How to pick a side project strategically

Ruurtjan — Tue, 03 May 2022 10:50:57 +0000

My list of side projects grew ever larger. The list of abandoned, semifinished projects did so too. That's when I decided to focus on a single side project for a longer period of time. But which one?

There are many reasons to start a side project. To learn a new technology, to build a portfolio, because you need it yourself, or maybe just for fun. All of these are fine, of course. But if you're like me, getting actual users, and a chance to monetize your project boosts your motivation and enthusiasm. Here's how to strategically pick a side project that has the potential to grow into a side income, or even create an opportunity to go full-time on what you love doing: making digital products.

The golden trio

It's not by chance that NsLookup.io made the cut. The three criteria I use to evaluate an idea are:

Longevity — Will it stay relevant for a long time?
The monetization sweet spot — Can you make a living?
Limited but extensible scope — Can you pull it off?

Longevity

Riding the hype train can get your project trending quickly, but you'll have nothing left when the hype is over. So find something that has longevity instead. What's something people will keep searching in the coming decades? Email, DNS, online meetings, and timezone conversions are all examples of things that have a high and steady search volume.

The monetization sweet spot

If your project can't attract any users, then it's obviously not going to generate any meaningful revenue, let along allow you to eventually build a business around it.

Too much monetization potential, on the other hand, can attract regular businesses, or venture backed businesses. So ideally, we'd be somewhere in between. Enough potential for an indie developer to make a living, but not enough for existing businesses to expand into your territory. Around €5k per month would be perfect.

A good way to gauge the amount of potential is to identify the primary search keywords, find their search volume, and analyze the top ranking websites. You'll probably find a couple of sites that are similar to your idea. That's not an issue, as long as you think you can do better in some way. Either execute better, market better, or meet search intent better. Novelty is overrated.

Limited but extensible scope

You can't undertake a massive project on the side, so the scope needs to be minimal. Once an initial version is live, it should be extensible incrementally. Adding many small features that add up to a great product. Since side projects are mostly done in the evenings and weekends, the available time is usually chunked in sessions of a couple of hours. That's another reason to find something that can be built iteratively. Try to ship something every other session.

For NsLookup, this meant launching with a single page, and adding features and content along the way. Now that I've gone full-time, I can invest more in quality and bigger features, but it was good to start with a limited but extensible scope.

And that's how I picked NsLookup as my main side project. It has longevity, is in the monetization sweet spot, and has a limited but extensible scope. If you're interested in growing a side project into a business, then you should follow me on Twitter, where I share what I'm learning while working full-time on NsLookup.

I quit my job to make free web tools

Ruurtjan — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 08:11:58 +0000

I quit my job. I'm now unemployed. It feels great to finally be able to write this blog post. I remember daydreaming about making an aggregation site for flash games back when I was 10 years old. Teaching myself rudimentary HTML and CSS, I managed to build a page with tables and iframes. It wouldn't be until I went to university that I started shipping my side projects. It's been a long time in the making. Of all the side projects I've done over the years, most failed, with only two standing the test of time.

Project	Why it failed
Flash games aggregation site	❌ Lack of tech skills
Line number remover	❌ Search volume too low
winkels.in	❌ Search volume too low (Dutch only)
gazelle-kopen.nl	❌ Search volume too low (Dutch only)
iplocation.tools	❌ Couldn't get it to rank in Google
Road cycling analytics webapp	❌ Drowned in technical debt
Pascal number visualizer	❌ Passion project, no growth potential
stars.ruurtjan.com	❌ Passion project, no growth potential
Avro file format parser	❌ Learning project
Tech talk aggregation site	❌ Hard to get high-quality data
Pastebin for Markdown files	❌ Hosting anonymous user-generated content is a legal minefield
Doing Project Euler exercises	❌ Learning project
Mobile game that divides the earth in hexagons	❌ Couldn't figure out the math
Automatic audio transcription	❌ Couldn't find a better angle than the competition
Linear algebra implementation in Scala	❌ Learning project
WhoIsMyISP.org	✅ Started 8 years ago, profitable and growing
NsLookup.io	✅ Started 2 years ago, profitable and growing

Only two projects ended up becoming profitable. The first one, whoismyisp.org, was a bit of a lucky shot. I didn't do any research before starting, and it was only a single page when it launched. It took years before making even a small profit. Since then, it has grown slowly over the past 8 years, and now has partnerships with NordVPN and ipinfo.io.

