Reflecting on the approach
In our time during the About You Pangea Festival 2022, we came up with our vision for:
Instead of starting with one idea, as many do, it was more important to us how we were going to work and what our day-to-day would ideally look like. Especially since we both had some experiences with freelance work and bootstrapping startups that didn't work out the way we wanted them to.
So a different approach was needed to succeed someday.
The way to success would be lined with lessons learned, disappointments, and failures, that was clear to us. So we decided to embrace the lessons it would provide and make it a point to fail rapidly, repeatedly, openly, publicly, honestly, and confidently.
And then learn from our results, identify our mistakes, correct our approach, iterate, and improve.
Each of the failures would allow us to create content about it, allowing others to learn along with us and get to their goal faster. The decision to #buildinpublic was easily made and would force us to get more comfortable with failure culture, kick-start personal growth and hold each other accountable with open communication.
To do so, we needed our name and presentation to reflect and make people quickly understand. We went through quite a few iterations. Very quickly, we fell in love with the idea of having 2 domains: 1 with the .fail TLD and one with .win
The main ones with win/fail TLDs in the running were:
coders
decode
next
replay / incremental / iterative
simple / mvp / nevermind / poc / bootstrapped / value
endless / constant / many
loud / noisy
humble / confident / bold / graceful
planned / certain / upcoming / calculated
But also others like: fuckup / instant / quickly .build
In the end, we decided on the name that we both could associate with, where both TLDs were still available, and where Google keywords would not be highly competitive.
Our vision framework
The rough outlines of our approach ended up being the following:
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Limit the time we spend on an idea andamp; launch it fast.
In the past, we kept changing and improving the concept of an idea over and over, kept working on it for a long time, and never really launched and validated it.
People will start using it when I get it to that perfect point and feature set.
So we limited ourselves to having a rough version 1 ready after 2 weeks. Just spend after-work hours and weekends on it.
Preferably, we would spend that time together in one location to improve our communication and keep our focus and motivation.
📣
Polish andamp; market the idea for no more than 2 additional weeks.
Getting the idea to a launch state with working out the last kinks, after successfully building the core, would take a bit more time. So we gave ourselves 2 additional weeks to do so, get people excited for it, and prepare the monetization.
This time could be very well spent apart and wouldn't require us to be in the same location. Giving us a bit more freedom and focus on the task at hand.
💰
Monetize immediately andamp; aim to earn the first buck after a month.
After the conclusion of the month, the idea needs to be fully launched and include a monetization feature. Ideally, we would already have the first purchase at that time, giving us an idea if people would like to pay for it.
With this approach, each idea would not take more than a month to get launched, allowing us to rapidly iterate on things we would like to improve on.
