The human memory is limited. When you are first excited about something you get lots and lots of fleeting ideas. By the time you are working on the ideas, you have most likely forgotten most of them and then you are stuck. You no longer know what the next incremental step is, even though you feel it should be obvious.
My most successful project was organized via GitHub issues with a title and no content. To start to get into the mindset of shipping all you have to do is gather a bunch of these issues and assign them to a milestone, that is your product, your initial release. It doesn't matter if it is only 1% of the final vision, you will have many more milestones after this one. After your first milestone what you should do is get users. If you can't, then you should stop unless you need the software yourself. If a milestone is too big and you can't finish it in the deadline you gave yourself but you finished a significant amount of issues, then just take some of the issues out and shift them to the next milestone. Shipping will become a regular habit instead of some mysterious event in the far away future.
Shipping should be a priority, not an afterthought.
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It's important to develop a mental framework on how to evaluate ideas. I no longer feel excited by the prospect of a new language, or a framework, because it would be an uphill battle to drive up the adoption. Once you start thinking critically, you'd have fewer competing ideas, and hopefully, a longer lasting motivation. Instead of acting upon the idea by coding it right away, write it down and evaluate it against a fixed set parameters. YC Application questions are a great starting point. Few questions I routinely ask myself:
1. Will this make money? If yes, how soon?
2. If you've to tell people about it, where would you go?
3. Are there existing solutions that solve the same problem? How are you different from them?
4. How long will it take to ship the first version?
5. Are you solving a problem that you've personally faced?
6. Does the solution save time/money?
Having said that, I think it's a okay to act on a burst on inspiration once in a while. The problem is that we have often direct our energy to inconsequential stuff—name, design, or dreaming how this could be next big thing. Just worry about shipping and everything will fall in place if the idea has legs.
Create value.
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Journey before destination. Schedule and build in bulk.
- Learning Japanese? Take the train/bus/bike and listen to lessons via audiobook, listen to Japanese music, etc
- Working on hygiene? Add your habits together in bulk. Do your face care, teeth, etc all together. Position all the products in a line in your bathroom drawer or countertop in the order you expect to use them.
- Need to exercise more? Schedule your exercise with something you already have to do (going to the grocery store, walk or bike) or are highly motivated to do (go play DDR, hit the climbing gym, or listen to a video game podcast or 4 while running)
Remember that you are human and have a limited amount of willpower. So don't leave your goals to willpower, make them happen because they have to along the everyday journey.
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Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty, etc) has some advice on this:
> Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft.
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How do you decide whether a side project/idea is worth pursuing? You mentioned in another comment that you don’t “do the MVP stuff” and go full blown from the beginning. That seems like a big time sink without a rigorous way of validating whether users want what you’re building?
> Yes it is a time sink and I can't claim having a specific methodology but if you look at all the conflicting theories, literature and endless blog posts that have been written about validation, you might as well just trust your gut.
> My amateurish approach is to jot down every idea in a single line of a text file, then walk away. If the same idea or topic strikes me again, I give it a separate text file and write some copy that might go on the product page, together with links to related stuff, screenshots, etc. Then, after another few weeks and only if I still believe in the idea I come up with more details, perhaps do some light coding, brand ideas, register domains, etc. Then (You guessed it), I wait another few weeks or even months and if it passes my still-relevant check I start working on it on the side of my existing, well, side project. The challenge these days is when to pull the plug or go all-in since the market, interests and attention shifts so quickly that it's tough to adapt without losing temper. Doesn't get easier as you get I older.
There's no exact rule but I'd say 12 to 16 months is a good time to expect some sort of positive trend. I don't do any of that MVP stuff and go full-blown right away because user expectations are high and I'm too old to get pleasure from starting something out of a notion-hosted website. Cash-wise I try to keep it under 20k - keeping in mind that I don't do physical projects and all by myself (no freelancers, contractors, etc).
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p5v on May 18, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: I spent two years launching tiny projects
Same here, and one of them made it into an actual business: https://murmel.social
twox2 on May 18, 2022 [–]
How many people pay for this?
p5v on May 19, 2022 | parent [–]
More than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Including a few businesses that we've created tailor-made solutions for: https://blog.murmel.social/tailor-made-murmel-experience-for-your-business/
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DO NOT FALL FOR THE STATUP PORN.
