Build Side Projects With 500k+ Users: Shipping & Growing
After a lot of thinking, you have finally come up with a great side project idea. Now here's the problem: How do you bring it to life? And after that, how will you get anybody to actually use it?
That's exactly what this course is here to help you with. After going through it, you will:
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1ļøā£ Understand what makes a great first version
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šÆ Learn easy, low-effort ways to improve a product
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š£ļø Set up the right mindset for processing user feedback
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š» Know how to build a smooth user interface
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š Get tactics to acquire users organically
If your work experience isn't enough to get interviews, you need your resume projects to pick up the slack and the only way for them to matter is if they get a meaningful amount of users.
Once you get 1,000+ users, your project will be better than 95%+ of other resume projects. When you get to 10,000+ users, you'll start turning the heads of recruiters, and if you can get 500,000+ users like this course talks about, tech companies (including FAANG) will be banging down your door, eager to hire you.
Alex Chiou is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10+ years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood. His success has also profoundly reflected in his compensation growth:
- 2014: Alex made $85,000 per year as a clueless new grad at PayPal š¤
- 2021: Alex made $750,000 per year as a high-performing tech lead at Robinhood š
In just 7 years, Alex was able to increase his pay by a staggering +800%, and a huge part of this was due to his side projects:
- 2015: Alex becomes Course Hero's 1st Android engineer and lead with 0 professional experience. His only Android experience at that point was building a couple side projects with 10,000+ users
- 2017: Alex gets into Facebook with his 100k+ user side project being a huge pull on his resume and a fascinating discussion point during the interview
- 2020: Alex crushes the most important round of his Robinhood onsite interview, a practical coding round where he has to build an Android app from scratch (i.e. just like what a side project is). He finishes the round in just 50% of the time, and the interviewer decided to just use the remaining time for a friendly chat
Side Project Master
Throughout his entire career, Alex has shipped 30+ side project mobile apps and consistently struck gold, building 10+ apps with 10,000+ users. He has delivered not 1, not 2, but 3 apps with 500k+ users. Here are the crown jewels:
- Random Name Picker - 1,150,000+ users, 4.6 rating after 5,700+ reviews
- Random Number Generator Plus - 880,000+ users, 4.8 rating after 6,700+ reviews
- SQL Practice PRO - Learn DBs - 700,000+ users, 4.8 rating after 9,400+ reviews
- Simple Flashcards Plus - 195,000+ users, 4.5 rating after 3,700+ reviews
Now guess how much Alex spent promoting his side projects to get them so many users...
š„ Drumroll please š„
$0.
Getting Top Interviews Without Even Applying
Alex has had tons of top tech companies reach out to him through his Google Play developer email, marveling at his massive side projects. Here's just some of them:
- OpenAI
- Uber (offered to jump him straight to the onsite twice)
- Discord
- Block
- Instacart
- Clubhouse (this was back when Clubhouse was the hottest startup during the pandemic, and they wanted him as their 1st Android engineer!)
Because of this, Alex hasn't needed to properly apply to a job in 7+ years.
High Code Velocity = No PIP
Alex has written far more Android code than almost every other Android engineer on earth due to his immense love for side projects. This made his coding muscles ultra-efficient and is a huge reason why Alex has never been a low performer across his entire career as an Android engineer.
Alex spent ~4 years at Meta and always got an "Exceeds Expectation" or higher rating every half despite Meta being an often brutal high-performance tech company. This is largely because he simply wrote more code than most other Meta engineers. With ~270 landed diffs per half in his last year at Meta, Alex was writing roughly double the commits of the average Meta engineer, putting him in the Top 5% of code committers.
