Cindy's Newsletter #9 - Managing multiple side projects
Cindy's Newsletter #9 - Managing multiple side projects
Managing too many things at once, don't do this at home!
Now that I’m a business owner, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and keeping some of my time free for various projects and to learn. I believe it’s important to keep a pulse on what’s going on, and nothing beats experience and playing with the new (to me) bits. Things goes so fast online that you can never stay totally idle.
I don’t have trouble with what would Daniel Vassallo call blue line income and maintaining that source of stable income, but I could never stick to just that and need the variety he describes. It would kill me inside to have nothing else going on (for fun or for hope of profit).
I do have to try and manage all of those projects, or I would always jump on new things and never get anything done. I’m also trying to keep each project small so I can release them.
For now, my main productivity system is my Trello board. I need to write those things down since it’s too distracting to keep it all in my head. I have too many columns, the most important ones being:
In progress: The projects I’m actively working on for that month. I’m trying to stick to a maximum of 3 projects : enough to cater to my cravings to work on many things, but not too many that I’m hopelessly spread out.
For now, I have my little Etsy SaaS, finishing up my mushroom incubator (and related article) and spinning up a fancier eCommerce site for my sock business so I can point paid traffic to it.
Small tasks: Other things I have to do to make the business work like this newsletter, filling taxes, sending a quote, preparing seed orders and other small ongoing stuff.
Idea backlog: Projects I’m likely to do or ideas for an ongoing project that’s too far off in the future. I’m probably never going to act on all on them, but many are going to start their life there.
Freezer: Business ideas I’ve come across and I like or that I come back to regularly. Most of them are unlikely to ever see the light of day, but they can percolate there, you never know. Mostly used to empty my brain of them and for brainstorming purposes.
I can’t judge yet about the money since I didn’t have that much time to make that system work: with a full-time job, my budgeted time would go mostly to fun projects and a tiny bit of freelance programming on the side to keep the skills I couldn’t use at my job sharp.
Also, I’m considering those first few years as an experiment. I’m sure I’ll never have just one business, but once I know what I really like (beside coding, which I already know I like 😇) I can put more of it on my schedule.
Projects updates
I had a big photo shot with my socks so I could make my Etsy listing a lot better. I’m far from perfect at product photography but it’s a lot better than it was.
I’m going to give them away to family next so I can take pictures of them on people’s feet. You can see the results here: https://manibassocks.etsy.com.
I’ve signed up for a Coursera course on Facebook ads and started working on a WooCommerce store for the socks so I can have a nicer place to point paid ads to, so I needed those pictures for the site and upcoming ads too.
I’ve also switched most of my sites over to the new Google Universal Analytics, I was tired of Google’s nagging and probably won’t have time to do it in the middle of the summer when the old one will be switched off.
Feeling of the week
I’ve been thinking about this one a lot while setting up my SaaS boilerplate. The more I learn, the more I’m surprised that whole internet thing works that smoothly.
Ways I can help you
Get your cozy, made-to-fit wool socks at https://manibas.com.
For my Canadian friends, I have a nano business selling seeds from my garden at https://sentiersperdus.net/en. Sorry, due to various phytosanitary concerns, it’s hard to ship those outside Canada
Don’t hesitate to reply to this email if you want to chat about software development