What counts as a user for my side project?
Recently built a web app to find and understand skincare products. For the purposes of resume and talking about it, what counts as a user?
I'm tracking on posthog. Can I count every unique person who visited/used my web app a user? This is imo akin to downloads in the app store i suppose?
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Discussion
(7 comments)- 14 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
As long as you have some reasonable explanation for "user" that you can defend, I'd pick the one that gives you the highest user count 😅
You can also be creative with how you phrase it, e.g. "Reached 300,000 users" is true (and impressive) if you had 300,000 unique pageviews, and I'd prefer that stat compared to "10,000 registered users"
Everyone knows that side projects are hard, so people will inflate things like revenue ("on track for $X next year) or users ("400,000 engagements on the company social accounts").
As a side note, this is why mobile apps are powerful as side projects. Since the download count and ratings are publicly computed by Apple and Google, it creates a fair playing field for developers.
- If someone has 100K+ downloads on their mobile app, I can validate by checking out the app page.
- If someone has 100K+ users on their web app, I might be a bit suspicious
Related: [Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free
- 04 months agoMid-Level Software EngineerTaro Community
Yeah that makes sense. On a landing page I could embed my posthog analytics for proof?
https://posthog.com/tutorials/how-to-embed-shared-dashboard
Maybe I can also link/show the reddit support i've gotten in the landing page to show that this works? as a testimonial perhaps
- 0
4 months agoHelpful TarodactylTaro CommunityFollow-up question on revenue - how do you make sure this gets past background check? Will background check companies ask for details?
- 0
4 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroFollow-up question on revenue - how do you make sure this gets past background check? Will background check companies ask for details?
As in "This revenue seems suspicious" or "I don't want this engineer effectively working 2 jobs if they were at my company"?
- 04 months agoHelpful TarodactylTaro Community
The former - so a company thinks it’s too good to be true that you’re making that much money from a side project.
- 04 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
If something is making meaningful revenue (i.e. enough to seriously impress a hiring manager going through your resume), the first line of defense is that the product actually looks polished. If you have user-facing proof like reviews, that will help as well showing that your product is legit.
After that, I would be prepared to share a revenue chart of some sort.
Zooming out though from the lens of jobs, I wouldn't worry too much about revenue for a side project. Your goal is to optimize for users and making $$$ directly conflicts with serving a stellar user experience.
I have never seen a product that looks/feels janky and also has a ton of users somehow (>10,000). Consumer products in particular tend to be meritocratic as it is so, so hard to get regular consumers to use your product (there's simply too many good websites/apps competing for attention).
I imagine nobody in this thread has a side project with 10,000+ users, so I wouldn't worry about this too much. Get the users first, and we can talk later. 😁
- 04 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
The loosest definition would be to just count unique IPs that visited your site at all, but that feels too generous.
The next level would be a registered user. A registered user on web seems equivalent to a mobile app install as both of those require some friction. I think this is a comfortable level to put for a resume that doesn't feel dishonest.
If you wanted to hold a really high bar for yourself it would be a registered user who also does a core action, which you would need to define. A core action could be doing a search or viewing the details of a skincare product for >2 seconds.
