Got 1000 users on my side project, now what?
I'm a backend engineer and I've been working weekends/after work on my side project for the last 3 months because my actual work experience is really awful due to bad team matching, I barely even code in my day job. On reddit I got about 100k views and 500 upvotes total with 60 comments. I now have 1000 people who have done a core action on my app/meaningfully used my app
But now I feel like to get to 10k users I pretty much just need to spend 95% of my time just marketing/content creation and 5% actually building software.
My goal is to use this to get more interviews at companies im interested in (which are unicorns/late stage startups) and then start job searching early next year. (not interested rn since its holidays and I want to take it easy/have fun)
Is it worth investing time working on this project and spending my free time after work creating a tiktok and marketing this app and posting on reddit for the next few months? I certainly wont be learning anything, but users do look good on the resume.
If it wasnt that I would be spending time practicing leetcode. Not anything aggressive but just 1hr a day which really adds up over 60 days. Not sure which is higher ROI
TL;DR: side project has 1000 users. should I leetcode in free time or market my side project?
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Discussion
(7 comments)- 213 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
I'm leaning toward studying Leetcode (aim for mastery!) because:
- A side project with 1000 users is already quite impressive, and you can talk about how it's continuing to grow. Getting to 10K users probably won't change the narrative much.
- The skills needed to grow the side project won't be applicable to your next job. Like you said, the distribution is the hard part now to grow your app. If you're optimizing for climbing the career ladder, you won't need the marketing/video making skills as much.
- As a side note, this is why I recommend SWEs to build pure utility apps that can don't require a social network or upkeep. The utility apps can continue to grow on their own through search traffic in app stores or Google search.
Once you're landing interviews, your side project has had the intended impact -- get your foot in the door. The reason to continue building the side project after that is:
- You enjoy it
- You're learning from it
- You want to monetize it
- You think it could become a "real" business
- 013 days agoJunior SWETaro Community
I did look into SEO optimization but it looks SEO optimization is really tough because a lot of it depends on "backlinks" and writing blogs to answer questions people search for which can be difficult to rank up. It's definitely possible but its far higher ROI to post on twitter or make a tiktok imo
- 1
12 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroAs a heads up, backlinks aren't that important. It must be a vestige of what used to work for SEO. We have tried for years (and mostly failed) to get meaningful SEO traffic to Taro, and we found out that backlinks don't matter the hard way.
The true way to get Google SEO relatively quickly is to generate a lot of high-quality, content-rich pages. It doesn't matter if your DR (domain reputation) is tiny. Most side projects won't be able to do this unfortunately.
- 012 days agoJunior SWE [OP]Taro Community
oh thats interesting! I find that the conversion rate (to my north star metric) of google seo users is really horrible compared to social media posts. Plus its hard to control for geography, my app is targeted towards north america users
- 113 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Oh wow, congrats on getting 1,000 users! 99% of junior engineers can't even come close to what you've accomplished, so you should be incredibly proud.
You can grow a product with raw marketing, but as you've probably figured out, that's not super fun and it also defeats one of the core purposes of a side project: Technical learning
Instead of spending a bunch of time on content marketing, think about how you can organically multiply that 1k to 10k with word of mouth. Go through your email feedback and reviews (if you have them). If you don't have much, you can even email users to do a user research call to figure out what they like/don't like.
TL;DR: side project has 1000 users. should I leetcode in free time or market my side project?
It depends on what your job search currently looks like. If you have 3 FAANG interviews lined up, you obviously should spend 75%+ of your free time on LeetCode grinding. But if you're in a position where you just need to get the interviews to begin with, the side project makes more sense to beef up your resume. I talk about this all incredibly in-depth in my job searching course: Ace Your Tech Interview And Get A Job As A Software Engineer
- 113 days agoJunior SWETaro Community
Thank you for the kind words alex and rahul!
I think as suggested I will prioritize leetcode prep in my free time and put the app as second priority. Posting on reddit is pretty low effort and theres like 20 different subreddits I can post to so im planning on just round robining them
My main question here was to know how much roi is there compared to 10k users vs 1k and its seeming like not much. Thanks once again really appreciate the insights as always!
- 012 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
There is a huge difference between 10k and 1k both in terms of learning (more users = more issues to handle) and the attractiveness to employers. 1k users is at a point where it's rare but could be fluke (e.g. you wrote 1 social media thing that did well and drove a bunch of registered users). 10k is at the point where there's almost certainly something special happening and 99.9% of engineers overall won't have a side project that large.
That being said, going from 1k to 10k is incredibly hard. You can definitely try sending out more applications and doing interview prep with your current 1k side project resume and see where it lands you.
I recommend sharing some LinkedIn posts as well about the achievement. I know many engineers who've done that and had employers take notice.
