// the find
easychen/lean-side-bussiness
精益副业：程序员如何优雅地做副业
A Chinese-language book (mdBook format) about running a side business as a programmer, covering everything from lean startup methodology applied to indie products to monetizing courses and knowledge. It's aimed at Chinese developers who want income outside their day job and covers the full arc from idea validation to anti-piracy for video courses. Non-Chinese readers get nothing from this.
The lean startup adaptation for solo side projects is genuinely well-structured — MVP validation before building is the right call and the book walks through it with a real project example. The dual-revenue approach (indie app + paid course as complementary income streams) is practical advice that holds up. It's openly licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA and written by someone who clearly did this themselves, not a ghostwriter summarizing other books. The companion 'one-person business methodology v2' repo suggests the author kept updating the ideas rather than abandoning the project.
The whole thing is in Chinese with no English translation, so the 12k stars are entirely from a Chinese developer audience — if you can't read Mandarin, this is a directory tree. The content froze in March 2024 and the tooling recommendations (AdobeXD, specific Chinese payment processors like 'rabbit den' feedback tool) date it — some of those products have moved on. It's a book repo, not a library or tool, so there's nothing to run or integrate; you're just reading static HTML. The payment and platform advice is China-specific (WeChat Pay, Taobao-adjacent platforms) and transfers poorly to anyone building for a global audience.