They Almost Quit Before It Made Them: 10 Side Projects That Changed Everything

There's a version of history where none of these projects exist. Where the creator got too busy, too scared, or too talked-out-of-it. Where the podcast never launched, the screenplay stayed in the drawer, the weird little film never got made.

Luckily, that's not the version we got. These ten creators bet on the thing that felt too personal, too niche, or too risky — and it ended up defining their entire careers. If you've got something sitting in a notebook or a folder on your desktop, this one's for you.

1. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Hamilton Mixtape

In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda performed a song at the White House Poetry Jam that he described as being from "a concept album" he was working on. The song was about Alexander Hamilton. The room laughed — warmly, but still. A hip-hop musical about a Founding Father? Based on a biography? That's a side project if there ever was one.

Miranda had already found Broadway success with In the Heights, so this felt, to many observers, like a quirky passion detour. He spent years developing it between other commitments. When Hamilton finally opened Off-Broadway in 2015, it became one of the most transformative cultural events in American theater history. The thing everyone thought was too niche turned out to be universal.

2. Issa Rae and the Awkward Black Girl Web Series

Before Issa Rae was the creator and star of HBO's Insecure, she was posting low-budget web episodes to YouTube about a socially awkward Black woman navigating work and relationships. The series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, was made for almost nothing and aimed at an audience Hollywood had largely ignored.

Rae has talked openly about the doubt she carried early on — whether the concept was too specific, whether the production quality would turn people off. It didn't. The series went viral, attracted industry attention, and became the proof-of-concept that eventually got Insecure greenlit. The "too niche" thing was exactly what made it resonate.

3. Dave Grohl's One-Man Album

After Nirvana dissolved in 1994, Dave Grohl was, by his own account, unsure what to do next. So he went into a studio alone and recorded an album playing every single instrument himself — drums, guitar, bass, vocals. He almost released it under a fake name because he wasn't sure anyone would care what the Nirvana drummer had to say as a frontman.

He released it as Foo Fighters instead. That band is now one of the best-selling rock acts in American history. The project that felt like a private experiment became a 30-year career.

4. Mindy Kaling's Spec Scripts

Mindy Kaling was working as a production assistant when she co-wrote a two-person play (Matt & Ben, a comedy imagining Matt Damon and Ben Affleck receiving the Good Will Hunting script from the sky) as a side project with her friend Brenda Withers. They performed it themselves. It was weird. It was specific. It was very much not a calculated career move.

The play got reviewed in the New York Times, led to an agent, and eventually helped land Kaling a writing job on The Office — where she became one of the show's most prolific writers and eventually created The Mindy Project. One ridiculous passion project rewired her entire trajectory.

5. Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Soderbergh wrote the script for sex, lies, and videotape in eight days in a journal while on a road trip. He was in his early twenties with no real industry foothold. The film was intimate, uncomfortable, and not exactly a commercial pitch. He almost didn't submit it to Sundance, reportedly unsure the material was ready.

It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989 and is widely credited with helping launch the American independent film movement of the '90s. That journal scribbled on a road trip became a turning point for an entire generation of filmmakers.

6. Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture

Before Girls, Lena Dunham made a micro-budget film called Tiny Furniture using her mother's apartment, her real family members as actors, and roughly $45,000. The film was semi-autobiographical, slow-paced, and deliberately unglamorous — not exactly the stuff of traditional pitch meetings.

It won Best Narrative Feature at SXSW in 2010 and caught the attention of Judd Apatow, who became a producer on Girls. The film that felt too personal and too small ended up being the exact thing that proved she had a singular creative voice.

7. Marc Maron and WTF with Marc Maron

In 2009, Marc Maron was a comedian who, by his own description, had watched his career plateau and his personal life fall apart. He started recording a podcast in his garage — not as a calculated brand move, but almost as therapy. Conversations with comedians he knew. No real plan.

WTF with Marc Maron eventually became one of the most influential interview podcasts in the medium's history. His 2015 episode with President Obama was recorded in that same garage. What started as a creative lifeline became a landmark.

8. Guillermo del Toro's Sketchbooks

Del Toro has kept detailed illustrated notebooks for decades — dense, obsessive journals filled with creature designs, story ideas, and philosophical musings. For years these were purely private documents, a creative habit he maintained regardless of whether any of it would ever be useful.

Those notebooks eventually became the source material and visual bible for films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. They were published as a book in 2013. The private creative habit was, all along, the engine of everything.

9. Donald Glover's Freaks and Geeks Spec

Before Donald Glover was Childish Gambino, before Atlanta, he was a college student who submitted a spec script for Freaks and Geeks — a show that had already been cancelled — as part of his application to write for 30 Rock. It was an unusual choice. Writing a spec for a dead show wasn't exactly conventional wisdom.

Tina Fey hired him anyway, and the rest of his career unfolded from there. The unconventional instinct — to write the thing he actually cared about rather than the safe choice — was the move that opened the door.

10. Kevin Smith and Clerks

Kevin Smith sold his comic book collection and maxed out credit cards to make Clerks in the convenience store where he actually worked, filming mostly at night. The film was shot in black and white because they couldn't afford lighting. He was 23 and had no industry connections.

Harvey Weinstein acquired it at Sundance in 1994 for $227,000. Clerks launched Smith's career and became a touchstone of '90s indie cinema. The film that was made out of pure necessity and stubbornness is the one that lasted.

The Pattern Worth Noticing

Look across all ten of these stories and something consistent emerges: the project that felt too personal, too weird, or too small was almost always the one that broke through. Not because niche automatically equals success, but because genuine creative investment is visible. Audiences can feel the difference between something a person had to make and something they calculated would land.

The doubt you're feeling about your own project? It doesn't mean the project is bad. It might just mean it matters enough to scare you.

Start anyway.