By Poornima Vijayashanker
We often think that to build a product, we have to drop everything that we’re doing, and just focus on building! While some people might have an abundance of time and resources to go all in, it’s often not possible for most of us.
Financial and social commitments can compete with getting a product idea off the ground.
The good news is that you don’t need to give up your day job, you can start with a side project!
The following video segment is the first, in a series, with Ben Congleton, CEO & Founder of Olark, and myself on the topic: How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products.
In this video segment we dig into what inspired us to start building products, and how we both began building products on the side.
Once you’ve watched this video, let us know in the comments below, if you’ve thought about starting a project on the side, and what might be holding you back from getting started? If you have already started, how you’ve stay committed to making progress on it?
Thank you Poornima!
Starting a business and making it successful is already incredibly hard. Doing it on the side while having a full-time job (or even part time) and maybe also a family, is infinitely harder and very few people can succeed. Sure, there are examples, but these are the outliers.
I don’t believe in the viability of starting startups as side projects. It sounds tempting, sure – who would not want the security of a job while building their own business – but in my experience it almost never works, because a startup required 100% focus and dedication.
Not everyone can afford to got without income for many months, I get that. But maybe then it’s not the right time for these people to jump into building a business.
@Daniel Appreciate you taking the time to politely disagree 🙂 But one thing I do want to clarify is that I’m not recommending that people continue a business on the side indefinitely, because as you mentioned it is really hard to do with other commitments. This is why I titled it “start with a side project”, not “build a startup on the side” 😉
The main reason I recommend people start on the side first, is because too often people find that they don’t really like their initial idea and often become dispassionate about it. So it’s good to start slow, and on the side to see if there’s indeed a long term interest. Once there is, then yes, I’d agree that people should think about when they’re going to go all in.
Does that make sense? What are you thoughts?