How much time do you spend working on your projects?

I talked to Mike Perham of Sidekiq for the Indie Hackers podcast last week (his episode won't be out until next week). He's making over $1M/year as a solo founder(!), and he got his start while working a full-time job.

One of the cooler things I learned while talking to him was that the company he worked at was actually Sidekiq's first customer. He'd go home at night to work on the product, then go into work the next day and spend hours as a user of his product. I thought this was a pretty ingenious way to hack the not-enough-time situation faced by so many people trying to start businesses.

I think 90 minutes a day could actually be a blessing in disguise.

Having so little time means that if you want to make a success of this you're going to have to:

1. Learn to be ruthless with prioritization. You should only be working on a feature if you know users want it. This means you'll be putting effort into great customer development and surveying etc.

2. Learn to be ruthless about MVP. Before you start using up your 90 coding minutes you're going to make sure you've spent plenty time making absolutely sure you're building the minimum possible version of the feature you want to do next.

3. Learn to focus on the money. If you're boostrapping this is super important. Even if a feature is wanted by your users and you can do a good MVP of it - don't build it unless you're confident it's going to be right for the users that represent the best paying segment of your customer base.

Finally, my response to the 12 startups in 12 months - each to their own but I don't like this idea. Rather spend a little extra time choosing the best idea you can and at least give it 3 months before trying another one. Traction in 1 month is very tough. Obviously if you have time to spare and just want to practice iterating through ideas then go for it, but if you want a chance for one of these startups to turn into a small side business I think you need to give them more of a chance each!

Matt, Dan and I all had full times jobs when we started working on Quuu (https://www.quuu.co/).

Doing the dev side of things, I prefer to work in a hackathon like process. I'll typically try and cram as much work as I can into a weekend or two and get the basic MVP out the door.

Once you've got past that initial build, working 60min a day was easily enough to continue to refine the product, and that gave Matt and Dan something they could show to customer, and grow the business.

I guess my secret was to not go it alone, find people to share the work load :)

I would say that 90 minutes is a pretty good window of time to accomplish small goals on a regular basis.

I have not had huge successes, but I have had small successes that keep me motivated. And I notice that I find the time to do the things that I am truly interested in. If I let something lapse for a while, then it is a pretty good indicator that I just don't have the interest to continue pursing it as a serious project.

I think it is more important to just do something. Sometimes that means abandoning a project that you may have put significant time and effort into to focus on a more appealing task. I find myself applying the lessons learned in these past "failures" often enough to avoid any regrets.

With a family of my own, I am lucky to get a few hours in each week on side projects. But If I am going really well and excited about something I am able to find a lot more time. So I believe if I did manage to create a bigger success, I would also find the time needed to sustain it. I definitely know I will never find if I don't keep working at something … anything!

Good luck!

While working on https://www.rabbitmqhosting.com I usually spend about 1hr per weekday and 4hrs each on Saturday and Sunday.

What I'm trying to move towards is a place where I can automate much of the things that I'm currently doing manually; like sending a welcome email when someone signs-up etc

With a friend of mine we work at least 8 hours a week on our side project (http://www.magicgatherers.com). We usually cram this into one day. We both feel this is a bit limited, as we are limited to one day (friday) a week. After 10 weeks we take a week off and get much more work done.

I am not yet at a successful stage, but I work on my side project while also working a full time job and having family commitments.

You have to get creative with your time, and you have to use tools that optimize your productivity. Don't try to learn a new programming language and build a side project. Just use the language you know best. Don't try to use shiny new frameworks, stick with what you already know.

Planning out everything the night before in to very small chunks, and really, I mean really sticking to bare bones MVP features is critical.

Anthony Trollope was one of the most voluminous authors in history, and insisted that 3 hours a day before going into his job at the post office was the perfect amount.

If you could do 90 minutes a day, every day (or every weekday) consistently, I bet you'd make very good progress.

It understandable to start small. We started Sorted as a side project to work at night. Later on, it was the project on the flight. When we found good traction from beta users and early public launch, we decided to switch to full-time.

On the other, if you read Rework from 37signals, it pointed out Basecamp was built in the same duration of 2-hour commute for a year. Alibaba was famously referenced as short commute time. The 18 co-founders were required to have as short as 15-min walk time from home to office. When you save the commute time, you squeeze more time to side projects and increase the odd of success. (as least to perform more user validations)

Good Luck!

As much as I can. You can succeed, but no one says it's easy.

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