99.999% of Your Ideas are Side-Project Ideas, Not Startup Ideas: Why Treating Them as Such Increases Follow-Through To Building Them

(tl;dr: In this post, I argue that 99.999% of your ideas are side-projects ideas and?_not_?startup ideas. Treating them as side-projects gives you higher chances of building and completing them than otherwise.)

If you live in or near a startup city (Bay Area or similar geographical location around the world with prevalent startup culture), you get bit by the startup bug. That’s not a bad thing. But it isn’t good if you are a tinkerer with many ideas.

Living in areas with startups on every block unconsciously tricks you into believing that your idea could be the next big startup. And once you are convinced, down you go the rabbit hole doing pre-startup work.

You set up user interviews, understand their problem, look at existing solutions, do a MOM test, define MVP, mock-ups, etc., while honestly believing that your “product” is lacking in this world. And once you launch, you will be the next BIG thing.

And after spending days/months thinking, talking, sketching, and fantasizing, most people either get demotivated because the idea is not big enough/feasible/required, or they start the project only to give up when a new “ground-breaking world-changing idea” comes to them. And the cycle restarted.

This phenomenon is more common than people are willing to accept. I accept it now after having fallen victim to the above vicious loop several times.

TBH, in my naivety, I built some products and launched them. They did see some traction and decent user growth. Few had ~$100 MRR, but they didn’t turn out to be the ground-breaking world-changing ideas I thought they were.

Over time, maintaining them became a chore, and my interest faded away. What hurt when I shut them down was that “my startup idea failed” in my mind.

In reality, they were side projects. The real problem was expectation mismatch.

I was convinced that?the default state?for all of my ideas was that they are startup ideas, not side projects. And living in a startup city is like having an echo chamber for this thought.

The downside of believing this narrative, all of your ideas are startup ideas and not side-projects, is that for every idea, you spend days/months doing pre-startup work.

Do this enough times, and you risk getting burnt by the failed experience. And worse, giving up on the idea of building a startup or even a side project.

Speaking from personal experience, it took me four years to start building side projects again when I shut down my last project.

I’ve realized that in 99.999% of cases, the idea I have (and most people do) is a side-project idea. And treating them as side-projects leads to higher follow-through in building them.

And yes, there will be 0.001% side-projects that will be a great startup ideas, but those are extremely rare.

Treating 100% of your ideas as startup ideas is a recipe for burnout.

Now, if you want to start a startup and find great ideas, there is plenty of great advice from YCombinator (1,?2,?3) and?Paul Graham?(1,?2) on how to do so.

Finally, before I close this post, I want to answer one more question

Why build side projects if they can’t be a startup?

And the simple answer is, “Just for the fun of it.”. The side benefit is that you’ll learn something new!

With that, Happy building side projects!!!!

(P.S.) I am building a side-project to automatically filter my emails without opening/reading them and not having to create filters/labels upfront. ??