I don’t know if you are male or female, younger or older, but most of you are doing technology-related work in the Internet industry. Like most people, I code for a living at a living wage. Except for millions of people, ordinary people still occupy the vast majority, I am mediocre one of them. But I always believe that each person is unique existence, must have the meaning of existence.

I will not talk about the truth of life, as far as the role of our technical personnel is concerned, the meaning of our existence in addition to supporting themselves and their families, to create value for the enterprise and what else? In my opinion, the most important thing is to realize ambition and wealth freedom. Technical personnel should never focus on technology. Technology is only a tool after all, the key is to use them to achieve the products and functions we want.

What else can we technical people do besides use our skills to fulfill functional requirements on corporate projects? The answer is Side Project.

Side Project

You probably know about Side projects, and I highly recommend doing Side projects outside of work. A lot of people don’t try side projects because they know they often fail, but I think it’s part of the process of failing, and it’s only when you try that you know what’s best for you.

There are many benefits of doing Side Project. Here are the following:

  1. It can make your free time more fun. Writing your own project and writing someone else’s project are two different things, and you’ll find that if you try.
  2. Make the best use of your skills to realize your ideas, both improving your skills and realizing your ideas;
  3. Perhaps it is your entrepreneurial direction. There are many existing business projects developed from amateur maintenance, and Jane book is one of them.
  4. Make more friends with the same interests. There are many people with ideas. Don’t confine yourself to a small circle.

How to do a Side Project well?

Looking for demand

Big products target a wide audience, while for personal projects, I suggest starting with small needs around you, starting with achieving an MVP (minimum viable product), and then collecting feedback to refine and iterate.

Small needs are very easy to find, you can start from your own needs, and then radiation to a small group, see if there is the same needs, talk with them, feel feasible can start to do functional planning.

Product form, technology selection

Products come in many forms, and often only one of them will be chosen initially. Here are some examples:

  • Website (PC, Mobile or responsive)
  • Small program
  • App (native, Hybrid or cross-platform)
  • Wechat official account
  • community
  • GitHub Repo
  • .

We can find that in fact, part-time projects are not all about technical skills. In the process, more attention is paid to operation and product, which is also a kind of improvement of personal comprehensive ability. At the same time, in terms of technology, it is often impossible to do a good job of a product only with the front-end or post-terminal, which will raise the requirements on themselves. Fortunately, every language can basically cover the implementation of the front-end and post-terminal. For example, I choose Node.js as the implementation of JSer back-end business.

Technology selection is related to product form and functional requirements, remember one point: technology is only the way to achieve, focus on the part above the technical level. Many technical people focus on the technical aspects, such as having to implement on a high profile but less skilled technology stack, which sometimes doesn’t make sense because technology isn’t the most important thing.

Of course, there is a special case, that is, the purpose of doing this amateur project is to practice technology, but it only relies on this idea to realize, or the project is a technical product. I’m basically a technology and project type, and I think I can double my “expected revenue” by doing this.

How to promote Side Project?

The first step, of course, is friends around you. They can be the initial users to experience your product and avoid the embarrassment of cold launch when the product is just launched. This part is also your early perfect product the most powerful helper. Then in this if there are friends who agree with your product very much, you can mark them as seed users, and use word of mouth to spread certain users slowly.

When products and services tend to be stable, you can go to the community, the community inside the “advertising”, of course, naked promotion will generally encounter misfortune, so we need to pay attention to the form, involving the knowledge of promotion and operation more to study.

Here are a few sites where you can easily showcase your creative projects:

  • Community of creative workers
  • Product Hunt
  • 36kr NEXT
  • IT is an orange

After promotion, the focus is still on operation, to ensure that users remain and pull alive.

Some Side projects I have tried

Here, I would like to introduce some amateur projects THAT I have tried. More high-quality projects need to be shared by everyone.

1. Poetry Society – [Offline]

Details can be found in this link, which was shared on V2EX and is now a fond memory. This is a pure operation of the nature of the project, directly using a PHP BBS system to do a niche forum, the number of users should be hundreds… Some of them expressed interest in the project, but gave up after several setbacks.

2. Transboundary Apes – [Offline]

Transboundary ape is positioned as an Internet transboundary communication platform, which targets people in the Internet industry and starts from transboundary. The concept of transboundary is very broad. It is the essence of communication and integration. The combination of various attributes gives rise to new elements, which promote the progress of individuals and groups. The entry point of this project is relatively large and difficult to play, so it is normal to stop. But in the process, I also wrote a whole set of multi-user CMS systems, which was a relatively successful thing for my front-end.

3. Front End area – [Offline]

Front-end area, positioning must be front-end related, the form includes the website and wechat public number, have stopped operation. This is the only amateur project I have ever done that has not been promoted in the community. Only by baidu search traffic, it has reached 50+ DAILY IP, and the whole project lasted less than two months. It looks like this project is ok. Why not go offline is because of the next project.

4. Yiqi – Internet People fishing Community [just launched]

Also, the idea is to have done hasn’t been done long ago, why it is called fishing communities, and is, in fact, don’t know what to take a good slogan, approximate function is that people can share their on do spare project, can also be published idea [] in functional programming, etc., function is not perfect, so haven’t promoted. Those who want to check it out can hit the experience at www.e7fe.com/, which, by the way, was previously the site of the Front End project.

The last

Scribbled these words, not dry goods, but my experience and thoughts. I don’t think OF myself as a methodical person, and I believe that many people have their own ideas, so I think it’s better to go one step further and make them a reality.

If you have your own Side Project, please post it in the comments section for us to experience it together! Of course, you can also choose to publish on yiqi, rich text can ensure that you are detailed about everything about the project.

If you have ideas to communicate can also pay attention to the “end technology” public number editor sent SP, I will timely pull you into the group communication!