Creating a sideproject with my family (why?)
Due to the situation we're all experiencing during the last 18 months, I had more time to think and reflect than usually. It made me change the way I'm thinking about my business, but it also made me appreciate my family more. After all, those were the only people I had for a long time now.
I also realized that nobody in my family could explain, what I do for work (this includes my wife and my kids). Of course, I sometimes try to show them some of my work, but it is quite abstract if you don't know much about it.
I don't care if my kids find it interesting what I do all day long... but I think it is important that they at least have an idea.
Since I didn't want to create a lesson plan and bore them to death, I had the idea to create something with them together. To be honest... there wasn't much enthusiasm when I presented my plan ;-) But again, it wasn't a bad idea rather than hard to imagine for my family, how they could help me with a project.
It was now my job to come up with something, we could create together. This is how the idea for Noizable was born. Noizable is a collection of human sounds.
- I came up with the first three sounds and my kids did the rest.
- We created a list of all the sounds and then each of us had to record them a couple of times.
- Together we decided which recordings are the best to create the final collection.
- We brainstormed a name for the site and got the domain.
- I set up Wordpress and my kids chose style and colors of the site.
An hour ago I launched on Producthunt (Noizable). And I can't wait to show the results to my wife and kids (all asleep).
So, why did I do it?
Well, I think these last couple of months were mentally challenging, and I was lucky to have people around me. And I think it is important that my family knows what I do behind closed doors in my office. I like to think that I accomplished something. Making things is so important, and maybe my kids learned that they can come up with ideas and actually make them real.
Maybe some of you have a family, kids especially, and this post motivates you to share what you do with them. It was a lot of fun for me, I can tell you that.
That's great! It hope to co-create a game or app together with my son and wife for fun at some point, but he's only four. I've been playing around with PICO-8, I think that'll be a great way to get the family interested in creating something.
Hey Martin. I love that idea :) Unfortunately I don't have any programming skills... if I had, I would definitely do something like that as well...
When my daughter was about 7, we created a website together, where we described her favorite toys. She still talks about the site 4 years later ;-)
It's a great way to learn! The platform is so limited, which really invites hacking and playing around with it without any pressure. As opposed to doing web stuff which requires you to understand ten different technology stacks to do anything (unless no-code).
It's a really motivating story, Dani.
I always like reading about stories of people overcoming difficulties in this current period of crisis. It inspires me to keep going.
Good job on balancing out the "fun" and "serious" parts of the work with your kids!
Hey Misha. Thanks for your comment. I was hoping that some people could take something positive from my little story :)
By the way... It looks like you created your first website about a year before me... It was 1999 for myself ;-)
Cheers!