I’ve built 7 shitty side projects in 7 months.
In 2015 I wasted a bunch of money trying to build a technology startup. I borrowed money from my parents, built an MVP and got turned down from an incubator. It was such a waste of time, money and effort, but it pushed me to do something different in 2016.
I’m a designer, not a developer — the main reason the startup failed is because I was unable to build it myself, I had to hire some outside help to get it done. I hated not being able to be directly responsible for it.
So, in 2016 I set myself a goal. The idea was to build as many things as possible — entirely on my own. This way I’d be entirely responsible for their success.
As a designer I’ve been pretty good at hacking together projects without the help of a developer through the use of out of the box products like Squarespace, Wordpress, Gumroad, Tumblr and some very, very minimal HTML/CSS knowledge.
Over the past 6 months I’ve managed to stick to my goal. One project went viral, gaining ~600,000+ page views over the course of one weekend. Some have been complete flops, and some have made small pockets of revenue.
I thought the halfway point in the year would be the perfect time to document the process so far and completely open up about any revenue/profit that was made and any analytics I’ve got. Hopefully it helps anyone out there needing a push, or doesn’t know where to start.
So let’s get started.
December — Neue Goods.
A design blog featuring interviews with creatives and designers.
I actually started one month earlier than anticipated, whoops.
Since studying design, and like many other designers out there — I’ve always wanted to start my own clothing label. I’ve played around with the idea several times over the last 5 years, but after seeing many indie labels come and go, I decided I’d only begin if I had the resources and budget to follow through with the idea, and would only begin if I could offer something different. Neue Goods is what I created — a streetwear inspired brand that draws visual references from the internet, graphic design and creativity. The point of difference is that I wanted to focus on creating and outputting regular content, over the actual final product. I wanted to focus creating a strong community around the brand — before asking people to front up their cash. In December I launched http://neuegoods.com — a simple blog running on Wordpress. I interviewed ~10 local and international designers and creatives. More on this to come below.
Page Views to date: 4,398
Instagram Followers: 1019
January — The Personal Brand Co.
Get a personal logo and resume for only $49.
Christmas and New Years had just ended, but I was still on a break before returning to work. I was keen to spend a maximum of 3 days building a project that could create a small amount, and somewhat passive amount of income. The idea I landed on pounced on the trend that millennials are becoming more and more career focused. They’re striving to secure lucrative positions at cool companies that make their friends jealous. I’ve always found it a bit easier than my non-designer friends to blow away prospective job opportunities by presenting them with nicely designed resumes and cover letters. Because of this, I’ve found myself helping out my non-designer friends a few times when they’re looking for jobs by designing them a set of nicely branded collateral. I decided I could turn this service into an product that could be bought by anyone online. I set up a simple landing page with a Wordpress Theme, created a Typeform questionaire that asked the customer about their needs, and their work/education history. At the end I set Typeform up as the final payment gateway. The idea was that I’d lead customers to the site, they’d fill out the questionaire, I’d recieve a payment, input their data into a set of resume templates I designed and then email it off to them. I got two sales, totalling $98. Typeform Pro (which I needed due to the payment gateway feature) costs $140/year. Whoops.
Page Views to date: 1,333
Revenue to date: $98
Instagram followers: 566
February — Shit Bar Ideas.
Viral smash hit.
This is one of the good ones. I live in Sydney, and recently we’ve had some pretty shit bars pop up. Ones that try too hard to be weird and quirky, to capitalise on press and media attention. A food blogger by the name of Cook Suck posted this tweet about how bad it is has become.
A few minutes after, he suggested someone should turn this into a generator style website. I had been learning basic HTML/CSS/JS via Treehouse for a couple of months — and figured I could actually do this.
I got started, and after a few hours of Googling and Stack Overflowing — it was complete. The Javascript was shocking, three arrays to hold the three catagories of data and a simple function to randomly pull one and string it together as a result. I hosted it via Github Pages (for free) and bought a $1.40 domain name for it. I tweeted Cook Suck to get the ball rolling on the project. He posted it to his modest social following and it started. Tweets and Facebook mentions came rolling in. A few hours in, I was in a theatre watching a movie (Deadpool?) with my girlfriend when she turned around and showed me on her phone that Pedestrian.tv had picked it up and wrote an article. Throughout the rest of the day I had a close eye on my Google Analytics and Social Media. Slowly one by one, media outlets picked it up and the vitality grew. Over the course of a weekend it was shared 1500+ times and amassed around 500k page views. Almost everyone had seen it.
