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Interview with SideProject Officer Aslak
Aslak is doing a SideProject to remove his own pain, competing with Facebook, and testing out cool tactics from books he is reading!
Hey! Who are you and what is your sideproject?
I'm Aslak, a 31 year old fullstack engineer. In my day job I'm at the startup Konfidens where we make software to help psychologists run their private practice. I've been a habitual side-projecter for several years and I've always got a couple going. My main project these days is Shera, a replacement to Facebook Events.
What's your story and how did you get started with the project?
I've steadily been trying to get less dependent on Facebook, and while I've conceded that I can't quite delete my accounts I can at least limit my use of the Meta products as much as possible. Removing most notifications and the apps from my home screens have worked really well for me, however some tools like messenger I can't really get rid of. One of the big ones is Facebook events. Every now and then I have a birthday party or such and need a place to invite people. Facebook has all the friends for easy invites, but most of the people I'm inviting are already in a couple of group chats. And with more and more people getting rid of their Facebook accounts, doing events on facebook might not even be feasible. It seemed obvious that an alternative should exist, but back when I first started looking I couldn't find any so I just decided to build it myself. How have you done product development underways?
Since my main hobby is making web apps and testing out new technologies, product development has been the main part of the project. I've just been coding along on nights when I feel motivated. I get a lot of motivation from people using my products and the feedback they give me, so the project will sometimes go dormant for a couple of months, quickly followed by a major rewrite when I get too embarrassed about my old code. Not super good as a business practice, but great as a hobby! What has worked surprisingly well and surprisingly bad?
One of my motivations was trying out the t3-stack, and it's been a blast. Highly recommended for any developers doing small to medium scale web projects! I've got a slew of projects that are mostly tools that help me, with no users and no business value. One of the goals with Shera is to think more about growing it and monetization. I still feel like I'm a ways off before I could charge anything for Shera. I'm unsure if it's true that I should get further with the development before charging, or if I'm just failing at focusing on the business part. But the growing of the project is going surprisingly well. After a recent Kode24 article about the project I've been getting a large uptick in events so it's showing some promise! What books and podcasts have made an impact on you?
The book that has had the most of an impact on Shera is probably The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. It lays out strategies for building products with network effects, and I was looking for a project to try out some of its tricks. What do you believe that few agree with you on?
I'm not sure many people would say they disagree, but I very strongly believe in getting quickly to a product that is actually usable for something, and then start using it. With web development it's very easy to get stuck building for buildings sake, and while that can be fun you learn way more and way faster when people are actually using your products. Where can we find out more about you and your project?
https://shera.no/, and the newsletter found at https://shera.beehiiv.com/ are the best way of keeping up with Shera. If you're a developer the code is open source over at https://github.com/aslakhol/shera and I love getting issues and pull requests. If you want to check out any of my other projects you can find them at https://aslak.io/ (Yes, I've had the trello card for building a portfolio site on my board for a few years now.). I've also got a twitter I don't use, or you could always reach me on linkedin or by email.