How to successfully plant a side project?
summary
A developer describes building Standup Flow, a daily-standup tool with a working Slack integration that saw real usage in one team but failed in the market because 87% of potential users used Microsoft Teams instead. The talk covers technical and product pitfalls: Teams API integration can take over a month of difficult work, reimplementing authentication and analytics wastes weeks, and initial hosting choices (Heroku with $7 dynos plus Postgres and addons) quickly raise monthly costs to ~$24+. Tracking showed many email signups but very few active Jira‑integrated users, with insufficient marketing identified as the main reason for low adoption.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:49Side project origin
- 3:39Idea validation
- 5:46Integration problems
- 7:13Technical errors and architecture
- 9:40Dead code trap
- 11:24Measuring impact
- 12:50Underestimated marketing
- 13:55Why side projects
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