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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Over the years I tried a number of ways to develop things on the side. Ultimately I've learned what works best for me is to put as much time as I can into something until it's done.

One concern I have with a few hours a week is unless the project is really really tiny, you can begin to think that it'll never get done and it fizzles into nothingness.

For example let's say you want to make X app and it takes you 2 full time months to go from an empty folder to shipping an MVP. Let's just call it 300 hours. But if you only put in 5 hours a week (about 1 hour a day) it will take you 60 weeks to finish it. That's over a year of chipping away on something which is a very long time. You'll probably drop it well before you finish it because it'll feel like it's dragging along forever.

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That's why you need persistence!!

Having watched "The Founder", when Ray Croc was selling ice-cream machines nobody wanted he was listening to motivational records where the speaker says "the world is full of educated fools" and highlights that the one quality required is persistence.

Of course, if it's a stupid idea or a useless app then persistence is also useless and it would be a true waste of time.

But if the app is solving a problem for you, it likely will solve a problem for someone else which is why a side project will always prevail with persistence.

I always think that a side project is still a project, much like your main job. The only difference is time spent on it. But it'll be the same outcome.

Great, but that says nothing about how to get persistence/become persistent. What you say correct, but its not actionable on its own.

For me, I find that if I work on something, eventually, my interest in it wanes and other things become more important. Unless I start making significant progress, its then only a matter of time before it fizzles out. There's only so many weeks or months I can work on something before my mind craves something else.

What definitely helps me stay focused long term is to not work on something on my own. When others are involved, then when my mind starts thinking of new things, I can set it aside and say to myself "no, stay focused, I don't want to let ABC down". Sadly when ABC is me, it doesn't work very well, but if its someone else, especially someone I care about, then it helps me stay focused. Currently on month ten of a large side project with my brother and still going strong :)

Have 2 side projects. Then when you get bored with one, you can switch to the other. Then, when you're bored with that switch back to the first.

Let’s start with a definition shall we?

You are persistent if you keep coming back to the same task and advance it.

Let’s say that for an app, and with limited time, we can instantiate this definition as: if you keep coming back to developing your app regularly during a full year, you are persistent.

Now that we have a definition, what can you do to fulfill it?

Set time in your calendar, create habits, etc.

Or it might help you to learn how to drop the useless things and just ship a bare essential MVP.

Or, maybe even more, recognize that the fun was in the developing, and not in the shipping. Don't stress over it not getting done. I have a ton of abandoned side projects, and I don't regret a single one. I also don't regret stopping them when they stopped being fun.

I've designed and shipped my side project after a year, presented it at meetups, social media, but now I'm struggling with marketing. I have very little motivation to work on it, but I have endless drive to polish the codebase and features :) But I also know that 2-3 visitors per day will case me to abandon the whole thing.

It's tough, shipping is only the second step.

I have a hard time with marketing too as it seems the most hustle oriented and requires constant vigilance. My motivation dwindles much past the website/product design but everyone likes the product. My project is stupid simple and has a niche customer base. I don't know but I'm thinking it might be best to hire a marketing person on fiverr or upwork and have them manage marketing. I don't know if the return would be worth it though. Have you looked into hiring someone to do the social/marketing work?

I read this often, and since people tend to do overengineering, this isn't bad advice. However: Some things can only be reduced so much.

Rebuilding the product we ship at $dayjob, and which I enjoy working on, with a comparable feature set would probably take me ~8 years fulltime, assuming I know the whole stuff as well as I think and I don't hit major blockers (e.g. I don't do UI stuff, but most work is in the backend anyway); there is virtually no FOSS to accelerate this. A lot of the features can be dropped to get to a MVP, but I suspect I'd still be working on that for 6 month to a year, fulltime, and I will not be as easily extensible as the current incarnation. So that's 1000 to 2000h with a huge amount of technical debt and magnitudes inferior to the "competition"/$dayjob.

Could I still pull that off if I wanted to? Yes. Would I enjoy it that way? Hell no.

I know, but one shouldn't try to build a death star as a side project. Pick the scope wisely would be my number one advice.

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