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.
I wish I had taken this course ages ago. While I disagreed with Level 3 idea (my level of complexity is always higher and I always strived for paid users first, not unpaid/free users), I think the most important thing about this course was how Alex mentioned how to evaluate a project, what would save me hours of time (and determining what was more like a startup vs a hackathon project you could continue to maintain like an open source project.
Also, I'm super impressed with Alex being able to share his story on how he created so many different apps, and also felt safe and vulnerable enough to share with us, as he has done with all the other courses he has taught about his level of knowledge and understanding in interviewing at Meta and what rigor they demand, like any other good FAANGMULA / hot tech startup / publicly traded company would have as the bar/metric for their work working with real users. I believe and completely agree with what he also said what would be a waste of time for user research (I have been guilty of surveys, but that is also because my other background was heavy in design and front-end for a very long time so I could do that a bit better than the average back-end engineer with zero design sense and people/soft skills). All-in-all I highly recommend people take this course, it is truly a gem and something I wish I took years earlier (would have saved me sooo many hours and years of my life working on open source projects that went nowhere, startups I believed were startups, which were actually failed projects, and projects that actually were the highest level of complexity reaching for the impossible or the hardest goal (paid users with every feature known to (hu)man), this would have saved me so much time, energy, and sanity.
BUT, I'm glad I took it now so I know better in the future and how I evaluate my projects now, I'm glad that from the metrics of success given in this course, that I am working on Level 1 projects I know will have a lot of users and save my other time for Level 2 and 3 for my paid work or longer term open source work that I may not care about as much and can give my time to, or at least be a lot more realistic about what I'm doing. I felt ashamed a lot for feeling like a failure for projects and startups that didn't turn out so great, but I felt a lot of relief knowing I wasn't alone in my journey, stopping frequently in many of the videos like "omg this is totally my life," and that I didn't feel so down or stupid that I fell in to some of common pitfalls some software engineers go through and mistakes they made when making projects. It also reaffirms that I've learned a lot and have finally started building project with much more compassion for myself, energy, time, and dedication with hours of work I've put in (just enough, and maybe too much that I can be a lot easier on myself). You must take this course, everyone should take this, especially junior developers in college as they build their first class, hackathon and mock projects they want for startups so they know the difference in practice much earlier on in their career, I wish I had this in college!
Thanks for this eye-opening course Alex! Like most of your courses, it revealed that to me the "secret" is a change of mentality rather than some prescribed series of steps.
I will never look at tech in the same way after this course! I even noticed how much of a brilliant idea this review dialog popping up immediately upon completion of the course is, something that I doubt I would have noticed before taking this course.
Thank you for your time Alex!
Absolutely love this course! Every single engineer NEEDS to watch this.
Alex's course have become a staple replacement for Netflix. Two things stand out to me here - 1. How building side projects makes you a better (eventual) founder and 2. How you become a better coder building side projects.
10/10 recommend!
This course points out many mistakes I was making when deciding what to work on and plainly explains what the goal of a side project is (spoiler: get users!).
As a fan of side project and the freedom they afford to learn anything you want, I can not recommend this course enough.
Great course as usual from Alex, distilled the core concepts in a very concise & digestable manner. This course really opened up my mind & perspective on approaching side projects & what I have been doing wrong.
thanks Alex, will definitely apply these concepts!
The course was very good, but too focused around app/web dev. I'm into backend/ML and for me a significant part of the material wasn't immediately useful because the field is not so tangible. More examples would be appreciated.
Thanks Alex, the course was very informative. It was also very motivating for me to scope out suitable side projects given the paradigm you established.
good course overall. I liked the actionable advice and straightfowardness from the instructor. Took lots of notes. Great work
A great course for any software engineer. Loved the 3 levels of tech and the ideas of Simple is Complex, honer vs innovator.
Great course. Alex provides a thoughtful, practical framework for coming up with side project ideas that anyone can use.
Excellent course. It is very well structured and the content is very valuable.
Simply structured, and easy to get started on a first side project.
Amazing, high quality stuff.
loved it!
