Motivation
Shipping fast is an essential skill for any good developer.
After working as a contractor for 2 years I felt that I wanted to have more ownership in the products I was building, so I decided to try and make it as an indie hacker.
But building products requires more than just coding. As a bootstrapped founder you need to take care of everything: design, project management and most importantly: marketing&sales.
I spent my first 6 months taking 2 projects to 70% and abandoning them.
What happened?
I failed at the most talked about subject in the startup world: validation. Exactly! I worked for months on features that made sense on paper, but in reality, nobody wanted them (or I didn’t know how to reach the right audience). I knew I had to change my habits and force myself to ship faster, so I started looking for solutions.
Then, I stumbled upon John Yongfook’s blog where he discussed attempting this 12 month challenge to regain his product-building skills after a few years in a corporate job.
I felt inspired and knew this would be the right fit, as it helps you develop the habit of building and launching fast, validating ideas faster.
The challenge
12 products in 12 months is a challenge that has been approached by a few people already including John, Pieter Levels and a few others. The idea is simple: you have to force yourself to ship a new product every month.
Some advantages of doing this challenge:
- Fail fast: 1 month is enough to validate if an idea is good or not.
- Learn marketing: as a developer, it forces you to spend more time on business tasks rather than just building.
- More chances of success: some ideas will be bad, but iterating fast gives you more chances of finding one that sticks.
- Stay focused: there’s not enough time for many features, so prioritization is key.
Where to find ideas?
I chose some starting ideas by looking at some of the things I am passionate about: coding, motorcycling, traveling, productivity tools, tech recruiting, and others.
Then I made a list and qualified them based on market potential, dev difficulty, competition, and unique advantage. After narrowing the list, for the remaining ideas I did mindmaps, and researched them in more detail. I chose the first startup based on founder-product fit, a motorcycle route planning tool. I will post at the end of each month on this personal blog, documenting my progress and lessons learned.
In the meantime, these products will be built in public and I will be tweeting daily.
Product 1 - Roadsio
Roadtrip planning & discovery app. Check out the launch here.
Started: 3rd July 2023 Launched: 31st July 2023