Ask HN: Have you considered outsourcing your side projects?
I am sure I am not alone in this when I say that I have too many ideas for projects and not enough time. The pile of unfinished side projects continues to fester in my Documents folder as if to shame me, daily.
Has anyone considered paying a cheap-ish freelancer to just knock out some of the prototypes you have in mind and then picking it up from there?
I know that with side projects half the fun is doing it yourself, but it's also nice to actually realize your ideas and see them come to life. A small prototype can quickly validate your idea. Sometimes the hardest part about starting is setting up all the dependencies.
Has anyone done this? What did you learn?
I personally see different kinds of ideas:
* The "trivial" ones where there is no risk (we know it's possible) and it "just takes development time". Say I own sport infrastructures and I want to build a system (website, app, ...) where customers can pay, register to some classes, book some infrastructure, etc. In that case, it just takes a lot of development time, and therefore it's expensive. I won't be able to afford that "just for fun".
* The "innovative" ones where there is a risk: I think it would be useful, but it doesn't seem to exist, and I don't know if it is reasonably feasible or not. In that case, outsourcing would mean paying someone to do that research and possibly failing. Many times it will fail (because it's not possible, which explains why nobody does it). If I fail myself, I have learned a lot in the process. If I pay someone to fail, I have just lost my money.
Now it's probably possible to pay someone to develop a product, try to sell this product and then re-invest in the product. But at this point it's not a side project, it's entrepreneurship :-).
To me the whole idea of a side project is that it is something I would like to do, myself. If I was paid to work on it full time, it would become my job and it would stop being a side project. And then other side projects would pop up!
I've sometimes considered it, but:
• For most of them most (well over half) of the fun is in doing it myself
• I don't know where to get good freelancers; a half-arsed job would be much more annoying than just having an unfinished project.
• Some of them are partly or all hardware projects adding logistical complexity to hiring a freelancer.
Plus I have rather too many in-flight projects so the total cost would be too much to finish them all; presumably people without this problem are actually on track to finish their projects without needing another pair of hands :D
For people looking to turn their side-projects into a business I guess the calculus would be rather different though.
I did and still do quite some outsourcing (hiring freelancers) for my projects. Since I work for myself, I am also monetizing on my side projects. I also don’t have time, but this is part of the reason. Simply, there a lot of stuff I don’t know how to do, and an experienced freelancer does not only help, but can teach you a lot of stuff.