This is the first chapter of my book, which you can also download in PDF format. If you want to read more you can buy the book here.

这是我书的第一章，也可以PDF格式下载 。 如果您想，可以在这里购买 。

为什么要进行专案？ (Why Side Projects?)

This book is about creating profitable side projects. It isn’t about building the next big thing, and retiring on your millions in three years time after an acquisition by Facebook. It isn’t even about building businesses that will replace the main income of your existing job, freelance work or agency. This book is about launching a product that will make enough money to pay its way as part of your portfolio of revenue generating activities as an individual or business. A side project that is worth investing time and money into, because it shows a return. A side project that won’t be abandoned due to the need to work on more lucrative opportunities.

这本书是关于创建有利可图的辅助项目的。 这并不是要建立下一个重大目标，而是要在Facebook收购后的三年内让数百万美元退休。 甚至与建立业务将取代现有工作，自由职业或中介的主要收入无关。 这本书是关于发布一种产品的，该产品将赚到足够的钱来支付其作为个人或企业创收活动组合的一部分。 值得投资时间和金钱的附带项目，因为它显示出回报。 不会因需要从事更多有利可图的机会而放弃的附带项目。

Side projects are about more than just the money you might make from them. Launching Perch opened up a world of opportunities to learn and develop my skills as a business person. Working with clients we were often in the position of needing to help them market products, by way of the sites and applications we developed for them. The things I learned through marketing my own product could be fed back into our suggestions to clients.

辅助项目不仅仅是您可以从中赚钱。 Perch的推出为学习和发展我作为商务人士的技能开辟了很多机会。 与客户合作，我们经常需要通过我们为客户开发的站点和应用程序来帮助他们销售产品。 我通过营销自己的产品中学到的东西可以反馈给我们给客户的建议。

Developing your own product means that, perhaps for the first time, you are also the client, you get to make the final decisions. If you need to bring in outside help to launch or develop your product you may well quite literally become a client, and in a later chapter I’ll share with you some of the things I have learned by being on the other side of the relationship. Even if you do all of the work yourself or in house, the chance to have total control and have no-one else deciding to chip away at design decisions or limit technical choices is an exciting, and sometimes terrifying, thing.

开发自己的产品意味着，也许您也是客户，这是您第一次做出最终决定。 如果您需要外部帮助来启动或开发产品，那么您很可能会成为客户，在下一章中，我将与您分享与我建立关系的另一端所学到的一些知识。 。 即使您自己或在家完成所有工作，获得完全控制权而又没有其他人决定放弃设计决策或限制技术选择的机会却是令人兴奋的，有时甚至是令人恐惧的事情。

It is possible to get many of these additional benefits of a side project with a free product, but as we will see in this book, things change when you start charging and making money. The expectations and feedback from your users will be different and, as a business, once you start to see your product as part of your total revenue your focus is very different from that toward something you just give away.

使用免费产品可以获得附带项目的许多其他好处，但是正如我们将在本书中看到的那样，当您开始收费和赚钱时，情况会发生变化。 用户的期望和反馈将有所不同，并且作为一项业务，一旦您开始将产品视为总收入的一部分，则您的关注点将与您仅放弃的关注点完全不同。

小梦被低估了 (Dreaming Small is Underrated)

When I talk to my peers about our journey with Perch, I often start to hear their own ideas and dreams of the product they have always wanted to build. Frequently it seems that the sticking point is that this product has already become so fully-featured, so large in their minds that they are unable to get started on it, where would they find the time? Launching something that solves such a huge problem would take a huge amount of development time, need a lot of money invested up front. Or, they can only see the end goal, the point at which the product is all they work on, they are unable to see the progression from being a freelancer or agency to being a product business because they imagine they would need to immediately switch from A to B.

当我与同伴谈论我们在Perch的旅程时，我经常开始听到他们对自己一直想制造的产品的想法和梦想。 通常，问题的症结在于该产品已经变得功能齐全，在他们的脑海中如此之大，以至于他们无法开始使用它，他们会在哪里找到时间？ 推出能够解决如此巨大问题的产品将花费大量的开发时间，并且需要大量的前期投入。 或者，他们只能看到最终目标，即他们所从事的产品工作的全部，他们无法看到从成为自由职业者或代理商到成为产品业务的进程，因为他们认为他们需要立即从A到B

It isn’t surprising that people feel this way. We’re told to “reach for the stars” and to “dream big”. The press is full of stories of entrepreneurs who have risked it all, eaten noodles for three years while sleeping under their desks and are now basking in the glory of their acquisition. Big wins; big stories make the news. The news rarely reports on the hundreds of similar desk dwelling, noodle eating hopefuls who are still clinging to a dream that is unlikely to ever materialize. The news also tends to fail to report on the many small, successful product businesses that are launched every day by people like you and I. People who can develop something small, launch it, make money from day one and develop it into a nice business. A business that is providing something of real value to its customers and enough revenue to give it longevity.

