30 days, 6 projects, 1 with real users — my actual workflow

I got laid off in March. By April I had 6 side projects shipped, including one Chrome extension with 15 real users.

When I tell people this, they ask: how do you have time for 6 projects while job hunting?

The answer is not discipline. It's a tightly-constrained workflow I accidentally built. I want to share it here because nothing about it is genius.

The constraint that did the work

I gave myself one rule: ship in under 8 hours of total work or don't ship.

Not 8 hours of coding. 8 hours from idea to published link. That includes idea, design, build, deploy, writeup.

This kills 80% of ideas before they start. Every project I tried, I asked in the first hour: can this be done in 8 hours, end to end? If the honest answer was "probably not, I'd need to also build X, Y, Z", I dropped it.

A real example. I tried a resume rewriter. The build itself, the prompt engineering, the API integration, that was an 8-hour candidate. But there's also: how do people discover a resume rewriter? YouTube SEO, Reddit ads, partner placements. That part is also weeks. So I gave myself half a day to build, then a landing page, then I never marketed it. It's dead.

A different real example. AI Buddy. Idea at 9pm on a Tuesday. Built the sidebar chrome extension between 9pm and 1am. Deployed it. Posted it on Twitter at 1am. Got my first user at 9am the next morning.

The difference: the build half was 4 hours. The marketing half was "post on Twitter" which I was already doing daily. 4 hours + 5 minutes vs 4 hours + 6 weeks. Project ships.

The 3-step pre-build filter

Before I write any code, I write three things in a text file. Takes about 15 minutes. If any of these is wishy-washy, the project doesn't start.

1. Who is the first 10 users and where do they hang out?

If I can't name a specific subreddit, a Discord, an X timeline, a wechat group, a specific kind of coworker… the project is dead on arrival. You can build the best resume rewriter in the world but if your first 10 users are "professionals who want help", that's not a place, that's a wish.

1. What's the smallest thing they would pay for / care about / come back for?

Not the "full vision". The smallest. Often this is one specific page in a bigger product. Examples: in AI Buddy, the smallest thing is "select text, get answer with no popup". In the weekly report generator, the smallest thing is "paste a list of pull requests, get a paragraph in English". Pick the smallest thing that, if it alone existed, you'd use it.

1. What does "done" look like by hour 8?

Usually: deployed URL, working core feature, no auth flow if I can avoid it. Visual polish is for later. Onboarding is for later. Analytics is for later. Every optimization done before hour 8 is an hour I don't get back.

What I run every day

After I built a few, my daily rhythm settled into a pattern. It's embarrassingly boring.

Morning, when I'm fresh:

• 90 minutes: work on the currently-active project. One project, one stage.
• After 90 minutes I stop, no matter what.

Afternoon:

• Job hunting and applications.
• 30 minutes: read 3-5 pages from one project I haven't touched for a week.
• 30 minutes: post anything I've shipped to one of the 5 platforms I'm active on.

Evening:

• 1 hour of reading existing projects' GitHub issues / analytics / user feedback.
• Sometimes this surfaces a bug for the morning. Most days it doesn't, and that's also fine.

I do not, on any day, switch projects mid-day. I do not, on any day, "explore new frameworks" or "try the latest AI tool". Both eat hours and produce nothing.

The platforms I post on, in order of ROI

I tried around 12. These five earn >90% of the traffic that actually converts:

1. DEV.to. Technical audience, friendly to "I built X" posts. My best article has 5,400 views. The title I used: "I built 6 useless (and useful) things with AI in 30 days". That title under-promises.
2. Indie Hackers. Builders only, very high-signal comments. Posts about postmortems get more engagement than launches.
3. 掘金 (Juejin). Chinese tech audience, willing to read long-form posts about real engineering. Code blocks matter.
4. Zhihu answers, not articles. Answer a question someone else asked. Don't pitch. My answer to "how do you solve X when Y" gets 3-5× more views than my articles.
5. Reddit comments. At the bottom of someone else's r/SideProject post. I do not make top-level posts. Comment on threads I have lived experience in.

Platforms I tried and that did not work for me:

• Twitter/X threads. Too much noise, hard to convert
• LinkedIn. Too much signalling-to-impress, very low quality conversations
• Product Hunt. reCAPTCHA stops my bot instantly. Maybe 1 in 50 launches succeeds if you manually solve it.

What 6 projects actually were, with the honest judgment

AI Buddy: a Chrome extension, AI sidebar. 15 users. ~1200 lines of code. The only one with any users. Status: alive.

Email reply generator. Paste an email, get a polite rewrite in English or Chinese. ~600 lines. Built in 4 hours. Got 3 users. Most of them from a single Reddit comment I left on r/Productivity. Status: alive.

Weekly report generator. Paste your PR titles, get a paragraph. ~400 lines. Built in 3 hours. The single user is me, and I use it weekly. Status: alive but I have one user.

Resume rewriter. Pasted from a template. ~1200 lines. Spent 8 hours building it and 0 hours marketing. Status: dead, on a free Heroku instance I'm sure will shut down next month.

AI podcast summarizer. Paste an RSS feed URL, get a 5-bullet summary. ~900 lines. Built in 5 hours. Got 2 users, neither of them came back for a third podcast. Status: alive but abandoned.

AI 错题本 (wrong-answer notebook): a Mandarin study aid that helped me prepare for a kid's math exam. ~600 lines. Built in 4 hours. I used it once. Status: dead.

Five of these would not survive a YC panel. One would. That's also fine, because the five that didn't clear weren't the work, the work was the one that did.

What I learned, the part I didn't expect

I thought shipping fast meant "tolerate bad code". It doesn't. It means "make sure your bad code doesn't infect other people." That distinction took me 4 of the 6 projects to learn.

When I started AI Buddy, I treated the first 30 users as if they were going to break everything. I treated issue #1 as "user can't figure out where to click" not "user has a complaint about response time". That latter instinct is from working at a product company. The former instinct is from shipping side projects.

The day I shipped AI Buddy's first user, I emailed them by hand. Asked what they tried first. Watched them use it via screen-share. Found one thing wrong. Fixed it in 12 minutes. They came back the next day.

Six projects later I have one real thing. It's small. It's not particularly novel. But it's mine and a few people use it, and on hard days that one tiny thing outweighs the other five sitting on a git server.

If you're thinking about shipping your first side project, I'd say skip the discipline talk and start with the constraint. 8 hours, ship or drop. Most of the rest comes from there.