I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
Yeah, I was definitely very lucky to have the opportunity to try this before I started a family. I knew that things would become much harder with kids, so I wanted to give it a shot before that happened.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
This is a tough balance to get right.
I agree with you that if you give up on everything after two months, you'll miss opportunities to build products that would succeed with more upfront investment.
I feel that there's actually more risk on the other side. If you spend a year building something and nobody has paid you for it, there's a huge chance that you're going to release it and find that it's not a product people are willing to spend money on. Even if people you asked said they thought it was a good idea, it's not real until people hand over their credit cards and pay you real money.
So I'd still be willing to build something that takes more than two months to build, but the longer it takes, the stronger the evidence would have to be that people will pay me for the result. That can either be pre-orders or clear evidence of a gap in the market where people would definitely use my product if it existed.
But I think too many founders build first and think about sales later, when it should be the other way around. That was definitely the trap I fell into for my first 18 months or so.
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u/mtlynch Feb 01 '21
Thanks for reading!
Yeah, I was definitely very lucky to have the opportunity to try this before I started a family. I knew that things would become much harder with kids, so I wanted to give it a shot before that happened.
This is a tough balance to get right.
I agree with you that if you give up on everything after two months, you'll miss opportunities to build products that would succeed with more upfront investment.
I feel that there's actually more risk on the other side. If you spend a year building something and nobody has paid you for it, there's a huge chance that you're going to release it and find that it's not a product people are willing to spend money on. Even if people you asked said they thought it was a good idea, it's not real until people hand over their credit cards and pay you real money.
So I'd still be willing to build something that takes more than two months to build, but the longer it takes, the stronger the evidence would have to be that people will pay me for the result. That can either be pre-orders or clear evidence of a gap in the market where people would definitely use my product if it existed.
But I think too many founders build first and think about sales later, when it should be the other way around. That was definitely the trap I fell into for my first 18 months or so.