Build Side Projects With 500k+ Users: Coming Up With An Idea
You have spent 50+ hours sharply refining your resume and LinkedIn profile. You have applied to 1,000+ jobs. However, despite all your hard work, you are getting almost 0 interviews, and when it comes to Big Tech, it's actual 0. What can you do?
There are many options here, but one of the most straightforward, underrated, and powerful ones is to build meaningful side projects. The entire point of a tech company is to build software at scale that gets a ton of users. You don't need to be working in a professional environment to do that - All you need is a computer and an internet connection. After going through this course, you will:
- 💎 Understand what makes a side project valuable
- 🫸 Avoid common traps that produce terrible ideas
- ⚙️ Have a process to generate feasible, quality ideas
- 💡 Follow a framework to judge a project’s quality
- 💪 Set up the right mentality to build projects long-term
This all starts by creating a project idea that you can build on the side (even as a junior engineer) and has market demand. This course will teach you how to do just that. Once you get 10,000+ users, your portfolio will start turning heads, and once you break 500,000+ like this course goes through, tech companies will be breaking down your door to give you an interview, even FAANG.
Alex Chiou is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10+ years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood. His success has also profoundly reflected in his compensation growth:
- 2014: Alex made $85,000 per year as a clueless new grad at PayPal 🤓
- 2021: Alex made $750,000 per year as a high-performing tech lead at Robinhood 😎
In just 7 years, Alex was able to increase his pay by a staggering +800%, and a huge part of this was due to his side projects:
- 2015: Alex becomes Course Hero's 1st Android engineer and lead with 0 professional experience. His only Android experience at that point was building side projects with 10,000+ users
- 2017: Alex gets into Facebook with his 100k+ user side project being a huge pull on his resume and a fascinating discussion point during the interview
- 2020: Alex crushes the most important round of his Robinhood onsite interview, a practical coding round where he has to build an Android app from scratch (i.e. just like what a side project is). He finishes the round in just 50% of the time, and the interviewer decided to just use the remaining time for a friendly chat
Side Project Master
Throughout his entire career, Alex has shipped 30+ side project mobile apps and consistently struck gold, building 10+ apps with 10,000+ users. He has delivered not 1, not 2, but 3 apps with 500k+ users. Here are the crown jewels:
- Random Name Picker - 1,150,000+ users, 4.6 rating after 5,700+ reviews
- Random Number Generator Plus - 880,000+ users, 4.8 rating after 6,700+ reviews
- SQL Practice PRO - Learn DBs - 700,000+ users, 4.8 rating after 9,400+ reviews
- Simple Flashcards Plus - 195,000+ users, 4.5 rating after 3,700+ reviews
Getting Top Interviews Without Even Applying
Alex has had tons of top tech companies reach out to him through his Google Play developer email, marveling at his massive side projects. Here's just some of them:
- OpenAI
- Uber (offered to jump him straight to the onsite twice)
- Discord
- Block
- Instacart
- Clubhouse (this was back when Clubhouse was the hottest startup during the pandemic, and they wanted him as their 1st Android engineer!)
Because of this, Alex hasn't needed to properly apply to a job in over 7 years.
High Code Velocity = No PIP
Alex has written far more Android code than almost every other Android engineer on earth due to his immense love for side projects. This made his coding muscles ultra-efficient and is a huge reason why Alex has never been a low performer across his entire career as an Android engineer.
Alex spent ~4 years at Meta and always got an "Exceeds Expectation" or higher rating every half despite Meta being an often brutal high-performance tech company. This is largely because he simply wrote more code than most other Meta engineers. With ~270 landed diffs per half in his last year at Meta, Alex was writing roughly double the commits of the average Meta engineer, putting him in the Top 5% of code committers.
