Sideproject.pro

Last year I made a side project to print the code on puzzle and send to customers who likes this idea. This year I decided to use those puzzles to host a game and let people challenge to complete the puzzle.

This is my first time to host an activity, gathering people together especially strangers I never met before. I am so afraid that no one will come. Fortunately, there are six people joining this event and we had a great time.

I am worrying about how to keep hosting activities people would like to join.

I received my first customer's order in one of my side projects.

Here's the side project's description:
I made a chatbot service providing todo list function of LINE app. People in Taiwan use LINE a lot. The chatbot can help you memo todo list and send notification through the LINE app.

I setup a paid plan of $1USD per month, which is near the price of a bottle of coca cola here in Taiwan.

I was happy at the beginning when I saw the order and then felt stressed because I had responsibility to service the customer. Though I had been serving them for free for 3 months.

To be honest, I love to try news things instead of scaling business. But money can help me to try more things. That's what I am struggling now. To make more money from that side project, I need to do things I don't like to.

Last week, I shared my work of the Google Assistant x Minecraft project. I did a live streaming at Youtube as described below.

I also spent some time sharing and editing another short version of demo. People seems happy to see the demo.

I recorded a english version demo video and shared on my twitter, which is the first time using twitter sharing to global.

I don't really know how to spread things to people in other country. But this is just a start and I will keep making english version of demo video if I complete some other projects.

I challenged myself to make a side project and live streaming the process on Youtube today.

I want to use Google assistant app to control the Minecraft redstone lamp to demonstrate a smart home scenario.

Things didn't work at first, not familiar with doing live streaming. There's a bunch of stuff to prepare.

Finally, I success my challenge and able to control the redstone lamp with google assistant!

I've edited my Patreon page and send an email to subscribers about my weekly update and this patreon page.

I also record a video clip to introduce the content and what people can get from Side Project Pro and another thank video for those who become my patron.

Honestly, I do care and wish people join my journey of Side Project Pro. But it seems that I had nothing to do to make people change mind. Therefore, I will keep going and share something that I care.

This is stunning to me. I thought there's nobody listening to my podcast. I just recorded what I like to share as documenting my thoughts and experiences about doing side projects.

The audience found that I had one episode uploaded only 8 seconds audio file clip. I checked and found that there's some problem. So, I re-uploaded the episode again.

It's really good to have connection with people caring what I am working on, which will support me for keep going.

Submitted my podcast last week. This week, I recorded another episode to tell people about my side projects which had been written into blogs this Sep when attending the IT ironman challenge.

Things are different from my expectation. I thought I could do a quick overview but now I guess a had to split those side projects into few episodes.

It's fun to review these projects when recording. Just like reminding me about the happy time doing side projects.

I've always struggling with the problem of want to be perfect then release. Yesterday, I wrote a draft about my first mail for the subscribed users of SideProjectPro. I want to let them know the updates of this project.

I sent the mail to them today. Hoping they still remember me and wanted to get my following news about this project.

My first article of medium publication of SideProjectPro just posted today.

I haven't get everything well prepared, such as the about page of the publication, description. But I decided to post the first article and keep those unfinished stuff behind.

The first article is about the problem I faced when recording my podcast channel. I cannot find a suitable way to tune the podcast audio file volume up. I shared my solution in the blog article.

It's also a document of my journey of side project life.

I send my first podcast episode to Apple Podcast. Now it's under review. I learned how to host sound clips on SoundCloud and the requirement of Apple Podcast. I was stuck with the add sound trail to RSS not checked and image size not correct.

Also, I found my sound clip volume too weak. It took me some time to fix this problem by using Mac with iMove to convert the volume stronger.