How to Validate Side Project Ideas - and Build Projects You’re Proud Of

I love creating side projects. It's a fun and fulfilling way to explore, play with, and impact the world and I have quite literally built a life around it.

Over the years I've built and shared dozens of side projects - here and on my Youtube Channel. But there's so many more ideas I haven't yet built (and likely never will).

My project backlog currently has 3379 ideas on it and there's no way I'll be able to build all of those in my lifetime. Plus it keeps growing as I add new ideas. That's okay - the idea is not to do all of them, it's to have a bunch of ideas (most of which will suck) and pick out a few that you think are worthwhile to pursue.

In this post I'm going to share my personal system for choosing which side projects to take on as well as filtering out ones to avoid, pulling from my own observations over the years of what led to good and bad projects over time.

Goals for Validating Project Ideas

First I want to share a bit about the goals for this system based on my own values for creating projects to provide context on why the system is the way it is. Hopefully this helps decide if this system is right for you or if you may want to look for a different one.

Personally I love to create so my system is biased towards creation - less thinking about creation, more actual creation. This means that the validations themselves are less comprehensive and work-intensive and really more there to filter out ideas that are likely bad than to provide a ranking system for how good something is. This lets me do as little work upfront as possible to prevent time-wasting ideas and move on to actually building them.

This system then really has 3 goals it tries to achieve:

Less analyzing, more creating - I like creating so the more of that I can do the happier I will be.
Validate project is worthwhile wrt cost - That said I don't want to waste my time. I want to avoid toiling away at something for years only to look up and realize I didn't get anything out of it.
Ensure I will enjoy creating the thing - Projects should be fun. This is my favorite thing in the world to do. If I build a system that robs me of that fun then I am building myself a life of misery. YOLO so you might as well enjoy it.

What this means is that this validation is NOT built to find the most optimal, profitable business idea. It likely will uncover ideas that will lead to small profitable businesses (because it focuses on problems / needs / desires) but it will rarely help to identify a VC-desirable, unicorn-ready idea. So if that's what you want, it's probably best to look for a different validation framework.

If you're looking for a framework for finding business ideas, I've written about that in the past in Stop wasting your time on Bad Startup Ideas.

What this system does do is validate idea "seeds" for the core building blocks of what I consider a successful side project - a project that aligns with my values, that I will enjoy working on, and that is worth the cost - thus a project that is worthwhile to explore, grow, and see where it goes. In my experience this means these projects succeed even when they fail (and most projects will fail) - you can be proud of the work you put in and results you got out of it regardless of the external outcome.

Personally this gives me a lot more fulfillment in my projects and Creation Cycles because I'm not as affected by the outcomes I can't control. Instead I can be confident in the decisions I made I could control and when a project inevitably doesn't work out, I can move on to the next one with a clear mind.

How I Validate Project Ideas

My system for validation is to check if a project idea fulfills 3 buckets:

The World wants / will use it, I want / will use it
I am good at it
I am interested in building it

A project idea does not necessarily need to hit all 3 buckets for me to prioritize it. But usually I bias towards those ideas that do.

If it doesn't hit all 3 buckets then I like to think critically about why it doesn't and whether I'd actually be happy / fulfilled pursuing it. Usually this results in me realizing I probably wouldn't like pursuing this idea even if it sounds promising on the surface.

Note: This is very similar to my values for finding fulfilling work. This is no accident - I like my systems to be aligned from high level goals to low level actions.

Here I'll dive into a bit more detail about each of these buckets and why I find them useful.

The World wants / will use it, I want / will use it

I've found that I lose interest in projects if I don't believe in its impact. Impact is basically the effect it will have once created and if I don't believe in that effect then it's unlikely that this project is worth the cost.

When I say Impact I'm not only talking about impact on people's lives / solving people's problems though I do think that's a very strong factor in impact. Impact can also be providing something people enjoy. So it's simplified here from impact towards something people want or will use to capture this broader idea.

I've found that there are two perspectives that really matter to me:

The world wants it - Helps determine if this is a real Problem / Desire / Need by looking at market data. Important if you want this to be a business and also (I've found) to validate if the Problem / Desire / Need I think I've observed is actually real or just a passing opinion.
I want it - Either I need to have a same / similar Problem / Desire / Need or be invested in bringing it to life. I've found if I'm not personally invested in this (even if there's huge world want for it) then I can't really get motivated to work on it.

