The $1000 side-project
The 6 steps to get there
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$1k/month in recurring revenue from a side-project is a realistic goal. It’s not a life-changing amount of money on its own, but it changes your relationship with risk. It gives you a cushion. It proves you can build something people will pay for. And for a lot of people, it becomes the foundation of something bigger.
I’ve seen people hit this milestone in a few weeks, and I’ve seen people take over a year. The speed depends on what you build and how you sell it, but the principles are the same whether you’re working on this alongside a day job or adding a revenue stream to an existing solo business.
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1. Pick something small
The biggest mistake people make with side-projects is going too big. They want to build a SaaS platform or an app. These are all fine business models, but they take months to build and even longer to get to $1k/month.
The fastest path to $1k/month is something you can build in a few weekends and start selling immediately. Digital products, templates, small tools. Things that solve a specific problem for a specific group of people and don’t require ongoing development to maintain.
A Notion template pack for freelance designers. A pricing calculator for wedding photographers. These are small, focused products that can reach $1k/month because they serve a clear need in a defined market.
The goal is to get something in front of paying customers as fast as possible. You can always build something bigger later, but $1k/month from a simple product teaches you more about what sells than a year spent building something nobody has seen yet.
2. Solve a problem you understand
The side-projects that reach $1k/month tend to come from personal experience. The founder understood the problem because they’d lived it.
If you’re a freelance developer, you know what tools and templates other developers need. If you run a small e-commerce store, you know the spreadsheets and processes that would save other store owners time.
Building from your own experience has two advantages. You already know the problem is real because you’ve had it yourself. And you already have credibility in that space, which makes selling easier.
The side-projects that struggle are the ones built for a market the founder doesn’t understand. They guess at what people want, build it, and then discover nobody cares. Starting from a problem you’ve personally experienced avoids this.
3. Price it properly from day one
A lot of people underprice their side-projects because they feel like it’s “just a side thing” or because they want to attract as many customers as possible. This is a mistake.
At $5, you need 200 customers per month to hit $1k. At $49, you need about 20. The maths changes completely depending on your price point.
Higher prices also tend to attract better customers. People who pay $5 for something often don’t value it or use it. People who pay $49 or $99 tend to be more serious and more likely to recommend it to others.
If you’re selling a digital product, start at a price that feels slightly uncomfortable. You can always run promotions or adjust later, but starting too low is much harder to recover from than starting too high.
4. Find your first 10 customers manually
Forget about marketing funnels, social media strategies and automated email sequences for now. Your first 10 customers should come from direct outreach.
Find the communities where your target customers spend time. Reddit, Slack groups, niche forums. Join them. Be helpful. When it’s appropriate, share what you’ve built. Not as a sales pitch, but as something genuinely useful to the group.
Send direct messages to people who’ve publicly described the problem your product solves. Reach out to people in your network who fit the profile. Ask for honest feedback and make it easy for them to buy.
These first 10 customers matter more than the next 100 because they’ll tell you whether the product actually works and whether people are willing to pay what you’re charging. Everything after that is optimisation.
5. Build a channel that compounds
Once you’ve validated the product with your first customers, pick one marketing channel and commit to it for at least six months.
For most side-projects, the best channel is content that ranks in search engines. Blog posts, guides, comparison pages. Content that answers the questions your target customers are typing into Google. This takes time to build, but the traffic compounds. A post you write this month will still bring in visitors a year from now.
If SEO isn’t right for your niche, a newsletter or a presence in a specific community can work well too. The point is to pick one channel, get good at it, and let it build over time rather than spreading yourself across five platforms and doing none of them well.
The solofounders I know who’ve built successful side-projects all have one marketing channel they own. They didn’t try to be everywhere. They picked one thing that worked and kept doing it.
6. Keep it lean
At the side-project stage, every expense should be questioned. You don’t need a custom website or expensive tools. You definitely don’t need a logo designed by a professional.
A simple landing page, a payment processor and a way to deliver the product. That’s the minimum. You can use Gumroad, Lemonsqueezy or similar platforms to handle payments and delivery for a few percent of each sale. Your total running costs should be close to zero.
This matters because at $1k/month, every unnecessary expense eats into the margin that makes the project worthwhile. Keep costs low and the $1k/month becomes genuinely useful income rather than revenue that gets absorbed by subscriptions you don’t need.
The $1k/month mindset
Reaching $1k/month from a side-project requires patience. Most people overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in six months.
The first few weeks are usually slow. You might make a handful of sales or none at all. This is normal. The people who quit at this stage are the ones who expected instant results. The ones who keep going are the ones who understand that early sales are data, not validation. Each sale tells you something about what’s working. Each non-sale tells you what to adjust.
$1k/month usually doesn’t arrive as a sudden jump. It builds gradually. $50 one month, $120 the next, $300 the month after. Then something clicks. A piece of content starts ranking, word of mouth kicks in, and the line starts curving upward.
The solofounders who hit this milestone are the ones who treated the side-project like a real business from day one. They priced properly, sold manually, picked one channel and kept costs low enough that even small revenue felt like progress.
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Great reminder that small projects can lead to big things! 🚀
That's a really good piece, Joshua 👌
We need to educate more about this mindset 🧠