I tried monetising it towards the end of the virality by adding an advertisement page — an open call out for brands to collaborate with me by implementing native advertising directly into the website. I thought it’d be better than adding banner ads or anything cheap/tacky like that. Unfortunately no one got in touch.
The page still gets about 1000 page views/week which is pretty sweet.
Page views to date: 647,725
Revenue to date: $0
Featured by: Pedestrian, Mashable, Junkee and others.
March — CursorPNG
A simple tool for digital designers.
After the hype cooled down from Shit Bar Ideas — I wanted to make something a little more serious, and useful.
As a designer, a common thing I do in my design process is dragging a small image of a cursor hand into all of my designs that have hover states. I feel this small touch makes the hover states and interactivity of a website much more obvious to clients and other collaborators.
However, it’s pretty funny how hard it is to actually find a transparent png of a Mac Cursor icon on Google Images. Because of this very small problem, I decided to create this very small website. It’s a simple one page website that holds the perfect transparent png of a Mac Cursor icon — just drag it into your design software and go. Apparently I’m the only person that has run into this problem because its uptake has been very minimal. Oh well — it was easy to build and definitely solves a problem for me.
Page Views to date: 300
Revenue to date: $0
April — Neue Goods: Collection 01
Clothing Goods inspired by creativity and technology.
Ok, this one is a bit of cheating. It’s not a new project, just some added depth to a previous one. After to growing a small but close community around the idea of Neue Goods — I figured it was time to actually launch the clothing label. I designed two longsleeves, one with a bunch of my favourite typefaces down the sleeves, and one with a bunch of design interface tools on the back with a nifty little $BTC chart. Super dorky. I got them printed by a local screensprinter; Aisle 6ix Industries and hired a friend from Melbourne to shoot the lookbook. After a bit of travel in Japan I came home and launched the line via a new website, powered by Squarespace. I’ve been shipping orders out via Sendle, and focusing on providing the best customer service I can. Even though orders are pretty slow right now, I believe that it’s best to get processes down in cement first before trying to scale. I make sure each order is packaged with care and is sure to delight the customer upon arrival. By focusing on these things first I am creating a community of advocates for the product that will heighten the word of mouth sales. I’ve strived to make sure each order arrives within 1 business day. So far so good.
We’re definitely in the red right now. I’m happy to run the line at a loss for at least 2 years, to focus on growth and quality of the product.
Costs to date: $1977
Revenue to date: $413.60
Profit/Loss to date: –$1563.87
May — ClarkFromInVision.com
A personal website for the world’s greatest CEO, Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer.
For the designers and developers currently using InVision within their workflow, this one needs no explanation.
If you’re not using InVision — you won’t get the joke anyway, so let’s move on.
I built the site on Tumblr, utilising my very very scarce knowledge of making custom themes. Domain name cost ~$20?
Tried to monetise it a little bit by selling t-shirts on Teespring. Zero orders.
Costs to date: $20
Revenue to date: $0
Page Views to date: 5,176
June — Sketch and Semplice
A guide helping designers build their own custom (no themes!) portfolio website with zero coding experience.
Sketch and Semplice is a how-to guide for designers wanting to create a completely custom portfolio website with zero coding experience required. Utilising the design tool Sketch, you’ll learn how to design a website that can be easily built into a real, functioning website in just a few hours using the Semplice platform — a portfolio system built specifically for designers that runs on Wordpress. This book will guide you through the steps it takes to completely design your website yourself — no themes!
In true ~ lean startup ~ style I build a landing page for this project within a few hours, using my existing portfolio website. I added a preorder button for the book using Gumroad, and a Mailchimp subscription field. I wanted to gather preorders and a mailing list to test the water and see if there was actually demand for a book like this, without having to actually write the damn thing.
After the site was ready to launch, I posted it to the official Sketch Facebook Group (~17k members). It got something like 60 likes, a few comments and I got 3 preorders, and 18 mailing list subscribers. Pretty happy. I figured this was enough to prove that there was a demand and I figured I’d continue on with the project.
I’ve drafted out the book, and man — there is a lot of writing to do. So far I’ve written ~4 chapters out of an expected 20.
Since the launch I’ve already sent out my first EDM, and got another pre-order! Who says email is dead?
Costs to date: $0
Revenue to date (Preorders): $76
Profit/Loss to date: +$76
So what’s next?
Subscribe to my new mailing list → Build Shit to find out.
It’s very casual mailing list where I talk about new projects I’m building in incredibly open details.
