Last month, I started a personal goal to release 12 side project ideas in 12 months. I have a -somewhat- long list of side project ideas that I've sworn myself to take to the finish line, but I have never been able to. Some of these are still just ideas, and others became projects that are now abandoned. Not anymore!

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The inspiration comes from Başak's tweet about the same idea.

The idea is to work on 1 product for a whole month, for 12 months. No matter what happens, after a month, that product will be released. This helps me to keep focused on what is really important and to keep perfectionist me at bay.

Of course, I won't release something that is not working. But that's actually the point. The strict goal and my perfectionism will create a combination that I think will always make a usable product.

To begin, I came up with a spreadsheet where I keep these ideas and where I try to keep track of the amount of time/effort I invest on each idea compared to their profit.

One interesting sceneario that I know will come up is that after releasing the first product, I will start working on the second product while making changes and improvements to the first product. Then, when the second product is released, I will starting working on the third product while making changes and improvements on the first 2 products. So, after 1 year, I'll be working on 12 products at the same time. Insane.

I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when that happens, but I need it to happen so I can start worrying about it. The goal: making this problem become true.

For now, this is my release plan for the first 3 products:

Codename	Release date
Plin	2023-08-01
Sprintdroid	2023-09-01
Cloudemica	2023-09-28

I will not get into details about what each codename and product is actually about. One detail worth sharing is that these 3 initial ideas are SaaS products.

Time and Money

It's important to remark that, unlike Başak, I do have a full-time job. And I plan to keep it like that at least for now. Meaning: I'll work my full-time job and work on side product ideas either before or after my "work day". Plus weekends and holidays.

I guess I'm not brave enough yet to resign my full-time job and make this my only focus. In the other hand, however, I also don't have that big of a runway of saved money to live of in the meantime. I have personal goals for which I need to save up money every month.

The blog

One of things I noticed while working on my first product was that I needed to have a conversation with myself to collect my thoughts about what happened on that day. Or what happened since the last time I had this conversation with myself. Some people might call this meditating. I'm calling it retrospectives.

A retrospective goes very similar to a Scrum Sprint Retrospective.

Until this point you might have to started worrying about me. Poor Alejandro talking to himself. Well, I'm not. I hold these retrospective "meetings with myself" by typing my thoughts in a Google Docs document.

First, I make a summary of the time spent in side products during the period. I'm using Toggl to track my time.

Then, I focus on answering 3 questions:

• What to keep doing
• What to stop doing
• What to start doing

These retrospectives became very helpful to identify where I was wasting time.

In one of these retrospectives, I was hit with the idea that I could publish these documents publicly, even if nobody cares to read them, to help me with accountability.

And that's how this blog was born. I'll write about my findings in the retrospective conversations and tech challenges that I find in my way that could be interesting to share.