In this episode, I share my journey from building side projects to learning how to effectively market them. With over 20 years of experience as a developer, I've embarked on numerous projects, from personal tools to potential products for others. I delve into my experiences with various side projects, such as an RSS reader named Ferret Feed, a home display system inspired by Wall-E, and a social media metrics tool called Reslytics, later rebranded as Watch Your Numbers. Each project taught me valuable lessons about the importance of marketing and engaging with potential users.
I discuss the challenges of marketing, including my struggles with social media presence and completing the final stages of a project. I also talk about my current projects, like Observalyze, an analytics platform with gamification elements, and my goals of building a more active social media presence and launching video content by September. This podcast serves as a tool for accountability and sharing my ongoing journey with listeners, hoping to learn and grow together.
The topic I'd like to talk about today is from building side projects to marketing them.
This episode will contain a bit of history about me and my experience leading up until
now.
So I'm a developer. I've been developing applications for over 20 years, both professional and for my job, where I'm also working for 20 years, but I've been doing programming longer than that.
And what I did in those 20 years for side projects is I would be building things for personal use, interesting stuff that solved the problem for me at the moment or doing some experimentation.
And after a while I would abandon those projects and later on start a new one.
And the benefit for me was that every project would allow me to experiment with new technologies
or a new tech stack or reusing the old one. And by starting a new project every time, I wouldn't have the technical debt of staying in the same project for a while and having to work with previous decisions by me and working with them.
I did start working on a RSS reader four or five years ago, and there I took the first
steps to trying to build something that other people would also use. So it started as an RSS reader for news sources, but it did not only import RSS, it also did Twitter and other social networks so that I would have one source where I would be reading news and other interesting things all in the same scope. So what I initially did is the build it and they will come approach.
So there are different approaches to building projects or marketing them, but one of the
most naive ones is just building it, putting it out there and expecting people to find
your project and using it. And at that time I did realize build it and they will come, did not really work because I was not that naive that I thought that people would automatically find it and use it, but I figured, hey, I'm building something, I'm using it myself. And as an added bonus, maybe some other people would also find it or use it, but besides some signups from bots, nobody found it and nobody used it.
So I did realize for something to really work, you really need to actively go out and find
people that like to use the thing that you're building. And at some point I changed the project because initially I built it to support multi-user and at some point I was hosting it on a Raspberry Pi and it was having some resource issues. So I rewrote the project and making it only work for one user without having to log in, just having it open to allow it to have more resources and work better on the Raspberry Pi.
At some point I even bought a domain name for it. I called it a ferret feed. Initially I thought I would call it media feed because it was a feed of media posts, but that was already taken. So at some point I figured maybe I need to do something with a mascot. Privacy Badger has a Badger for an icon.
That's a browser extension. And so I figured I'd do a ferret and that allowed me to use the pall of a ferret as a logo. And I bought the domain, I had it for a year, but now I have it running just on a sub domain of my current domain and only use it myself. That was the first project I really did something.
After that I started on a project that I called Wall-E, inspired by the robot from the Disney
movie Wall-E. I bought a small 3.5 inch screen that worked with a Raspberry Pi and I hung
that screen up somewhere in the house and I built a bit of software that would allow
you to display a photo gallery or the weather or similar things on that display. Also inspired by the magic mirror software and that project eventually involved to Teletron, a project that I'm still currently actively developing. I built it and I also created an extension or a plugin platform so you could set up your own instance and have your own extensions. If you're curious about it, you can find it on teletron.me.
For that project I have now kind of like 50 signups, but most of them seem to be bots
or there are a lot of Russian email addresses there and they're not actively using it.
Every time I create a custom or personal welcome message, but nobody has responded to the welcome message.
Then I figured, hey, I want to do more marketing. I want to make me available, but I also want to know how I'm doing. So I figured I'd build a cool called Reslytics, which is a tool to track social media metrics. So it would read data from social media. It would use the Twitter API, which was then still free to track the count of the follower count, the like count for an account, but for individual tweets, it would also track how many times it refused, it was clicked, how many retweets, how many replies, but the same also for GitHub repository, NPM packages. So you would get one system where you would get analytics for all the stuff that you're publishing out there. I did build it and I really enjoyed building it. And for that product, I've started a boilerplate thing. So I built a lot of things there for the first time, like integrating login, password resets, but also having a price plan integration with Stripe, but no, the integration with Stripe was later. So initially I built it as kind of a better platform saying, hey, you can use it now, but it's in beta. And at some point you need to pay so that I didn't have to do the Stripe integration yet.
It was fun to build, but at some point it stagnated because I needed to finish it. I wasn't still really happy with the design and the enthusiasm kind of faded away. So because completing something or a side project is often the hardest thing to do, you get at some point, you did all the fun stuff and then you need to build the more boring stuff like payment integration or management things.
So for me that kind of faded away, but the good thing that came out of it was the boilerplate.
And later on I rebranded it in terms of name to watch your numbers.
So that was an idea from my wife, so Reslytics is not really a good name, it doesn't really
tell you what to do. I didn't buy that domain even, or I suggested watch your numbers because you're gathering analytics, you need to watch your numbers basically. So I did purchase the domain, I still have that.
