think these ideas apply equally to working on a product as a solo founder while maintaining consulting work.