Startups are born in one way only: a person has an idea, knowledge, passion and time.

A bit more original insight is that this often happens “on the side” of something, like work or studies. This is because you rarely cancel your daytime responsibilities to find a new project. Rather you suddenly get lured into something, for example by following your interest and being fooled by my favorite motto: “I didn’t do this because it was easy, I did it because I thought it would be.”

Many tend to think you're either in a regular job, or in a startup. But there is something inbetween. Most of us are actually “available” after 4 pm. That's when all the rest of life happens. Thats a lot of stuff. We´re talking netflix, workouts, knitting, family, sleep, hobbies or the magical SideProject. SideProjects to me are something that can be a product, like an app, webpage or physical thing. But I also think of art and music, so, I'm not quite sure on the definition.

These SideProjects can be “on the side” for five minutes' or fifteen years. Depending on what they are for. If you sell honey from your farm on the side its designed to stay that way forever. If you go all out on a new startup from day 1 it was still “on the side” for the first five minutes when you were thinking of it.

So everything starts on the side, but no one is nurturing this phase. That's weird! No one has taken a role at the start of startups.

Sure indiehackers are a thing and have had a lot of action the last few years, but I feel these people for the most part are solo founders. One-man/woman-shows can only bite off a certain size of products, so this environment itself isn't enough to make big things. YC argues you often need a cofounder since doing a startup is so hard, so I'm guessing big stuff needs more people, and thus more than the indiehacker communities.

There are also many incubators that help established startups. This is good because only 10% of startups succeed, so incubators try to make this number bigger. But there is another way to create more startups than raising this percentage, and that is raising the amount of startups that are subject to this percentage. And this happens somewhere between the indiehacker-community and the 10% of startups that succeed: in SideProject land.

But maybe there is a reason this SideProject-place doesnt exist. I'm fearful of a couple of hypotheses that often scare me for a couple of seconds before I brush them off.

One is that startups are so hard it cant be done on the side. There is something here. At some stage most things will need to be focused on more than 1-3 hours a day to succeed. But I also know many people that have successful sideprojects, and things that have grown into startups, so I dont quite believe this hypothesis. Maybe there still is a space for us here where we can nudge more people into getting started, and a follow a few brave souls throughout their project while it's still on the side. And if some sideproject graduates out of this and becomes a fulltime startup I wouldnt cry tears other than in proudness.

Another thing I fear is that maybe people “are born in a startup way.” You always hear about people that have been doing this stuff since the lemonade stand. But I dont believe this either. Paul Graham argued that doing a startup is hard, so maybe the filter is set right. But he believed that it wasnt. That there were more people that with the right environment could succeed. In Graham We Believe.

Related to the above there is also the fear that a sideproject community doesnt have a role to play in the sideproject landscape. The projects that are done in this space are the ones that will be done. But I dont really believe that either. We already see good effects of our community in the sideprojects that are there now.

So yeah, I think this should exist. For some cases the “on the side"-rig may be better than a normal startup, like when validation case is slow. There is no use in trying to become a parent in less than 9 months no matter how hard you try.

And it's an interesting time to have these thoughts. AI tools are lowering the bar for building, with the obvious consequence being more startups created. The not so obvious consequence, and what we will see first and very soon is: the number of sideprojects exploding.

We have 300+ members and are experimenting with what role in this landscape we could take. There are probably 70 SideProjects in the community. Earlier we mentioned the startup formula and wrote that you needed a “person” in the mix, but if there are more people in the mix then you need another ingredient as well: trust. You get trust by meeting people over time. Paul Graham said they at YC often got asked where to find a cofounder, and one of his best answers were “at school”. Smart people are there, life is fluid and you get to know them over time. Maybe we can be the other place you can meet people.

When I hang around here and watching people ship, chat and give feedback, it makes me feel like I know these people. I trust some of them. Maybe we can be a huge global arena where you find someone to build big things with.

We can definitively also inspire and nudge people. Seeing others win and share their stories has to mean something, especially when the topic is, "This project could make you rich and free forever. I did it; here's how." That's basic human interesting stuff.

Also, a thing I didnt have as much respect for as I apparently should: accountability seems important. Paul Graham argued that even founders accepted to YC that were working on their dream startup with the possibility of getting rich needed weekly dinners and demo day to light a fire under them to produce stuff with a sense of hurry. Interesting! So if we nudge people to commit to goals, have some healthy peer pressure and force people to show their work, then that's probably efficient tactics. Systematical luring is also a thing, I believe. Presenting a small problem to someone to get them interested, then suddenly they are deep down the SideProject startup rabbithole and working crazy hours. Love it!

Graham mentioned school as a period of fluid time. This is true, but the fluidity actually comes back, just in tiny annoying spikes. Its not there when you get your first job, or your first kid, or your second kid, or get sick. But it's there for a couple of hours, weeks or months between your first and second kid, or in those two months where the family was pretty healthy and your normal job was manageable. These periods can be used. And they can be used extra efficiently with the “shower thought” tactic: Limit your other problems so that the sideproject becomes your shower thought. The problem your mind drifts to while you're doing other things. This is a powerful way of problem solving. Having kids, for example, forces you to stop work, do other stuff that you maybe dont like, and then your mind wanders to your project. Whenever you then get 30 min in the evening you are pumped up and know exactly what to do to get progress. There is something more powerful here than just working non stop. There is nothing more efficient than parents.

In the community we have tested a couple of things. We spar on active projects, this works. We tested an incubator where 20% made it through the four weeks. This made me realize we need big numbers of attendees for these things, cause sideprojects are fragile things. This got us onto the thought of taking over the role Buildspace once had. In the incubator we tried taking 3% ownership, but we scrapped this for our Buildspace-copy test and now are live with the first "batch 1" of our Buildspace copy. Another thing we are testing is using the community as crowdsourced innovation for corporations. What kind of problems can corporations throw into this community with a money bounty attached, and get amazing ideas from hundreds of engineers/product leaders and designers? We're not trying to take on consulting work, but have several interesting leads for a pilot test on this. Like a recruiting firm asking the community: "What are recruiters not understanding about how to verify a good developer?" 500 USD to the best suggestion in two weeks…

Even if every project fails, nurturing sideprojects still makes sense. There is value in the repetitions and your shots on goal. You always hear founders needing a couple of reps before they are successful, and if you get those reps in a huge sideproject community while getting to know other reppers, then I believe huge things will be created by those exact people later in life.

I have a dream of Tore from Tromsø designing a thing where Batma from Botswana contributes as a fullstack developer, and Nick from Washington DC leads the product process. Batma shows himself as a reliable man and goes on to do three more products with Tore before they make something awesome.