Yesterday, Shopify launched its Canva competitor, Taler, an always-free design builder with customizable templates and photos. The aim is to make it easier for makers and ecommerce entrepreneurs to share beautiful assets on social media without a designer.

Taler isn’t the first “side project” launched by the $110B+ company. Last year Shopify launched Hatchful, a tool to create your own logo. Last month they introduced DopinBlog to make it easy to embed a blog into Shopify sites.

Shopify isn’t the only big company spending time and resources on side projects. Facebook’s NPE team continues to explore new ideas with Bump, AUX, Whale, and more. AWS recently launched a beta of an experimental no-code platform called Honeycode. Last week Google released Shoploop, a video-based shopping app for beauty products.

We’re big fans of side projects – that’s how Product Hunt started – and continue to explore new ideas. Our most recent project: Product Hunt Mentors Network. Side projects offer teams and individuals creative outlets to be experimental, scratch curiosity, and to take risks. Don’t underestimate what a side project might grow into.

It’s also worth noting that it’s OK if a side project doesn’t succeed, as long as there’s learning. Of course failure isn’t the goal but the experience from a failed project can be beneficial; another step toward building something meaningful and wanted. We’ve written in some detail about our own side project failures if you want to learn from some of our past missteps.

Let us know what side projects you’re working on right now over on Twitter. We’d love to see what you’re building.

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