MAKER GULLY
The internet makes side projects look like pure upside. You build at night, ship on weekends, and maybe it turns into something. What never makes the highlight reel is the stuff that actually sinks people, and it is almost never the code.
I run Maker Gully solo while keeping the rest of my life intact. If you are about to start a project of your own, here is what I would tell you to get right before you even begin.
What to Get Right Before You Build
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Your day job is your seed funding. It pays for your runway, your tools, and your right to take risks on the side. Protect it. The fastest way to resent a side project is to let it quietly tank your performance at the job that actually pays your bills.
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Read the fine print before you write a line of code. A lot of employment agreements claim ownership of what you build, especially if it is done on company time, using company equipment, or falls within your employer's field. Moonlighting clauses and non-competes are real. I am not a lawyer, but read your actual contract. If anything is ambiguous, get clarity in writing before you ship, not after.
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Keep the two worlds physically separate. Use a different laptop, different accounts, and work during different hours. Do not push to your personal repo from a work machine or try to prototype during a standup meeting. Clean separation protects your intellectual property, your focus, and your reputation all at once.
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Guard your health like a production dependency. Nights and weekends are a renewable resource only if you actually take time to renew them. Sleep, move, and eat like someone who wants to still be building five years from now. Burnout does not announce itself. It just quietly makes everything you ship worse.
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Play by the rules, both yours and the platform's. Respect app store policies, privacy laws, data handling, and the terms of every API or AI model you lean on. Moving fast is not a defense when you are holding someone's data or charging them money. Boring compliance is always cheaper than the alternative.
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Keep the money unglamorous. Separate your finances, track what you spend, and do not let SaaS subscriptions quietly bleed you dry. If you start earning, treat the tax and business side like an adult. I run mine under an LLC for exactly this reason. Talk to an accountant before things get complicated, not after.
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Tell the people who will feel your absence. Every hour you spend on the project is an hour you are not somewhere else. The people around you can be your biggest supporters or your biggest source of guilt. The difference usually comes down to whether you talked to them first.
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Stay small enough to finish. The graveyard is full of ambitious half-builds. One small thing shipped beats five impressive things abandoned. Scope your project down to what a single person can actually carry.
The Real Goal
The goal isn't just to ship something. It is to still have your job, your health, and your relationships intact whether the project takes off or quietly doesn't. Build like you are planning to be around for the long version, because the best side projects are the ones you actually get to keep working on.
That is the reality of being a team of one.