人们有这种感觉也就不足为奇了。 有人告诉我们“伸手可及的距离”和“梦想远大”。 媒体上充满了企业家的故事，他们冒着一切风险，在桌子下面睡觉的时候吃了三年的面条，现在沉迷于收购的荣耀。 大胜； 大故事成为新闻。 该新闻很少报道数百个类似的桌子上的住所，希望吃面条的人仍然执着于一个不可能实现的梦想。 该消息还往往无法报道由您和我这样的人每天发起的许多小型成功产品业务。可以开发小型产品，开展业务，从一开始就赚钱并将其发展为良好业务的人。 为客户提供实际价值和足够收入以延长使用寿命的业务。

Therefore I really do believe that many decent product ideas are abandoned due to the gulf between what we believe makes for a successful product and reality. If your idea is likely to bring in $20,000 per year of revenue, that is never going to make any headlines. It is not going to be of interest to any investors. However, if you are currently a freelancer or running a small agency, what difference would an extra $20,000 a year make to your cash-flow? For many web designers that figure is going to represent the income from several projects. Success can mean many different things, and the beauty of a side project is that you get to define that success for yourself.

因此，我确实相信，由于我们认为成功的产品与现实之间存在鸿沟，因此放弃了许多体面的产品创意。 如果您的想法很可能每年带来20,000美元的收入，那将永远不会成为头条新闻。 它不会引起任何投资者的兴趣。 但是，如果您当前是自由职业者或正在经营一家小型代理公司，那么每年额外赚取20,000美元会对您的现金流量产生什么影响？ 对于许多网页设计师来说，这个数字将代表几个项目的收入。 成功可能意味着许多不同的事情，并且附带项目的美在于您可以自己定义成功。

什么决定您的产品成功？ (What defines success for your product?)

When we launched Perch, back in 2009, we hoped to sell a copy per day. A copy per day at £35 (about $56 USD) would mean that Perch brought in, after deductions for payment processing and so on, around £10,000 ($16,000) per year. This was enough revenue to make the product worth continuing to develop and to ensure we could support the customers who were using it. If your product is going to require ongoing support and resources then you need to have some idea of what constitutes enough success to maintain it. How many customers and accounts would enable you to see this as a successful part of your portfolio?

当我们在2009年推出Perch时，我们希望每天出售一份。 每天35英镑（约合56 美元 ）的副本意味着Perch在扣除付款处理等之后，每年带来大约10,000英镑（16,000美元）。 这笔收入足以使产品值得继续开发，并确保我们能够为使用它的客户提供支持。 如果您的产品需要持续的支持和资源，那么您需要对什么构成足够的成功进行维护有一些了解。 有多少客户和帐户可以使您将其视为投资组合的成功组成部分？

Ultimately Perch surpassed our expectations, selling more than four times that goal of one license per day in its first year. However, starting small and defining success as being quite a modest thing enabled us to quickly get Perch to launch, and getting something launched as soon as possible should be your focus right now.

最终，Perch超出了我们的预期，第一年每天的销售量就达到了一个许可证目标的四倍以上。 但是，从小做起并将成功定义为一件微不足道的事情，使我们能够Swift启动Perch，并且应该尽快着手启动某项工作。

到达装运点 (Getting to the Shipping Point)

I expect most readers will be familiar with the Lean Startup concept of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It’s a term that is used to describe a small product or feature of a product that has been developed with just enough features to make it viable – to be enough that people will be willing to buy or sign up. I really like the description in John Radoff’s blog post on the subject,

我希望大多数读者会熟悉MVP （最小可行产品）的精益启动概念。 这个术语用于描述小型产品或产品的功能，该产品具有足够的功能以使其可行-足以使人们愿意购买或注册。 我真的很喜欢约翰·拉多夫（John Radoff）关于该主题的博客文章中的描述，

“The goal of a startup is to find the sweet-spot where minimum product and viable product meet–get people to fall in love with you. Over time, you listen to your customers, make improvements and raise the bar on what viable means–making it more expensive for competitors to jump in.” – John Radoff

“创业公司的目标是找到最低限度的产品和可行的产品相遇的最佳地点-让人们爱上您。 随着时间的流逝，您会倾听客户的声音，进行改进，并提高可行手段的标准，从而使竞争对手参与其中的成本更高。” – 约翰·拉多夫 （ John Radoff）

The funded startup may well have the luxury of being able to develop just enough of a product that people will be willing to subscribe to a free plan. If you are launching a bootstrapped product then your aim should be to ship something that people are willing to give you money for as quickly as possible. This means launching with the minimum that will make your product something people are happy to buy. Getting people to give you money is important and not just because, as a bootstrapper, you need it to continue investing in the product. Launching with something free, or running a long beta period may get you users, but won’t necessarily get you customers. While those free or beta users may give you feedback, it will be very different from the feedback you get from people who have paid for your product.

