Side Projects. Big Impact.
How shipping small (and big) ideas transformed my career as a designer.
Hey welcome back, the playbook is still very young but so far I’ve been loving it. I’ll share some metrics soon.
Keep the feedback coming, it means a lot 🫰🫂
Thanks for reading!
My most impactful work came from projects that made no money, or close to no money.
They are also one of my best career memories. By far.
Not client work. Not startup jobs. But late-night side projects with friends.
Embracing the process rather than the results, weirdly.
I’m pretty sure this resonates with some of you.
In my How I Went From Jail to Building a Design Career post, I mentioned being courted by some Big Tech companies when my career was ramping up.
Here’s the kicker: none of them cared about my client work.
Every single one asked about my side projects. Not client work.
They wanted to know how I built those products—challenges, setbacks, and sneak peeks included. They didn’t care about the financial outcome, they just wanted a sneak peak on how those projects initiated and how they were executed.
More recently at Zenly and amo, roles were inverted. I was in the position of the recruiter.
I screened hundreds of portfolios in a very short timespan. Past the standard background checks, I always looked for side projects first. Not the shiny big tech experiences.
Having a couple of those under your belt tells a story about your dedication and passion.
The thing about side projects is that they're your purest work. They’re not contaminated by endless meetings, politics or BS. Just raw craft and dedication.
They are, by essence, secondary, but because they are secondary, it allows you to step back and truly think about all the aspects of that project.
You’re your own one-person show pulling the strings to get shit done.
Side projects unfair advantage right there: most of the time you won’t even perceive them as actual work.
Hey, this could also be your company’s unfair advantage—whether you’re a founder or an employee reading this. But I bet encouraging employees to spend time on anything outside work hours isn’t part of the culture. Worst, it can even be contractually risky.
That’s why hackathons were invented.
“Bro they want to work on side projects during weekends. Let’s make them do it. But for the company. We’ll get them pizzas”.
Nice try though.
The value and benefits of stepping back from the routine and removing the blindfolds for a moment far outweigh the fears of sidetracks.
On another hand, cherish the companies where side projects are encouraged. Spread the word about those.
Let’s clear up a cliché. Side projects doesn’t mean secondary job.
They can be as simple as you make them:
A portfolio update: Whether you’re designer, a PM or an engineer, it can’t hurt to update your personal branding.
An app you love that you want to redesign: This is my favorite. Not only does it make you a better designer—especially if you’re new to the game—but it can also land you a cool job if your concept strikes a nerve.
A Github repo of a component you built and want to distribute. Go chase those fancy stars.
A Figma Community file or plugin.
Advising a company you love. At Zenly I actually took a bit of my free time to advise some companies. It’s been highly beneficial for both my personal and my professional experiences.
It allowed me to discover new products, teams, and founders—and recharge my creativity and productivity. I’ll write more extensively about this soon.
But hey it’s true though. Sometimes something dead simple can turn into something bigger. In which case it cannot be called side projects anymore but side hustle—or just plain business.
In a previous post, I talked about partnering with friends. I can’t count how many times what started as a client relationship turned into a real partnership.
That’s exactly what happened with David & Elfred. We used to work on so many projects together — like this weird and lovely skeuo speaker Twitter app — that it just made sense to team up at some point.
In my post, I also briefly mentioned “selling rejected designs as templates online under an alias.”
Why an alias? I didn’t want my name attached to lower-value products. Not sure I’d do that today—it prevented me from actively marketing it.
Still, it’s by FAR the best ROI I’ve ever had.
Get this. It took me around 6 hours to clean up my design files, put a few marketing pages together, some decent copywriting and submit them for review.
“Congrats, your asset will be priced $9.”
wtf 🤡
On these platforms, back then, you didn’t get to set the price. Reviewers decided based on trends and demand.
It sold like hotcakes. It even reached top selling items for a while.
I made over $50k in total for those 6 hours of extra work. And amazingly enough, I still sell a few pieces monthly nowadays, even though I haven’t updated them in 12 years.
Let me recap that again: I earned in total 50% of my annual salary in 2012 by selling what my clients didn’t want.
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, it’s never been easier to build your own proof of concept or tiny piece of software—and actually make a dent.
This is not your simple side gig anymore. It’s worth diving into headfirst.
I’ve seen incredible work from friends and other talented folks lately.
The tools are there. The passion is there.
Kickstart something today, not tomorrow.
Ship it and show it to me.
Julien.