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I’ve seen friends, acquaintances, and colleagues become entrepreneurs. Without an exception, every one that has a serious social media presence is a fraud. They have a company that is either money losing or fed by their parents. They pretend to be entrepreneur geniuses on social media but really have done nothing but basically be instagram models.
The people I know who have successfully started companies are nothing like this. They usually have industry experience directly involved with or at least closely related to what they start (e.g “my company has to do this ourselves every time but we’d definitely hire it out if we could”).
My advice would be stick to climbing in whatever industry you think you’ll enjoy most and just keep your eyes open. Worst case scenario you’ll have a good career
> Also one needs to keep in mind that many startup "successes" are actually either negative or neutral outcomes. I know several "acquisitions" where the end result was investors making negative returns (receiving back pennies-on-the-dollar, if anything.) Meanwhile, the former CEO gets a cushy job as an advisor at the new place, announcements all over social media, etc. The actual companies barely had any revenue.
>> This was the case with Rancher being acquired by SUSE. The financials were so out of whack for a normal acquisition but SUSE had a dire need to acquire a k8s company and Rancher wanted to exit and now the board has huge regrets over spending so much on something thats brought so little value to the business!
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Jon Yongfook has a brilliant approach - he writes code one week, then does only marketing another week.
> Several months ago I decided to split my time 50/50, spend mornings on dev, and afternoons on marketing. it worked quite well so far. At least way better than the 99% dev and 1% marketing I-will-start-just-after-this-last-bugfix. I tried 1 week / 1 week before but during the marketing week I was overwhelmed by the wish to work on a new feature, or fix this damn bug :)
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### Active audience
I only build websites with a clear monetization model. Every project I've done after my first successful one as been in an adjacent audience. Doing roughly $700k revenue yearly right now over the 2 main projects. Hopefully with a 3rd coming this summer. https://siliconvict.com/projects
Having an active audience makes it easier to sell the product you're building. Building active audience:
Pieter Levels grew remoteok.com and nomadlist.com from scratch to $3M/year as a single founder. He cross-pollinates his startup's users on his adjacent startups. RemoteOK -> Nomad List -> HoodMaps, and so on. He has grown so large that he ignores non-paying users and focuses just on paying customers, even if there are thousands of people talking badly about his products. This took 10 years.
Mick Hagen sold Zinch to Chegg in 2011. Sure, it was noteworthy, but where Mick shined were all the connections he made doing it. He went on to found a VC firm called Cluster in 2017. In 5 years, it invested over $500M and earned many multiples of that as liquid returns since. Mick tapped his VC network, used their money, and came out of the crypto boom as the richest person I know. If he didn't have his active VC audience, he wouldn't have done 1% as well.
Brian Balfour - He founded Viximo, raised $10M and sold it. He founded Boundless, raised $10M and sold it. He led the growth team at Hubspot, and transformed Hubspot's Sales product into hypergrowth. During all of this he had a blog, and wrote about everything. During all of this, he made super strong connections with powerful influencers (e.g. Andrew Chen). He became the poster child for "Growth", so when he decided to start a company that teaches Growth (and other frontier topics) to businesses, companies threw their money at him. By growing his userbase and not making money of that over the years he built active audience that helps him launch new products so well.
Derek Sivers build and sold CD baby. Kept bloging and building online audience. Sold $575K
just in his 4 rng cheap books. https://sive.rs/575k
Taylor buford built casting call club (CCC) and grew it for 7.5y monetized by 1. ads, 2. copying premium features from social job boards like linkedin, 3. paywalls for higher site usage, before realizing he could build courses on voice acting and related. He launched Closing Credits in aug 2021 and climbed into $20k MRR in the first month. His most important metric was number of students coming back for a second, third or more courses, making closing credits grow its own audience. 1. bootstraped by castingcallclub – as brand increases Casting Crediits has more channels such as influences, blogs etc. 2. Students take courses, eventually finding success. 3. Successful users become influences and promote Closing Credits.
### Case studies
- https://sive.rs/
- https://brianbalfour.com/
- https://andrewchen.com/
### Growth hacking
- https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/growth-hacking-101-your-first-500000-users/12771772