Ship Your Side Project
p/ship-your-side-project
Make enormous progress on your side project in just 6 weeks
Jason Shen
The Side Project Scoring Tool — A system to help creative people pick the right idea
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Jason Shen
I've found that people tend to struggle in one of two ways when it comes to side projects: either they feel guilty about not being plugged into work 24/7 or they have a million ideas and need to cut down. This tool (PDF + Google Sheet) should help them narrow it down by scoring their ideas on certain criteria.
Lauren Nham
Thanks! This is really cool! It l could also blossom into a SaaS-based platform which ties in project management and customer development/lean startup tools! PS - Your linked page here has a broken "Learn More" button (extra ";"): "www.shipyoursideproject.com/inde..."
Jason Shen
@laurensophia Thanks Lauren (made the fix)! I'm curious to understand how you might see this being used - as an internal way to rank ideas for products / features?
Lauren Nham
@jasonshen This would be great for Hackathons/Design Charettes (internal and external). It assumes, however the challenge is distilling/selecting ideas rather than generating them. The current spreadsheet tool would be great for product to manage external teams -- marketing/sales/operations/etc. -- as they're less product-savvy and shiny object-driven). It helps to establish objective pre-filters of what product will and won't build and ideas that pass through these filters will be considered for a roadmap discussion. Ranking would require another tool, one that helps to make tradeoff decisions based on value (to Company, to Clients, to Users, Level of Effort etc.) delivered through these proposed features. Here's a great resource by Steve Johnson: http://under10consulting.com/rea... For the customer development/lean startup side, it would be interesting to explore a tie-in with the Validation Board (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) and Business Model Generation (https://www.producthunt.com/book...). These are later stage tools to further a side project idea, but helps align an idea with the larger context of an existing business, market, etc.
Rich Peterson
@laurensophia @jasonshen Great idea! As a little gift, I've created a Typeform v2 (beta) version of the sheet at https://rich.typeform.com/to/cJJphq .
Denes Papp

This tool consists of a nice and concise PDF which summarizes some important factors to take into consideration before starting a project and a very short Google Spreadsheet (10+ lines) which helps rate the project

Pros:

Nice and useful PDF and spreadsheet to rate project ideas

Cons:

A bit pushy to get donation before download