Since my background is in software engineering, I don't have any problem building products from scratch. But getting products in front of people has been a struggle for me for a long time. Everybody knows that you need to show your products to early users as quickly as possible to receive feedback, but deep down you're afraid that you're not going to hear the things you'd liked to hear. This has been an ongoing issue for me, so I wanted to put myself in a situation where by design I will be out of my comfort zone.
As a builder, the longer you work on a product the more features creep in. Then you realize the product is not wanted in the market. It's easy to keep going even though all the market data is telling you to stop. I realized that when you're working on your startup, exploration is part of the deal. Realizing that exploration is normal and as long as you're building the type of stuff you plan to build it's Ok to keep trying different products or markets. Since I know that now, I figured a better way would be to try things a little faster. That's why I decided to publish a project every month to receive feedback quickly and move forward accordingly.
One of the greatest points I heard from the co-founder of Rotten Tomatoes, Patrick Lee, is at his talk about focus. He mentions that finding Product-Market-Fit is like starting a fire. Having a lot of features is like sun, it doesn't start a fire. Focusing on One Feature, One Category, One Market like having a magnifier which focuses the sunlight and starts a fire. I wanted to keep this in mind while I'm building products and in order to see how the market responds to a product I decided to publish my products every month on Product Hunt. To make sure I stick to this strategy, I will keep repeating it for at least a year.
I recommend everyone watch Patrick Lee's talk on focus. It will help you tremendously.
One caviat to the process is, even though the products will focus on a single feature, I want to make sure that they are still good quality and have great presentation. And if any of the products see potential traction, I will spend more time on them again in monthly increments.
We're seeing foundational shifts in our social and work lives, created by the pandemic. Shifts like these allow entrepreneurs build products that will alleviate the problems that come with the changes in our lives. A major part of my focus during these months will be to address these problems. However, building products just for the sake of building is also not the right approach, so my goal will be to focus on the intersection of alleviating problems during the pandemic and my personal mission. For this reason, my other goal is to clarify my personal mission as I build different products and consolidate what is about these products that make me so interested in them.
So far, as I looked at the product ideas and projects that interested me I've noticed that I tend to build products that connect people to each other to clarify communication and strenghten the collective relationship, which is why I'm calling my current mission "Strengthening Relationships". I believe this is a good start, but I think I will clarify even further as I learn more about myself during this process.
The first project that I built in July was called Min Tracker. The idea came to me when I was helping a friend of mine with peer-programming, then when the pandemic hit I started helping him over Slack calls. This gave me an idea of people doing peer-programming or having unscheduled meetings to track how much total time they spend during their calls for the purposes of invoicing or just personal time management. The focus was to build it only on Slack platform and do time tracking for weekly or monthly increments. Even though building Slack apps take so much time given how complex their APIs are, because of the small scope I was able to build it in a month and publish is on Product Hunt. The design work is done by Oz Hashimoto at Zypsy.
The product did not receive as much traction as I expected, but I felt a sense of accomplishments having published a product and reading the market response in such a short time. This gave me the confidence to work on my next project and it's in progress. I will share it once it is ready.
I decided to change my strategy towards product building and focus on publishing products every month, so that I get a market respone early on. The products I focus on are in the intersection of my personal mission and alleviating problems exposed by the pandemic. So far, it has been quite motivational to follow this strategy and I'm looking forward to getting more products out into the world.