Introduction
I want to start a side hustle.
I've wanted to for years, but I've kept getting stuck and barely making any headway.
I was inspired recently by reading Amy Hoy's Growth Stacking micro-blog, which on it she is sharing the whole messy process of trying to make business happen, which I thought I'd try too. Difference is, I'm not trying to grow an existing business bigger, I'm starting right at the very start with nothing.
I hope you'll join me on this journey from total and utter noob to breaking through the fog of indecision of even what idea to focus on to where the road might take me.
2020-02-16 7:35 pm
The Main Roadblocks
So, these are the things that have stopped me from making much progress over the years.
1: Energy
Sometimes I struggle a lot with low energy levels.
I would come home from work feeling super exhausted from coding all day at work, and I just didn't have it in me for 'coding all night'. I would just focus on resting as much as I could in an attempt to survive the next day.
I've tried a few times to build something in the evenings, and after one to two nights of trying to do intensive coding after work, I am just super shattered for work itself the next day.
2: Focus
I swing back and forth between different camps of ideas, abandoning and starting new ideas each time I move between fields.
The biggest two camps are essentially 'technical' and 'creative'.
Since I'm a software engineer I keep thinking that my best chance would be to do something tech related. However, as I mentioned above, I find this a lot harder and less motivating if I am working full time in tech at the same time.
I also have many other talents too, including music and making art. I was planning to do a music degree alongside the one I have, and I'm quite good at drawing and painting. See examples of my artwork here
I have other things in life I'm passionate about too, like nutrition, travel, and caring about the environment which I sometimes try to create projects around too.
I vacillate back and forth between ideas that seem like I'd find 'practical' (tech related), 'passionate' (art and music related) or 'purposeful' (caring for the environment).
Sometimes I try to pick ideas that combine two or more of the broad themes together.
Sometimes I try to make games, to combine my tech and creative skills, but then I get discouraged thinking that it's still really hard to make indie games successfully, and then I give up.
A currently abandoned project: Algorithmic Composition
I tried to work on some software that 'algorithmically composes music', (perfect pitch is handy for debugging such software).
The idea was that you could either generate a whole piece of music on its own (which might not be that great but still fine for background music) or work with it to develop and flesh out your musical ideas.
This would work by generating multiple different phrases, chord progressions and structures which you could then adjust, assemble together with whatever ratio of original and algorithmically generated material you desired.
It would just be super easy to get that grand, musical, orchestral melody out of your head and onto paper.
However I still got discouraged thinking that since music is such a tough industry, people wouldn't be particularly interested in the music my software could make, or paying for the library itself.
A brief glance at some of the research I was trying to find to look for new algorithms also made me feel that there was bound to be way better consumer software out there that did that kind of thing, which also made me feel very discouraged.
2020-02-16 9:15 pm
Perfectionism
This is another roadblock slowing me down.
Like I mentioned previously, I get hung up on perfectly choosing the correct mix of tech, art and creativity, and any other element I feel needs to live in my project in order to give me the best chance of success and to feeling happy while working on it. (Something I assume is that the happier I can feel working on it the better chances I have of sticking with it and being successful).
2020-02-16 10:16 pm
Philosophical Angst
Why do I want this?
Why do I want to start a side-hustle/project/businessie thingie?
What is my purpose for doing it?
Once I sense things starting to get a bit philosophical, I then skip straight to starting from a massive top down approach.
Why am I here? Are there any things I am first supposed to do with my life?
After that I sometimes get stuck in nihilism. No matter how much I achieve, or how much I don't achieve, none of it will matter to me after I die.
Overall the best goal I have to dig myself out of that is to just try to feel as happy as possible for as much of my life as possible. As well as trying to extend my life for as much as possible too.
So please excuse me while I go sort out all my philosophical angst Before I start creating Anything for the world.
2020-02-17 9:58 pm
What do I write about now?
Should I start blindly surging forward into an abandoned project at the toss of a coin? Should I list the fruits of all my abandoned projects? Should I try to make a dry, educated, rational decision about which of the abandoned ones would be the most logical to pick up, without considering anything else?
I could talk about my obsession with perfection in regards to doing everything 'right' when it comes to trying to optimise for designing the perfect product, choose the perfect user and try to perfectly shape it round them before I'm even started.
That's derailed me a few times too.
I could talk about how shy I get sharing my stuff on social media and to my friends. I think that's derailed me more than most a lot of times.
If we want to get meta, at this point in time I haven't even shared this blog yet, and I'm even starting to feel scared about a lot of people seeing it. So I'm not even sure when I'll work up the guts to share it, or how widely I will.
I sometimes, or at least think I get derailed by my personal projects getting too big and unwieldy, and not splitting them into small enough tasks I can tick off one by one.
However, I think it's because I need to upgrade my personal 'definition of done.'
I start by breaking my project down into small little chunks I can achieve and deliver on, and draw up a plan, then begin making things little bit by little bit ........ but then I don't show them to too many people.
I'm fiendishly shy on the internet. Even if I do sometimes get to the point where I do have something to share, sometimes the trauma and fear of having to share it in the public world is so much it causes me to quickly drop off and hide in a cave and barely interact with it again.
2020-02-17 10:20 pm
Case study of an abandoned project
A React Native Flood-Fill Game
I started building a Flood-fill game initially in React because I wanted to brush up on some of my front-end skills.
I made it look great on my desktop computer, then I showed it to my family and a few of my friends. You can see the first iteration here.
I told them to use their desktop, yet it turned out that everyone who looked at the game at all looked at it on their phones. The others didn't even look at it because they told me they couldn't be bothered to deliberately fire up their desktop or laptop computer to go see it.
