F2F #42: Side project jealousy
If you're jealous of your side project, it means that it's a solid project
Over the course of the years, I've had a couple of successful side-projects that ended up stealing the thunder of my main thing.
Even though I started MarsBased and Startup Grind at the same time, the main focus was MarsBased, because it's my own company, while I kept Startup Grind as a side thing. MarsBased is a real solid business while Startup Grind operates on a franchise level, and I got the chapter of Barcelona.
MarsBased is a boring business: we sell consulting and IT projects. Projects in, projects out. A lifestyle business, projected to do 3MM in revenue this year, with a team of 30 people, that's been sort of a cash cow and a very calm company for eleven years. I say it's boring because from the perspective of a journalist, it's not easy to find an innovative angle to cover a company that sells services, nowadays (we do have our edges, but I'll leave that for another day). Maybe, more than boring, the word I'm fishing for to describe this kind of business is unsexy.
Slowly but steadily, I grew Startup Grind to 9000 members, sold out events every month with founders and C-levels of cool companies (like Zynga, Stripe, Shazam, Google Ventures, Codecademy, etc.) as guests - and also as attendees - and I soon started getting attention from press. I was interviewed in the major newspapers (and some radios) in Spain, but I could never talk about MarsBased. Maybe a tiny wee bit, because they wanted the cool thing: a big event with famous people, sponsored by Google.
I have been known as Àlex from Startup Grind or Àlex the startup guy in Barcelona. But rarely ever do people refer to me as Àlex from MarsBased.
Now, it's happening again with Foc a Terra, the weekly podcast I co-host in Catalan. It's raking in thousands of downloads per episode, and we have sponsors and interest from major media outlets. Famous guests line up to appear on the show, barely three years after we launched, while the MarsBased podcast appeals only to the low hundreds of people per episode, five years down the line.
The lesson here is: if you're jealous of your side project, it means that it's a solid project. That project needs to fly and has to receive double efforts from your end so long as it doesn't affect your main gig negatively. In fact, you should make it so that both projects feed each other positively to keep the momentum going.
The other learning - a much harder pill to swallow - is that your main gig maybe doesn't merit any kind of spotlight and you have to accept it. Maybe MarsBased doesn't really require that and I should focus my efforts in marketing MarsBased indirectly through the side projects so it makes more money and I can keep financing those side projects.
Thoughts? Feedback? As always, thanks for reading!