这家获得资金的初创公司很可能会拥有足够的开发能力，以使人们愿意购买免费计划。 如果您要发布自举产品，那么您的目标应该是交付人们愿意尽快给您钱的东西。 这意味着要以最低的价格推出，使您的产品成为人们乐于购买的东西。 让人们给你钱很重要，而不仅仅是因为作为一个引导者，您需要它来继续投资该产品。 免费发布产品或长时间运行Beta版可能会吸引您的用户，但不一定能吸引您的客户。 虽然这些免费或Beta版用户可能会向您提供反馈，但与您从为您的产品付款的人那里获得的反馈大不相同。

Perch launched as a paid version from the outset. Other than a few early beta testers we have never offered a free download or trial version of the software and the initial version we shipped had an incredibly tiny feature set. The core use case of Perch is to be able to drop Perch tags into your page, reload the page and then start editing content in the administration panel. That first version had image upload – content editors could upload images – but no way to resize them. It had no way to add new pages, there was no developer API and so on. All of these were things that we wanted to implement, however as soon as we got Perch to a point where we thought we could sell it, we shipped it.

鲈鱼从一开始就作为付费版本推出。 除了少数早期的Beta测试人员以外，我们从未提供过免费下载或试用版的软件，而我们出厂的初始版本具有非常小的功能集。 Perch的核心用例是能够将Perch标记放入页面中，重新加载页面，然后开始在管理面板中编辑内容。 该版本的第一个版本具有图片上传功能，内容编辑者可以上传图片，但无法调整它们的大小。 它无法添加新页面，也没有开发人员API等等。 所有这些都是我们想要实现的东西，但是，一旦我们使Perch达到我们认为可以出售的程度，我们便将其发货。

Perch was developed over about four weekends, as a side project. It was profitable, from license sales, within 24 hours of launch. We’ve developed, improved and refined it over the past four years based on listening to our customers, and keeping an eye on what is happening in the web industry in general. It is now all we do as a business, it has taken well over half a million dollars in revenue, and continues to grow as a product and in numbers of customers.

作为辅助项目，Perch是在大约四个周末开发的。 在发行后的24小时内 ，通过许可证销售就可以获利。 在过去的四年中，我们在听取客户意见的基础上，对它进行了开发，改进和完善，并关注了整个Web行业中正在发生的事情。 现在，这是我们作为企业所做的一切，它已取得了超过一百万美元的收入，并且作为产品和客户数量持续增长。

Although we continue to have great success with Perch, prior to launching Perch we had another idea that didn’t turn out so well. In fact it never even launched, despite the fact we spent far more time, energy and money on it than we did on the first version of Perch. So I feel somewhat qualified to include a word of warning in this chapter.

尽管我们在Perch上继续取得了巨大的成功，但是在推出Perch之前，我们有另一个想法并没有取得如此成功。 实际上，它甚至从未启动过，尽管事实上，我们花在它上面的时间，精力和金钱都比第一版Perch多得多。 因此，我觉得在本章中包含一些警告是有资格的。

警示故事 (A Cautionary Tale)

It is something of a standing joke that every developer wants to build their own bug tracker, and we were no exception, coming up with an idea for a bug tracker based on the “Getting Things Done” methodology. We spent months discussing and planning the feature set, alongside our client work and even had an intern working with us on the project for an entire summer. Masses of code was written, features were tested, we even started using it internally. However we had such big plans for it that we could never get to a point where we were happy enough to ship it. Every time we started to work on it, we were dreaming up new features and worrying about various perceived defects – all before anyone outside of our company had seen it.

