Do you ever think about doing a project on the side?
Something that could be monetised, and that you would do independently from your job?
I have been doing it since 2021.
The beginnings & working on the side
I have been wanting to do it for a long time. As a physicist, I wanted it to be some cool tech project that I would work on in my free time, together with my friends, and that would have the potential to become a tech startup. The problem with it was twofold: first, it’s really hard to coordinate a group of people who all work demanding jobs to have free time and an equal amount of motivation at the same time. And second, tech projects usually take time to develop, so I wanted to be sure that the idea was perfect.
Until 2020, when I realised that searching for a perfect idea was a guaranteed way to never actually start working on anything. Plus, with the covid situation shaking the society, I gained a few insights into how the world works, and realised that jobs were a very fragile concept. Being a specialist in your job/field is amazing, but if you can complement that with some other skills (call it business, marketing, people skills or whatever you like), you are suddenly much more resilient and flexible.
So I was suddenly looking for ‘a project’, not ‘the project’, and found one in board games, my hobby. Combine that with the fact that Kickstarter just became available to Slovenian creators, and that board games are a strong category on Kickstarter, my partner Blaž and I decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign for this board game idea we had.
So in 2021, we were developing a board game, learning about crowdfunding and building a community, in addition to our jobs in aviation and civil engineering. It was a very intensive period with steep learning curves, and we were working a lot – looking back, I admire the commitment we had, though admittedly, I think covid and the lockdown contributed to it, because there were so many things we couldn’t do, that a lot of our free time was freed up. And, having some long-term goal probably helped us not get crazy.
Leaving my job
After months of working late nights and weekends, and the lockdown lifting with the warmer weather, it became clear that our pace was not sustainable. So we either had to give up the project or free up more time for it.
After a lot of deliberation, I decided to quit my job until we launch Kickstarter. I knew that in the long run, I wanted to do a PhD, so if the Kickstarter didn’t work out, I’d start looking into that. And if it did – well, we thought we’d figure it out.
At that point, we had a company registered, but we didn’t have any income, so I was jobless for a few months, from October to February. At that time, I was focusing on finishing the campaign preparations and then running the campaign. Looking back, I don’t remember much of the preparations, apart from the fact that I thought I would have time for some other stuff, like finally figuring out how to invest in crypto, but I didn’t. But the campaign was prepared well, and when we launched in January 2022, it really took off – better than we hoped.
A huge misconception about Kickstarter is that you just go there with your project, and you get funded. This might have been true when crowdfunding started, but in the present days, you have to bring people to your project yourself first, and then, if you do, the Kickstarter’s algorithm picks you up, the staff notices you, and then, with a bit of luck (or rather, some alignment of things that are unpredictable and out of your hands) the magic happens.
For us, it did, and it was a good thing that I was on a campaign full-time. For the first few days, I was staying up almost all night, making sure that the comments were answered and that the project was on track, and for the whole duration of the campaign, I was pretty busy with preparing stretch goals, communication, being in touch with reviewers and manufacturers and so on. Meanwhile, Blaž would still work on the project in the afternoons and weekends.
We raised almost 120.000€, and the funds would have been enough to start working on our project full-time, especially as we would likely be able to get some additional funding from startup grants. However, we did not want to let go of our professional fields, as we are both pretty passionate about them. Not to mention the sunken cost with all of the studies and the career thus far.
The 80-20 split
With that in mind, I took a PhD position at a research institute. Looking back, that was not the best move. The sensible thing would be to take a few months just for SnowBoardGames, make sure the manufacturing and fulfilment were on track, and then jump into a PhD. But it’s easy to be smart in retrospect. The one thing I did get right, though, was that I officially only worked at the institute from Monday through Thursday, and I worked at SnowBoardGames on Fridays.
The first few months were tough – the institute work had a steep learning curve, especially as I was out of physics for half a year, and the workload at SnowBoardGames was gigantic – it was the first time working with manufacturing partners from both Europe and China, figuring out taxes and global shipping, and we were under a lot of pressure to not let our 3451 backers down. We also both turned 30 and got married in those few months after the Kickstarter, and we were definitely on a road to burnout.