Since everyone seemed so keen on their phones for testing out new games, I decided to port it to React Native so I could make it into an app.
(Note - while somewhat straightforward, translating a project from 'React' in the web to 'React Native' is not quite as easy as it seems. For example the CSS had to be changed quite a lot).
It's currently available for Android over here. I didn't put any ads on it, and it's completely free.
Failing to work out how to iterate
I thought I'd perhaps add some numbers on a few of the tiles ranging between say 3 and -3. They would alter your total remaining move count if you flooded them on that move. The numbers and the tiles they were on would also get re-generated each time you did a move, so it would be a lot more dynamic and different than the original puzzle.
I showed it to more people and tried to get people to download it, and asked them for feedback about where to take the game. I also observed how easy or difficult it was for them to play it.
Some people asked me for different levels, 'gems' to tap on, and more stuff to keep them engaged after they'd got the hang of the initial puzzle.
Some people finished it crazy fast on their first go with a very small total move count. Some people still couldn't get their heads around their initial puzzle even after I tried to personally coach them through it several times.
When too many different people asked for different things, which were different yet again from my idea, I had brain freeze and didn't know which ones to implement.
If I changed it one way, I might be ruining it for someone who liked it the other way!
How do I add gems without turning it into Candy Crush or some micro-transaction-extorting free-to-play game? Should I add more levels first, or focus on being able to change the board size and add new colours? Should I add a whole menu page or just focus on improving the instructions for How to Play?
Should I fix the algorithm to make the last few moves calculate themselves faster? (I actually wrote out the initial algorithm in a purely functional style with immutable data, and for the last few moves the code would Drastically slow down, till I introduced a tiny bit of mutation into the main bottleneck. There is still a tiny bit of lag on the last few moves which you can spot if you know to look for it. However if I made the board significantly bigger it may become a problem again.)
Should I deterministically add a way to calculate the lowest possible number of moves a puzzle can be completed in? (I'm actually hazing a pretty educated guess at your total allowed number of moves, I can't fully guarantee that you'll be able to complete the puzzle in that amount. That's why I deliberately didn't make a retry button, only a new game button, so no poor soul would be stuck constantly resetting a game that couldn't be solved.)
I also wasn't sure whether to stick with React Native. It had a slow load time when opening the app and took up lots of space on people's phones for something so tiny.
I found the basic algorithm really challenging to write in Typescript and it had a lot of really crazy type errors to fix when I tried to refactor it. I was feeling super tempted to bail to Kotlin and then learn Swift for when I wanted to make an iOS app.
Losing Motivation
I was also super hung up on it being a 'clone' of a super common game. I tested out a bunch of other flood-fill games on the Android store and also tried to gauge how many there are, and there are a lot.
I lost a huge chunk of motivation when I realised not many people had downloaded it. (I will double check my dashboard later), but at the time I think it only had around 7 downloads. Most of the feedback I managed to receive was from personally showing it to people on my phone.
After all that I eventually got super lost about whether to stick with that game or not at all. Now that I had fulfilled my goal of getting something out on the app store, maybe it would be better to focus on making a new app with a more original concept?
So I thought of a new idea for an app store game and started trying to make that. But I also got lost along the way.
2020-02-18 10:26 pm
Goal
I thought, since the main reason I'm making this blog is because I want to get serious about what I'm doing, I could set myself a concrete goal for actually making some money from my side projects this year.
So, thinking a bit more I plucked a number out of thin air ..... $3,500 pre tax. All from side projects. All this year.
Up to a third can be from services-style stuff to help figure out a product-style thing to sell, but all the rest should come from things I've made. And ideally a reasonable portion of that would be from digital things too, so I can continue to scale my efforts.
So there you have it. A clearly defined goal to help prioritise my efforts by.
2020-02-18 10:30 pm
Ok, so now that I have my nice shiny goal, I hope you can see why I'm feeling demotivated about continuing with my old app, or even creating a new app.
For one, you can't even convert a free app to a paid app on the Play Store (although I could just take it down and put it up again).
But mostly I don't really see myself making much of my goal at all with them. Say I did make an app, and I made an in-app purchase to upgrade to the paid version which would be about a dollar (that's how everyone seems to be doing it nowdays) - I project if I tried really hard to tell lots of people about it with my current 'promotional' skills, I'd get maybe 300 downloads. Then at best I might get maybe a 10% conversion rate. That means I'd be doing at ton of work (like 30+ hours) for $30.
Which is a drop in the bucket next to my goal.
2020-02-19 7:30 am
A Phone call from my future self
You did it! You really did it! You kept trying and trying, kept on trying, and putting one bold little foot in front of the other when you couldn't see anything of the way ahead.
So just relax, and don't worry. Things will turn out ok. You just can't see it yet, you need to wait until you create enough momentum.
I'm so proud of you!
I'm about to do something super scary right now, but it's not as bad as it was when I started, because I didn't know what to do back then. Like you mostly right now, I could always face something scary if I needed too, but now I've managed to create something to face.
But I never would be here at all if it wasn't for you! Right here, right now, fumbling around, lost and disillusioned, and not afraid to try and fail and fall over and pick yourself up and keep going and looking forward and stopping and thinking about how to act better right now.
So, chill out. Keep thinking carefully, doing the thought journey, picking apart your thoughts, taking time to pause and reflect.
What do I do right now? You decide the rules, girl-boss.
How do I know what to do? Just do what feels right, queen. Breathe deep and meditate.
Ok I meditated, but I'm still stuck. Go to bed silly!
Make up the rules. Make up the framework. And if it doesn't work, just keep adjusting it till you do find something that works. And remember, there are no shoulds.
This is how I just broke the space-time continium.
2020-02-19 10:15 pm