每个开发人员都希望构建自己的错误跟踪器是一个常有的笑话，我们也不例外，他们提出了一种基于“完成工作”方法的错误跟踪器的想法。 我们花了几个月的时间来讨论和规划功能集，以及我们的客户工作，甚至还有一个实习生与我们一起工作了整个夏天。 编写了大量代码，测试了功能，我们甚至开始在内部使用它。 但是，我们为此制定了宏伟的计划，以至于我们永远无法满意地交付它。 每次我们开始进行这项工作时，我们都在梦想着新功能，并担心各种可察觉的缺陷，而这一切在公司外部的人都没有看到之前就已经存在。

Ultimately we gave up on it. Our interest and energy had been sapped by endless revisions, and the product had lost all focus and momentum. We never got to see if it would have been the next big thing in bug tracking. We never benefited from seeing what people would do with it; or got to understand the features that other people will need. The longer you work on your product before customers get their hands on it, the more chance there is that you are putting time into features that no-one wants. Get to the shipping point with your product. Get it into the hands of your customers. Start making money and talking to real customers about what they want.

最终，我们放弃了。 我们的兴趣和精力被无休止的修改所削弱，并且产品失去了所有的关注点和动力。 我们从未发现过它是否会成为错误跟踪中的下一件大事。 我们从没有看到人们会怎么做而受益。 或了解其他人需要的功能。 在客户接触产品之前，您在产品上投入的时间越长，您将时间花在没有人想要的功能上的机会就越大。 随产品一起到达装运点。 将其掌握在客户手中。 开始赚钱，并与真实的客户谈论他们想要什么。

最低可行的基础架构 (Minimum Viable Infrastructures)

This book is less about your product and more about the infrastructure that surrounds it. However just as you can launch a product with the minimum that makes it something people will pay for, you can also launch a product with the minimum of infrastructure around it. You will need some things, but these days there are a wealth of services that seek to provide solutions to other startups. You can use these – even temporarily – to get to launch quickly and then iterate on your infrastructure as you do with your product.

本书与您的产品无关，而与产品周围的基础设施有关。 但是，就像您可以以使人们愿意付费的最低价格来发布产品一样，您也可以以最少的基础架构来启动产品。 您将需要一些东西，但是这些天来，有大量的服务试图为其他创业公司提供解决方案。 您可以使用这些（甚至是暂时使用）来快速启动，然后像处理产品一样迭代基础结构。

Taking time to consider your infrastructure, even if you decide not to implement some elements immediately is an important step in considering what happens if you succeed. For example, and as we will discuss in later chapter, most product businesses are charging fairly small amounts either as a recurring payment or a one-off for a download. Managing all these small payments from an accounting point of view is a very different thing to dealing with the small amount of high value invoices you might be used to as an agency or freelancer. Putting in place some tools and processes to ensure these are added to your books in the correct manner will prevent a lot of pain when you come to do your end of year accounts. Thinking through that process will also help you consider whether any tax rules apply to your product, such as the VAT rules in Europe. You can check with your accountant or directly with the tax service what applies to you.

即使您决定不立即实施某些要素，也要花一些时间考虑基础架构，这是考虑如果成功将会发生什么的重要一步。 例如，正如我们将在后面的章节中讨论的那样，大多数产品业务都收取相当少量的费用，无论是定期付款还是一次性下载。 从会计角度来看，管理所有这些小额付款与处理您可能习惯于代理或自由职业者的少量高价值发票是完全不同的事情。 放置一些工具和流程以确保将这些工具和流程以正确的方式添加到您的帐簿中，可以避免您在做年终账目时遇到很多麻烦。 通过该过程进行思考还可以帮助您考虑是否有任何税收法规适用于您的产品，例如欧洲的增值税法规。 您可以咨询您的会计师，也可以直接咨询税务服务。

As we will consider when we talk about pricing and pricing models, your infrastructure has costs. Taking payment has a cost, third party solutions you use for support or sending out emails have a cost. Unless you have accounted for these things then you may find that the price you choose is too low by the time everyone else has been paid. As you read this book be happy to throw out all that does not apply to you, and in the things that do consider your options balancing the fact that paying for a service might get you to launch more quickly against the fact you need to keep costs down. If paying for that $29 a month service saves you a week of time and means you can start selling to customers a week earlier, it is worth it. If there are no show stoppers, it is worth it. You can always switch to something else later.