We fulfilled the Kickstarter in October that same year, and it felt like a huge weight fell off our shoulders. Blaž started to work at SnowBoardGames 20% too, and we knew we needed a break before we could take on a new project. So we took some Fridays off, climbed, skied, snowboarded and went trekking in Nepal for a month.
Upon return, we found a pretty good balance between work and free time, and we started working on our second game, Secret Recipe, in the spring of 2023. Things were going well at first, but then I had a bit of a crisis, and it propagated across all areas – the project I was working on for the PhD was hitting a wall, I lost a few people close to me in my personal life, and Secret Recipe was throwing one challenge after another at us. I was torn between physics, entrepreneurship and climbing – I felt like I couldn’t do all three, and there were times when I was almost ready to let one of the areas go, but never really did. It felt like I was standing on a spike, balancing, about to fall into one of the three areas below.
I am not sure what eventually broke the crisis. Maybe talking a lot about it with people who have had similar fragments of experiences, and just pushing through. I remember that I was in a numb state, and that I first had to get really angry, and then, I was on the other side, and the metaphorical clouds were clearing.
Just in time for our second Kickstarter campaign in 2024 – we initially wanted to launch it at the beginning of the year, but it kept getting pushed back, and we launched it in September. We felt we were better prepared than the first time, but we expected the campaign to be smaller than the first one. However, we were not prepared for what happened at launch: it felt like we crashed. From the graphics that we needed to re-upload to the broken links in the ads an agency was running for us, and some backers reporting problems with placing their pledges, we were about to cancel the campaign. At the end, we decided against it, as we were still funded in a few hours, and we raised almost 30,000€ in the end, but we have an A4 list of things that went wrong, together with theories, insights and questions.
Looking back, it was a good thing that the launch crashed, as we got to experience the other side of crowdfunding, the one where the campaign does not take off, and you have to fight your way through it. There was a point where I questioned everything, and we learned a lot about Kickstarter again.
And, I started to question our business model. With our tech background, we were freestyling the business part of SnowBoardGames until then (well, not the taxes and accounting and that stuff, but definitely the business model, marketing and retail stuff). So we felt it was time to figure out some structure, and I got into a business program to learn it, did some shorter workshops on the side, and read a ton of stuff. We had some brainstorming sessions along the way, and I think we have a much better understanding now of where we want to be as a publisher, and where we don’t want to go.
It is curious how this clarity in one field overflows into other areas too – I think we’ve been in a good mental space for the majority of 2025. We definitely know we have some challenges ahead if we want to build SnowBoardGames into a serious business, but it’s a fun journey, so we’ll see where the next stage takes us.
Also, we’re entering a new stage in our personal lives too – we’ve become parents. It’s been amazing, and being on maternity leave and taking a break from physics has freed up some mental space, and I’ve been writing again. So you can expect some more regular posts again. 🙂
TL;DR
I guess my key takeaways are:
- Don’t wait for a perfect project to come by. Choose a project and start. You can cancel, pivot or fall 100% into it later.
- Doing it on the side while having a demanding job can totally be done in the short-ish term. A few months to a year, if it’s intensive. This could give you some head start and a taste, so you can decide if you want to jump in or let go.
- The more exhausted you get by it, the longer break you’ll need to bounce back. Keep that in mind.
- Keeping a job 4 days a week and being employed in your own company 1 day a week is an amazing option, in my opinion. We’ve been doing it since 2022. It gives us flexibility – we often move the hours around so we work when the weather is bad and in the afternoons, and have 3-day weekends. And if you were doing it on the side before, imagine what you can do with one whole extra day!
- It’s also a pretty safe option, as we could theoretically support all of the expenses our business has with our salary from the job we kept 4 days a week. Not something I’d recommend if you want to be a serious business, but we did take half a year of Fridays completely off, and it was amazing.