[throwaway4338]

Use your paycheck to directly pay a braindead coder with zero creativity or ambition who does nothing more than meet requirements, like you're fucking dictating to them. for added oomph they can be in a low-income country, but people with no creativity or initiative or ability to translate requirements into code aren't worth much anywhere.

So rather than code anything yourself, just give htem requirements that read like a to-do list for yourself, after you've already doen all the theoretical leg-work:

#1.1 to-do: when this form is submitted, pop up this confirmation form:

#1.1.1 Confirmation asking if user wants to leave page? #1.1.1.1 if user clicks yes, redirect them to the link clicked #1.1.1.2 if user clicks no, keep them on page.

#1.1.2 Form submission: when user submits form, run valdation

#1.1.2.1 if the name is not betwene 2 and 30 characters show an error "Name must be between 2 and 30 characters"

#1.1.2.2 if the email address is not in the format (one or more characters or numbers) @-sign (one or more characters or numbers) and contain at least one period after hte @-sign, then error message reads "Please input a valid email address."

and so on and so forth. stuff that makes your eye water regarding how incredibly, uselessly boring it is, like you're an executive and can't even tell your business manager to accept a bid, you must fucking dictate the letter itself.

However, as incredibly annoying as this process is, it takes you approximately half an hour to do a day's worth of work with it. You can review progress every day in half an hour over breakfast.

So, there is your answer regarding how to build a side project while you're working full-time: manage dirt-cheap disposible developers on Odesk or Elance who get off on adding absolutely zero benefit whatsoever of any kind to a project, besides doing exactly what they are told in painstaking detail.

This is being made from a throwaway because I haven't heard this idea expressed and people might not realize that this is the answer. As for my tone/style, I think it's completely wrong for any developer to agree to be in such a role, and the REAL correct solution would be to manage a creative, contributing developer who gets equity in the result and has more free time than you. But what do I know.

[chambo622]

Serious question: has any product or service of lasting value and success ever come out of an approach like this? It runs counter to most commonly-held beliefs on how great ideas turn into great products.

[throwaway4338]

absolutely, but nobody talks about this. This is simply handing off requirements, contracting them out. Your question can be rephrased as "has any product or service of lasting value and success ever had any part of it contracted out" and clearly the answer is yes. Not everything is built in-house. People don't usually mention it however.

(it's not accepting my edits on the original comment, I am trying to change "aren't worth much anywhere" (which sounds like a value judgment) to "don't command a high rate anywhere.")

[deepsun]

I can confirm, though I cannot legally name the products.

As a hint, it's pretty probable (if you live in US) that your healthcare financial information is managed by a system that I took part in development while being 2-grade student freelancing at the other side of the Earth. And many my friends did the same.

I've seen the biggest internet websites have their major customer-facing features developed by my friends, yet everybody thinks it was done in California.

[jqm]

Ya, but you could do that little bit of stuff in less time then it took to write up the spec, put up the work, sift through potential contractors and ensure what you got met your needs (going back to step 2 when it didn't). Plus you would know how it fit together since you wrote it so it would be somewhat easy to alter/reuse.

As far as side projects, 40 hours a week to work isn't that much. I usually work 50+ and have most of my work life. Lots of people work even more. If you did this you would have at least ten hours a week to work on a side project. Incidentally, I still have spare time. To do things like post this comment. What are you doing with your spare time? Video games? Movies? Facebook? Might be worth looking at. Life is short and you don't get time back.

Start small. Do a little project. Something that takes 8 or 10 hours. Then, with that under your belt tackle something bigger.

[ysriram]

Coding the idea is probably the easiest part. Getting people to use your product and iterating over user feedback is time consuming. Also, "build it and they will come" doesnt work (more so in the AppStore)

[jqm]

Agreed. But the topic was building a side project not getting users... which is certainly the more difficult part.