October sideproject: after two weeks

I met with a customer today and told him about my side project. Or, not really, I told him about Instagram and embedding photos on his website. His first question was: ‘How can we be sure that nobody puts up bad stuff there?’

Bingo. My october side project was validated. A moment later one of our other customers called. Their Instagram feed on their website had broken down. I guess I have to finish my Instagram moderation tool soon.

Customers asking for a solution is gold

I think the right way to create a side project is to find people that you can understand with a problem you can fix within a reasonable time frame. For me, this is a perfect example. We create websites over at Standout all the time, and embedding photos from a specific hashtag on Instagram is a really god use case on how to spice up a website and engage the visitors.

You have to be the filter. Not every idea is a good one, and the execution of the idea is far more important thand the idea itself. But if you want it to sell from the beginning – find a real problem that real people express.

Status update

So, I have spent some time on the side project. Here is what I have done so far:

• Create a new account
• Log in/log out
• Add new feeds
• Change feed settings
• Add whitelisted Instagram account names
• Moderate images for all your feeds
• Manually refresh feeds
• Embed feeds on your homepage

Pretty good for the limited time I have spent on it.

So, tomorrow I am putting the web app online for a few selected clients to use. I expect them to be paying customers once it is stable.

The site is ugly, navigation confusing, things are buggy – but it is starting to come together. Given another week it will look much better.

Time spent so far: 20 hours. It is really tough to find the time when you have kids. Good thing a customer asked for it so I could spend a little more time at work on this.