Nslookup.io was more deliberate, with basic SEO research, financial and time investment upfront. It is a site where you can do DNS lookup online. If you're interested, I'll write a follow-up blog on how to pick the right side project some time next month.

What about money?

Quitting my job obviously means missing out on the largest part of my income. The opportunity cost is massive. I sat down with my wife to discuss if we want to make this investment, and how we'll sustain our family in the meantime.

I'm lucky to work in an industry where the demand for workers is growing faster than the supply, so I'm confident I could get a freelance gig (or a job) within a month if things don't work out. That means that the risk of this endeavor is capped at my missed income.

We were able to save up during the past for 6.5 years of working a tech job. Not owning a car and living below our means definitely made a difference here! My wife still works part-time, so we'll be able to survive for more than a year if I don't take any earnings from my newly formed business. I'm optimistic that it should be possible to grow to €4000 ($4600) revenue with €3000 ($3450) pre-tax profit within 12 months. That's the goal I'm setting for myself, and is enough to do justify doing this long-term.

So here we are. Two active projects, a laptop, and a year worth of runway.

The master plan

Do I have a plan? Of course! Well, actually three. Each with a different amount of uncertainty and payoff. I'm not pinning myself down to a fixed plan. Instead, I'll work on multiple things simultaneously, and double down on what works.

Plan A
Stage 1: Grow SEO and add more landing pages.
Stage 2: Passive income through ad network (BuySellAds or Ethical Ads).
Stage 3: Partner with CDN or hosting provider.

This is what I've been doing so far. Build free web tools, get them to rank in Google, and sell ads through an ad network. This has a high level of certainty. Spend more time on SEO will almost definitely result in more traffic. So does adding more landing pages. Growth in traffic means growth in ad revenue. The payoff isn't very high, though. I'm currently getting a bit under $400 in monthly ad revenue from NsLookup.io. Growing to 3-4x traffic should be possible, but won't get me to my goal yet. Finding a CND or hosting provider that's interested in buying these ads would get the pay up, but that would still barely be enough to hit my target.

Plan B
Stage 1: Grow SEO and add more landing pages.
Stage 2: Sell an API to visitors.

Plan B is to sell an HTTP API with DNS data on a monthly subscription. It has a bigger potential payoff, but also more uncertainty. There's a bigger upfront time investment to build the API and a developers portal, track usage, set up metered billing, and write documentation. I also don't have a clear picture of the use cases of this yet. Nor do I know if I can make something that's better than existing DNS APIs.

The good news is that I have already set up a very minimal API, a wait list, and two paying customers. There's still a lot of work to do to automate everything, and to position it well.

Plan C
Stage 1: Make a one-off DNS dataset, give it away to founders, and find out how they'd use it and what they need.
Stage 2: Sell an updating dataset through nslookup.io and the Snowflake Marketplace.
Stage 3: Hire sales representative to do enterprise sales.

Enterprise sales are much more involved than selling to SMB's. On the other hand, it's about as difficult to get a one-off $250 payment approved, as it is to get a $250 subscription approved. So the potential for low maintenance recurring revenue is there. I have no experience selling to large companies, so if this proves feasible, I'd like to hire a sales representative. That's not something I'd be comfortable with before I've sold quite a few subscriptions. So I'm not confident that this plan will work out, but I want to give it a shot nonetheless.

Here and now

It's good to have a dot on the horizon, but what am I going to do this month and the next? I'll mainly focus on plan A. Grow NsLookup.io by improving the site, adding more tools, and investing in SEO. I'll also explore plan B by expanding the API, and talking to users. Plan C will get the least attention for now, but I'd like to talk to at least a couple of potential users.

Want to see how this unfolds? I'll share my progress on Twitter. See you there!

Forem: Ruurtjan