Side Projects

Today I'm working on hour 50 of One Hour SaaS. This is about half the time I thought I would need to see if I can build a successful SaaS business in one hour per day.

Although Podcast Ping, my main product is available for users to uses, I'm trying some side project marketing, so today I'm launching: PodcastHosting.Review.

I'm continuing to reach out to potential customer for Podcast Ping before doing the official launch, so this side project which is very relevant to Podcast Ping is a good way to start spreading the word, without official launching.

As usual I'll be doing a launch day twitter thread, so share how it goes 🤞

Would love for you to leave your feedback on the Product Hunt launch:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/podcast-hosting-review

You can continue to follow my journey building a SaaS business in one hour a day at:
https://onehoursaas.com/

Mubs

Yesterday morning I decided to build a quick project to answer a question that was on mind, and will be on my mind for the next few days.

The US election is almost here, and the early voting has been off the charts, but I wondered just how many people are voting.

I've seen the numbers on the TV, but wanted to dig a little deeper and get the information whenever I wanted it.

Turned out the data was available on The United States Elections Project, but it was buried a little deep. So I decided to use the data to provide the information in an quick and easy way to see:

https://howmanypeoplevoted.com/

You'll see the total number, along with the total from 2016.

However since the Electoral college is a such a large factor in who is the next President, I added a break down on the voter turnout in each state.

Would love to know what you think!

If you'd like to know more about how I built the project (in just a few hours), you can find more details here:
https://practicalmvp.com/blog/how-many-people-have-voted

After 37 hours of work that I documented on the one hour saas youtube channel, I'm calling the MVP ready to soft launch.

I was aiming for around the 30 hour mark to get to this point, so I got in the ball park.

Feels strange to build an MVP in 5-6 weeks, most times I try and time box it to two weeks, but in terms of actual time, it would translate to less than a week of full time work.

The bad news? Building in one hour a day is hard! Some tasks are hard to fit into one hour, and effectively managing your time into chunks of work you can make progress in is very important.

If you fail to manage your time affectively, your progress will grind to halt and that can be very demotivating, however...

The good news? Building in one hour a day forces you to make progress every day, seeing that progress can be motivating (in the long term).

If like me you're building in public, the one hour makes it very easy to consistently share your progress. At each stage you have the opportunity to connect with potential users (or fans) and get feedback, and on some days the motivational boost you need to keep going.

From here I'm going to turn my attention to getting some early adopters, for feedback on the MVP and who might help with the roadmap for future features.

MVP

Would love for you to checkout the MVP and let me know what you think:
https://podcastping.com

I actually built this nearly a year ago, and I've using it regularly ever since, figured it was time to officially launch it.

I'm a big fan of Hacker News, I would visit it many times a day, but these days I'm too busy to visit that often.

I tried to keep up with what was posted, what was popular between my visits, but the ever changing leaderboard made that very difficult.

So I came up with the idea of a daily leaderboard, inspired by the leaderboards like you see on Product Hunt.

Would love to know what you think:
https://hackernewsday.com

Quick intro video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l4rmQyLz3k

Around this time of the year I like to think I about one more big sIde project that I’ll do before the end of the year.

As I started to think about what to build, I focused on how I would build it.

I’ve seen many people here on IH and on Twitter talk about the lack of time to build projects. They have a full time job, they have family obligations and other commitments.

What if your time is really limited and you can only spare 1 hour per day to work on a project. Is it possible to build a (successful) SaaS business in hour per day?

I posted on Twitter to see if people would be interested in following me as I tried this:

The response has been great. A few people responded they did something close to this in building their businesses. Many people responded they would be Interested in seeing how I would tackle a challenge Ike this.

Given the response to the tweet I accept the challenge.

I will start my 1 hour per day in the middle of September, and document what I do thru the end of the year, and perhaps beyond. Will see what the state of challenge is at that point.

This will definitely be a new way of working for me, but I’m excited to see what impact It has on what and how I build things.

Until I setup something specifically for this you can get updates by following me on Twitter. I’ll likely be posting weekly updates as milestones here.

If you have any thoughts on doing something like this, would love to read your comments.