Potential Side Project with a Matchmaking Site (with real users)

Question

I have an opportunity to work on what could be an interesting side-project.

I was approached by a matchmaker friend of mine to help her with her website. Her website is currently used by ~80 matchmakers and the number of matchmakers is growing. Essentially, the site is a database of profiles that matchmakers can search based on various criteria.

After speaking with my friend, it's clear there are 2 main things that need to be done.

The first is a website migration. Right now the site is hosted on Salesforce which my friend says is expensive, so she's looking to host on something cheaper.

The second thing is she wants to develop a mobile app because so many of the matchmakers matchmake on the go and it's inconvenient for them to use a site that's not optimized for mobile.

This project has a number of great qualities

An area of interest (to me)
Real users with a real business problem
Potential to get paid for my work
Ability to make lots of connections and develop my network
Grow my technical skills through web-dev and mobile-dev

As it happens, a lot of the plusses are also minuses:

I'm a Data Engineer and have never done front-end or mobile-dev, so I'll have to learn a lot and it could be stressful
I'm 2 months into a 6 month contract Data Engineer role at Instacart (my first Big Tech job) and really want to be renewed if possible. Working on this orthogonal project in the evening won't allow me to work on work

Overall, I'm learning towards just punting on this, i.e. telling my friend I don't have time for this right now, helping her find someone, and if I change my mind later on, offering to help then.

Am curious if people feel strongly one way or the other regarding what to do.

Thought are welcome!

Thanks!

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

I'd almost certainly pass on this:  How quickly is the number of matchmakers growing?** If she can't/won't tell you, ask how long it took to get 80 matchmakers, and extrapolate from that. How impressive is your friend?** Has she built a successful side project or company before?  A common issue with people, esp non-technical people, is that they want to play startup. So they do all the things that successful companies do: hire people, build a mobile app, and modernize the tech stack. BUT they're missing the most important part: they're not actually solving a problem that enough people care about.  With only 80 matchmakers, why not just use something like Airtable or a Google sheet? Does there really need to be a mobile app? What's the long-term vision of this project?

Potential Side Project with a Matchmaking Site (with real users)

Discussion