Building on the Side
Skip the fluff. Hear the best bits.
Just 5 minutes. All value, no filler.
📓 Key Takeaways
📘 Start by consulting. It's the fastest way to earn income while refining skills and testing ideas. Consider your consulting services a product - you are the product. Easier to pitch, quicker to sell. Unlike software, you don't need users to discover, trust, then subscribe. Just help someone today with what you already know.
📘 Anyone can spin up an app. AI helps. Hosting is cheap. Stripe handles payments. The real problem now is attention. Even with a great product, you might get silence. Success comes from sticking around long enough to get noticed. Expect no reaction. Build anyway.
📘 Do the work for what you gain from it - not just the result. Even if it doesn't hit, you'll be sharper, smarter and more valuable next time. Make sure you're proud to put your name on it. That's what sticks.
📘 Don't take miserable jobs to buy time for your idea. That fuels resentment. Get paid doing something you enjoy, then tinker on the side. Be realistic. Very few people get to work full-time on their own thing.
📘 Put things into the world. Don't hoard. Even unfinished, you'll learn faster from real-world feedback than from internal debates. Strangers will be honest. Your friends won't.
📘 Most breakout hits weren't planned. Some flops had everything going for them. The market is unpredictable. No one really knows why some things take off and others don't. Build with conviction. If you don't believe it'll work, no one else will.
📘 You won't know if a product will succeed in a week. It might take months. Water it. Grow it. If you want to build many things fast, accept lower chances of success. But if you believe in something, stay with it long enough to find out.
📘 Chase ideas you're fired up about. Don't plan to bunt. You'll put in more when you believe it's a home run. If it ends up a base hit or a strikeout, that's fine. You played all in.
📘 Even failed projects should make you better. Learn a new tool. Test a new pitch. Sharpen your design. If nothing else, become a more capable person. That's the game you can't lose.
💬 Top Quotes
It's never been easier to have a shot at it, but at the same time, I also think it's probably never been harder to get attention. It's probably never been harder to not just get lost in the daily sea of everything happening all the time, all at once
Just as long as you're realistic about the prospects, don't take a shit job you're going to hate on the premise that in nine months one of your ideas is going to take off. That seems like a recipe for resentment. And I don't think you want that
We have built a lot of different products at this company. Some of them have been phenomenally successful like Basecamp. Some of them have been really successful like Highrise or HEY, and quite a few of them have been, do you know what, base hits at best, paying for our expenses at best, and a fair number have not even managed to do that
To me, like, you could probably get a client pretty quickly, I would start with that. So like, think of your consulting business as one of your products that you're making. And this is probably the easiest part you're going to have to sell, which is that you can just help someone with what they're doing
The hard part is not coming up with the idea and making the thing and having AI help you make something and spinning something up and vibe coating something into something. That's actually become easier than it's ever been before. And we'll only get easier. So that is not the hard part anymore. The hard part is like, now what?
You have to accept that it's a gift that you can get your ideas out there. And that that gift comes with a corresponding curse. That's so easy for everyone else. And you therefore not guaranteed any response
You're going to have to do this for other reasons than this is going to be an amazing business. You're going to have to do it for reasons like, I'm going to learn a lot in this project. I'm going to have a lot of fun in this project. I'm going to meet some people I wouldn't have otherwise
If you're going to take that approach where you've got a bunch of ideas and you want to make a bunch of things, you're going to make them a lot faster. And I think the chances of them taking off are going to be a lot slimmer ultimately because there's probably not that much there
I would focus on one thing that you think's going to be really, really, really damn good. Put your time into that and see what happens. And if that doesn't work out... you might need to spend a year pushing it, talking about it, trying to get traction. You might get some and lose some
You can't show up half-assed and then expect that there's going to be a prize for you. That just doesn't work. And you actually need that conviction because you're going to have sort of a dip in motivation of like, oh, I think it's not going to work
You're not doing it in a slimy way. You're not doing it in a quick scammy, make a buck kind of way. You're doing it in a way where you go like, you know what? I could put my name on this. If there was a little box, a little plaque, I'd proudly write made by David on it so people knew who made it
That game you can't lose. That's impossible, right? There's no way if you become all of those things better, smarter person, more capable than you're going to look back upon that. I wish I was as bad at this as I was a year ago. No way. No way is that going to be the analysis
