Building side projects is something I started pretty early in my career.
The major motivating factor behind it was mainly to get more experience in building things from the ground up and learning by building.
My approach was building clones. Breaking down and reimplementing applications felt like a good tactic to use since if I could re-create applications which other users are using, at least my skill had a price tag associated with it.
But after building the same thing that other folks were able to sell, I found it very hard to attract users.
I reached out to the few users who had expressed interest in my idea -
what were the problems they were facing? Why weren’t they using it even though they found it interesting?
These two answers came up -
They wanted privacy. They didn’t want anyone and everyone to be looking into their content
They found it jarring to open up a new website when their requirement came
I had no clue how to approach this.
So I reached out to the founder of the company where I worked and asked for his input.
“You need to bring your solution to where your customers are at“
This was eye-opening.
For most of the things that I had been building - my assumption was that if it was good enough people would come to it and use it.
But if my application was present as a chrome extension, slack extension, or telegram extension - everything will be so much easier.
I also joined a side project community in the meanwhile which solidified my assumptions around the same thing.
Projects built as extensions on pre-existing platforms find much much higher usage than any other platform.
If you are planning to build a side project, look into how you can build an extension on an existing platform.
Building an app for fun is all well and good but it’s much more exciting if actual people use it. Also, learnings from it would be tenfold.