For months we had two columns in the same spreadsheet. Column A tracked the product we told investors about. Column B tracked the thing we kept calling a side project. Every Monday standup we'd review Column A first because that was the plan. Then someone would mention Column B almost apologetically—"oh, and the other thing grew again"—and we'd nod and move on.
One Monday the numbers flipped. Column B had more active accounts, higher retention, and a shorter sales cycle. Nobody said anything for about ten seconds. Then our head of product asked the question nobody wanted to hear: "Are we still pretending this is a side project?"
That was the moment. Not a dramatic pivot announcement. Not a board meeting. A ten-second silence in a Monday standup.
Side projects survive inside companies for a specific reason: they carry no expectations. Nobody measures their pipeline contribution. Nobody asks for a quarterly forecast. That freedom lets them move fast, respond to real user feedback, and dodge the political weight of being "the strategy."
The problem is that freedom also lets the rest of the organization ignore them. A side project can outperform the core business for two quarters and still not get a second engineer, because the budget lives somewhere else and nobody wants the awkward reallocation conversation.
We see this pattern in other founders too. The side bet quietly becomes the best thing in the building, then sits there under-resourced, because admitting its importance means admitting the original plan is losing.
Looking back, the signs were clear well before we admitted it. If you're in a similar spot, here's what to watch for:
Customers tell you before you tell them. When prospects ask about the side project during sales calls for your main product, the market has already decided. We had three separate prospects say some version of "that other thing you mentioned on your blog—can we just buy that?" We treated those as anomalies until we couldn't.
Your best people keep drifting toward it. Nobody assigned our strongest engineer to the side project. She started spending her Friday afternoons on it, then her Thursdays, then most of her week. Talent follows energy. When your team votes with their hours, pay attention.
Unit economics are better without trying. The side project had lower acquisition cost, faster time-to-value, and better retention—none of which we'd optimized. We'd spent eighteen months tuning the funnel on our main product. The side project beat it with a landing page and a docs site.
You defend the original plan with history instead of data. "We've been working on this for two years" is not a reason to keep going. "We raised on this thesis" isn't either. When the best argument for your current strategy is sunk cost, the strategy has already lost.
The side project survives neglect. We forgot to update its onboarding flow for three months. Usage still grew. That kind of resilience is a signal that the value proposition is strong enough to overcome your operational indifference.
Admitting the shift was harder than building the product. It meant telling our investors that the thing they funded was no longer plan A. It meant reallocating budget from a team that had been working hard for over a year. It meant some people's roles changed, and a few people left.
We also had to accept that we'd been wrong—not catastrophically wrong, but directionally wrong. The original product wasn't bad. It just wasn't where the energy was. There's a specific kind of grief in walking away from something that works fine toward something that works better. You can't even tell yourself it failed. It just got outgrown.
Within a quarter of giving the side project full organizational weight, three things happened. The product got better fast because it finally had dedicated resources instead of borrowed time. Our sales conversations got simpler because we stopped hedging about which product to lead with. And morale improved—the team had known for months where the momentum was. Saying it out loud removed a layer of organizational pretense that was exhausting everyone.
Every company has a version of this story waiting to happen. The side project that quietly outperforms the plan. The spreadsheet column that keeps growing while no one watches.
The hard part isn't recognizing the signal. The signals are obvious in retrospect and, honestly, pretty obvious in real time. The hard part is having the conversation. Telling your co-founder, your team, your investors that the thing you've all been calling a distraction is actually the point.
If you have a side project that keeps surviving despite your best efforts to ignore it—stop ignoring it. Open the spreadsheet. Look at both columns. Ask the uncomfortable question out loud. The ten seconds of silence that follow will be worth it.
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