An MBA costs between fifty and a hundred thousand pounds. It takes one to two years. It teaches you frameworks, case studies, financial modelling, and how to network in structured social settings. At the end of it, you have three letters after your name and a set of theoretical tools that may or may not apply to the actual work you end up doing.
I built fourteen products in roughly the same timeframe. It cost me less than a hundred pounds in hosting fees. I learned product design, user experience, deployment, marketing, audience development, data analysis, branding, pricing strategy, and the specific emotional texture of watching something you made get used by a stranger for the first time. At the end of it, I've fourteen live URLs that prove I can think and do, not just think.
I'm not claiming these are equivalent qualifications. An MBA from a top business school opens doors that side projects can't. But I'm claiming that for certain kinds of learning - the practical, applied, build-your-way-to-understanding kind - side projects aren't just competitive with formal education. They're superior.
The curriculum of shipping
Each product I built taught me something specific that I would never have learned from a textbook. Modern Retro taught me about e-commerce, print-on-demand supply chains, and the gap between generating creative content and selling physical products. CultureTerminal taught me about content aggregation, RSS feeds, automated pipelines, and the editorial decisions that determine whether an aggregator feels curated or chaotic. The London Pub Guide taught me about local SEO, content verification, and the terrifying ease with which AI can generate plausible but fictional information.
These aren't abstract lessons. They're the kind of knowledge that only comes from doing the thing and getting it wrong and doing it again. No case study in the world teaches you what it feels like to deploy a product and discover that your automated pipeline published fabricated restaurant data because you trusted an AI to generate facts. That experience - the panic, the fix, the lesson - is burned into my brain in a way that no lecture could achieve.
First Out - the tube exit guide - taught me about progressive web apps, offline functionality, and the importance of utility over aesthetics. Some products need to be beautiful. Some products need to load instantly on a shaky underground signal and tell you which door to stand near. Design serves function. The most useful product I've built is also one of the simplest looking. An MBA would have taught me to make it prettier. Building it taught me to make it faster.
Learning by failing publicly
In business school, failure is a case study. Something that happened to someone else, analysed in a safe environment, with the benefit of hindsight and the comfort of distance. In side projects, failure is personal. It's your product that nobody uses. Your feature that nobody clicks. Your design that someone politely calls "interesting" in a way that clearly means "terrible."
This isn't pleasant. But it's educational in a way that safe, retrospective analysis can't be. When your product fails, you don't need to theorise about why. You know why. You felt it. You saw the moment where users bounced. You experienced the gap between your intention and their experience. And because it's your product, not a case study, you have the opportunity to fix it. To iterate. To learn not just from the failure but from the recovery.
I've launched products to silence. No visitors. No shares. No feedback. The silence teaches more than any professor could. It teaches you that your idea, which felt brilliant in your head, didn't resonate. It teaches you to question your assumptions. It teaches you that building something is only half the work - getting people to care about it's the other half, and it is harder.
The portfolio as proof
An MBA proves you can learn. A portfolio proves you can do. In a world where doing is increasingly valued over knowing, the portfolio is the more powerful credential. Not because knowledge doesn't matter - it does - but because knowledge without application is theoretical, and theory doesn't ship products.
When I sit across from someone in a meeting or a job interview, I don't need to explain my capabilities in abstract terms. I can show them. Here are fourteen products. Here's what each one does. Here's what I learned building it. Here's the audience, the design rationale, the technical challenge, the creative decision. The work speaks in a way that qualifications can't.
This is especially true for people like me - non-technical people who have built technical things. The surprise factor is genuine. "You built this without knowing how to code?" opens conversations that "I have an MBA from London Business School" doesn't. Not because the MBA is less impressive in absolute terms, but because the side projects are more interesting. They provoke curiosity. They invite questions. They create the conditions for genuine conversation rather than credential-checking.
The compound effect
Here's something nobody tells you about side projects: they compound. Each product teaches you something that makes the next product better. The design sensibility you developed on Modern Retro informs the aesthetic of CultureTerminal. The deployment pipeline you built for one site gets reused across six others. The audience understanding you gained from the Pub Guide shapes how you think about Oishii London. Nothing is wasted. Everything feeds forward.
An MBA has a fixed curriculum. You learn the prescribed material in the prescribed order. Side projects have an emergent curriculum. You learn what you need to learn, when you need to learn it, in service of a concrete goal. The learning is pulled by necessity rather than pushed by syllabus. This makes it more efficient, more memorable, and more applicable.
After fourteen products, my skill set is broader than any MBA could have produced, and it is entirely bespoke. I know exactly the things I need to know for the work I want to do, because the work taught me what it needed from me. No admissions committee designed this curriculum. No professor optimised this learning path. It emerged from the act of building, and it fits me perfectly because it was shaped by me.
The invitation
I'm not against formal education. I'm against the assumption that formal education is the only path to credibility, competence, and career advancement. For a certain kind of person - the kind who learns by doing, who thinks by making, who understands problems best when they're wrestling with them rather than reading about them - side projects aren't a supplement to education. They're the education.
Build something. Ship it. Learn from it. Build the next thing. Ship it better. The compound effect of this cycle, repeated ten or fifteen times, produces a breadth and depth of practical knowledge that rivals any formal programme. And at the end of it, you have something no business school can give you: a body of work. Proof that you aren't someone who studies what others build. You're someone who builds.
The MBA is a fine credential. The portfolio is a better one. And the best part is that the portfolio costs almost nothing, takes as long as you want it to take, and teaches you exactly what you need to know. Not what a syllabus says you should know. What reality, in all its messy, surprising, instructive glory, demands that you learn.
Ship it. That's the whole curriculum.