Example that passes this: CloudSeed - my F# Project Boilerplate. I found I was struggling to set up projects when learning F# so knew this would be useful to me and I discovered many others with a similar issue in my communities so this fulfills both the world and I buckets.

Example that doesn't pass: Working at a betting website. In my latest software engineering interview cycle, I found a lot of betting websites that were hiring for interesting positions and paying a lot. I think betting itself is okay but largely leads to bad financial outcomes so while I don't judge people who do it, I also don't support services that I see as taking advantage of these people. So this is clearly something the world wants but something I personally can't get behind so would be a bad fit for me.

I am good at

I get bored a lot. I have finite resources. So for my projects I like to focus on things that align with my strengths. This is good because it allows me to (usually) get a reasonable result with limited input cost.

For me this often means taking on web-based projects that I can build in 1 week or less and that have elements I can market via my Shares. I am decently good at building these things so I can build something reasonable quickly and move on to the next thing.

Note: This doesn't necessarily mean things I'm good at building today. It can also mean things I think I could be good at and am interested in getting better at as projects are a great way to learn this stuff.

Example that worked: 1000 Checkboxes is a great example of this. My goal was to see if I could build this with HTMX and to limit the build to a few hours. I was already good at spinning up small web apps so this played to my strengths while building to a new strength I'm working on - HTMX.

I am interested in building it

At the end of the day I need to be enjoying my time on Earth. With projects I try to make sure each project is worthwhile and one way I do that is to make sure I'm interested in doing the work to actually build the thing.

This helps me stay away from projects that I might be good at but would find it to be a slog - those with a lot of sales, support, or inventory management. And towards those I would enjoy - building Simple Scalable Systems while learning along the way.

Example that passed: F# Options Scanner - I was curious to see if I could build a robo trader for stock options. In the end it didn't work out but I enjoyed the process because I was curious about the domain and got to build with technologies I enjoyed. So the project failed but it was a success for me.

Example that failed: In my 6 months of trying to be a founder I launched nothing. This was because I kept trying to pursue ideas that had good markets (the world wanted it) but I ignored whether or not I was actually interested in building the thing. Ultimately this led to me not building anything because I simply didn't want to do the work.

My Long-term Project Strategy

At the outset I shared that this validation strategy is probably not sufficient for someone looking to start a large business. This is because it doesn't focus on any kind of marketability - really it's just focused on core elements of value, balancing the outside world with the values of the creator.

I want to call out that while this is not a great validation strategy for big businesses I do think it's a good strategy for building sustainable businesses.

My long-term strategy for my projects is:

Create a bunch of stuff
Enjoy the process
Double down on what works -> evolve into businesses

This is basically the small bets / portfolio project strategy for business. The ideas is that most projects fail but it's likely that some exponentially outperform in a sufficiently large population. This is the power rule in action - most things suck (80%) while a few things do better than all the rest combined (20%).

Note that this is the basic strategy that a lot of VCs take - invest in a ton of companies, double down on the unicorns that come out of it. It also aligns with what many of the most popular indiehackers do (Levels, Dan Vasallo, Bali Marc) - they build dozens of projects, most make no money, but eventually one or two start taking off and they build from there.

The way I kind of think of it is that each project is a plant and each idea is a seed. We don't know for sure if each seed will be able to turn into a good plant - all we can do is check the seed for any noticeable issues and give it what it needs to grow. Even though many plants will fail to grow usefully, over time we should have a garden of healthy plants created by planting and tending each of these individual seeds and slowly curating them for the best crops.

Will this actually happen? Who knows! But I'm excited to find out and will enjoy myself along the way.

My personal plans have me building ~3 projects each month. Most of these don't ever see the light of day and many are little features on existing projects but I enjoy creating them and a few end up in my Shares / Businesses.

I still haven't found my unicorn plant yet but my garden is slowly growing with 4 fruit-bearing projects. This at least gives me some confidence that with regular tending my project garden can and will continue to grow.

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