正如我们在讨论定价和定价模型时将考虑的那样，您的基础架构会产生成本。 付款需要付费，您用于支持或发送电子邮件的第三方解决方案需要付费。 除非您已经考虑了这些问题，否则您可能会发现当其他人都已付款时，您选择的价格太低了。 当您阅读本书时，很乐意将所有不适用于您的东西扔出去，并在考虑了您的选择的事情之间权衡了以下事实：在付费服务可能使您更快启动产品这一事实与您需要保持成本的事实之间下。 如果每月为这笔29美元的服务付费可以节省您一周的时间，并且意味着您可以在一周前开始向客户销售产品，那是值得的。 如果没有放映塞，那是值得的。 您以后随时可以切换到其他位置。

拥有您的客户和数据 (Own your customers and data)

On the subject of using third party services to get to launch quickly, there is one area in which I would not compromise. Make sure that the services you are using allow you to export all of your data at any time. The exception to this would be credit card data, although some payment providers do have methods of transferring this, you probably don’t want the liability and compliance issues of storing that yourself. If you are using a third party to deliver your product ensure that you get the customer information and are able to contact these customers. If you are using a hosted help desk, ensure that you can export all the data. I would advise that you routinely export and backup data from the services that you use, just as you backup your systems.

关于使用第三方服务快速启动的主题，我有一个方面不会妥协。 确保您正在使用的服务允许您随时导出所有数据。 信用卡数据是一个例外，尽管某些付款服务提供商确实有转移数据的方法，但您可能不希望自己存储数据时会产生责任和合规性问题。 如果您使用第三方来交付产品，请确保获得客户信息并能够联系这些客户。 如果您使用托管服务台，请确保可以导出所有数据。 我建议您像备份系统一样，定期从使用的服务中导出和备份数据。

The data that you store about customers and their interaction with your sales site and product is valuable, even if you are not in a position to analyze it as yet. Ensure that you have access to it and that you are able to export that data in a way that will be useful in the future. An export to a CSV file will at least give you something that could be opened and read in Excel or imported into another system in the future.

即使您尚无法进行分析，您存储的有关客户及其与销售站点和产品的交互的数据也很有价值。 确保您有权访问它，并且能够以将来有用的方式导出该数据。 导出为CSV文件至少会为您提供一些可以在Excel中打开和读取的内容，或将来导入到其他系统中的内容。

小东西会增长 (Small Things Can Grow)

Perch is not alone in being a side project that grew over time to become a business in its own right. Starting small does not have to mean limiting yourself to a tiny product forever. What it does mean is that you can grow sustainably, using the resources you have. For example, not having a mountain of funding to throw into advertising means you are unlikely to suddenly have scaling issues causing unreliability of your SaaS application. Usage will grow over time and you can add servers or improve code and infrastructure to cope. You are unlikely to find that overnight you have a thousand new users all needing support, and no-one to help them, leading to disgruntled people complaining on Twitter.

Perch并不是一个随时间推移发展成为独立业务的附带项目。 从小处开始并不一定意味着永远将自己限制在一个小产品上。 它的意思是，您可以利用自己拥有的资源实现可持续发展。 例如，没有足够的资金投入广告意味着您不太可能突然遇到扩展问题，从而导致SaaS应用程序不可靠。 使用率将随着时间的增长而增长，您可以添加服务器或改进代码和基础结构来应对。 您不太可能会在一夜之间发现有成千上万的新用户都需要支持，而没有人需要帮助，从而导致心怀不满的人在Twitter上抱怨。

As you will see throughout this book, there are many stories of tiny products developing into fully fledged businesses in their own right. Starting with a small thing simply means you can make that journey taking your customers along with you, rather than waiting for your giant, complex thing to be ready and perhaps finding some other solution in the meantime.

正如您将在本书中看到的那样，有许多关于微型产品自行发展为成熟企业的故事。 从一件小事情开始，仅意味着您可以带您的客户一起走过这个旅程，而不是等待大型复杂的事情准备就绪，也许在此期间找到其他解决方案。

采取行动：启动的第一步 (Take Action: First Steps to Launch)

The aim of this book is to encourage you into action. To help with that, at the end of each chapter are a set of action points. Things that you should be thinking about or researching in order to move forward towards the launch day of your product. This chapter is no exception. I’m going to ask you to spend some time thinking about these two questions before moving on to the rest of the book. Write your thoughts down somewhere, and keep your answers in mind as you read on.

本书的目的是鼓励您采取行动。 为了解决这个问题，每章的末尾都有一组行动要点。 您应该考虑或研究的事情，才能朝着产品推出之日前进。 本章也不例外。 在继续阅读本书的其余部分之前，我要请您花一些时间思考这两个问题。 将您的想法写下来，并在继续阅读时牢记答案。

1. Imagine yourself one year on from launch. What would define a successful year one for your product?
2. What can you remove from your product feature set right now that would make it simpler and quicker to launch?

1. 想象一下，自发布之日起一年。 如何定义您的产品成功的一年？
2. 您现在可以从产品功能集中删除哪些内容，从而使其更轻松，更快速地启动？

To read more you can buy the book here.

要了解更多信息，可以在这里购买这本书 。