WHAT WE LEARNED:
The best side projects aim to be useful and valuable: With Coverr, we aimed to solve a legitimate desire on the part of clients and colleagues. It wasn’t another blog post or PPC campaign or viral video; it was a tangible tool people can use right now. The best side projects aim to provide something of value, not fluff.
When you’re generous, your audience will be too: Because Coverr is free and doesn’t “feel like” a marketing ploy (and it wasn’t designed to be) people are much more likely to spontaneously share and talk about it. The overwhelming response we’ve received from Product Hunt, blogs and other sites just goes to prove that.
Side projects are easier to pull off with partners: Our friends at CodersClan were instrumental in getting Coverr off the ground, providing all the technical firepower needed for coding and implementation. Partnering with another startup is a great way to bring a side project to fruition faster. And if you choose partners in adjacent fields, it can be done without harming each other’s leads.
Side projects are refreshing and exciting for your team: The daily slog and relentless focus on your main product can become monotonous. The chance to work on a new “thing,” was a breath of fresh air for Veed.me. It let us experiment with new ideas, tools, and hypotheses. And many of the improvements we made to Coverr along the way are now being implemented into the Veed.me platform as well. There’s a reason Google implemented the “20% time” policy (even if they’ve gotten rid of it now…)
Keep it small and low maintenance: We made the decision to focus Coverr.co on a super-narrow niche of video: the nascent trend of background videos. We had a host of other ideas (including an idea for funny stock photography) but decided we had to keep it lean in order to focus and not cannibalize our main business. And now that we’re receiving so much attention and traffic to the site, we’re thinking of ways to involve the community more in order to cut down the maintenance of constantly producing new clips.