And currently I've been building it again, rebuilding it to allow you to gather data for multiple sources, but then not social networks, but just JSON or MySQL databases and do queries there, generate reports and share those with other people. That's what I'm currently working on.
It's not live yet, but that's also something that I want to use myself to gather the podcast analytics from different sources and automatically send that to me on a Friday or Saturday morning, for example, so I can have a look at it and I am actively forced to view it. So that was watch your numbers that I'd worked on.
So I also implemented some open source development tools and libraries. So I built SuperSave, I built that part of Wally, I believe, and that allows you to easily have a database and also a API on top of that database using SQLite or MySQL. I use that for all my projects. It's pretty mature. It works.
It's not built for large volumes of people, so it's not very efficient, but it does work for smaller numbers and it makes it very easy to set up an API. On top of that, I built SuperSave Auth, which builds user authentication and protection on top of SuperSave. So I implemented the hook system and the SuperSafe Auth package adds the user ID to every record that you write when returning data or querying data, it will also require the user ID to be set. So it would only return the records for that specific user. And that's more of a fun project. I'm not monetizing that or actively marketing that. It's just something that I use myself. It's open source. It's on github, on NPM. It's just there.
For me, looking back at all those projects, I find that marketing for me is the most challenging
part. It's not necessarily marketing, but also getting stuff out there and getting it known.
So I really enjoy building. I'm a developer and I'm having difficulties completing the last 10, 20% of our product and having a plan to get that out there. So I'm more focusing on purely building and I need to focus more on marketing and sharing and one of the things, and that's also the reason that I started this podcast, is to have more of a social media presence and not the many Twitter bots or Twitter people that try to gamify Twitter and just hack the algorithm.
Or I'm trying to be there, but also be there genuinely, just be myself, send messages there.
And that's proven to be difficult because I'm not really, I'm often not in a mindset to share things on Twitter or other social media and also interact with other people on it because I'm often more focusing on other things. I am winding down from a long day at work and I don't have the energy to really actively pursue other things on social media.
So I told you about projects in the past. My focus currently is Observalyze, which I completed a pivot. So at some point I realized for Teletron and for Reslytics that I also wanted to know how
people were using the application. So I started doing Observalyze, which is a kind of an analytics platform, but focused on SaaS. So you have a SaaS or a product and you want to get insight in how users are using your SaaS. The pivot that I did there is initially it was just sending keys of pages that were visited, active activities that were done to Observalyze. And I didn't realize that at the time, but it was just still just an analytics platform. It didn't really add anything on top of that. And it was mostly what it was mostly doing in its MVP version. So a minimum valuable product is that it was showing tables and tables of data. It wasn't generating insights.
At some point I had a idea to add gamification to it. So use the events to generate badges, complete tasks, track counts of things. So use that for gamification and to allow people or to invite people to use the product longer, to engage them longer with the product, not Observer Lies itself with the product that uses Observalyze. And there I really forced myself to make the pivot, complete it. I also even created a small marketing plan on how to market it after that.
I haven't really started on marketing yet. I feel like I'm postponing that and procrastinating with implementing small other products, like restarting on Watch Your Numbers and some to-do app that I am doing for myself with Notion. Also starting this podcast. It's kind of taking away from the marketing on Observer Lies. And at the moment, that's okay. I'm okay with that.
So I started this podcast, as you mentioned earlier. And I also want to use that as a mechanism for doing accountability. So the things that I say and do for this podcast. I have a feeling that when I put it out there, I'm kind of promising myself and other people. I know I'm promising other people things. And I hope that helps me in feeling more pressure to do the things that I promised and I say,
because I'm also letting other people down instead of just doing it for myself. So I'm hoping that will work. Also, I'm hoping on getting feedback from the people that are listening to this podcast.
If there are any people listening, because I need to do more marketing. Let me know if you're listening. You can listen on YouTube. You can listen on other podcast apps. I'm still working on getting it to work on Apple. But I did hear from them on what I need to change. So there has been contact. So that's hopefully that works. What I do feel is that I'm currently balancing multiple projects. For me, that helps because my mind doesn't really like being focused on one thing for a long time. So I'm handling multiple projects. And then at some point, when one of those projects is gaining more traction, I would focus more on that specific project if needed. Try to grow it, get more users. And hopefully, at some point, I'm able to gain income from my side projects
to get an additional income from those side projects. Instead of only doing them for fun, I hope to get a little bit back from them. For this podcast and also from YouTube, I'm also learning new skills.
So I like that. I'm learning how to do a podcast. I'm going to learn how to do video content, hopefully in the short term. I hope to start somewhere in September with that.
So I have the time to learn from that and also do this podcast via a video, something that I'm hoping to learn.
And for me, doing side projects is mostly about getting to know with new technology, solving problems for myself. And that's for me important in a side project. And the past few years, I've been trying to, as an added bonus, have other people also benefit from what I'm building. I'm trying to solve a problem that I think other people will also have. And now I'm taking this step to bring the product that I built or the thing that I built to other people and hopefully have them see that,
hey, this is also solving my problem. Interesting. Let me have a look at that.