3 Products in 6 Months: Getting Started Building in Public
Last week, I committed to build three products in six months in public between Feb. 1st and July 31st, 2022. (I posted it on Medium as I could not yet post here, my progress updates will appear here). My objective is to overcome fears and think-only mode and start doing, building, and launching in public. Making money is a motivation, too but I don’t want to press too hard on it with a clear objective, like “reach 10k MRR”.
I have no actively maintained website or social media accounts. Thus, finding an audience will probably be the hardest part of it all.
You may ask: Why 3 projects in 6 months instead of the more common 12 projects in 12 months?
First, I want to spend more time on each project than just one month. Second, I want to have a checkpoint after six months to see what I want to do with the rest of the year. Maybe I want to double down on one product, maybe I want to build fewer or more products during the remaining five months of 2022. For me, building three products in six months is still a lot, given that I will be doing this on the side.
My idea is to build and launch three different kinds of product for a broad learning experience:
- An information product
- A website or online community
- A software product
If possible, all three should tackle problems around a common theme (update: or be different takes at one problem) and with a common audience.
I will broadly follow a five-step process:
-
Ideate: Find, check, and select a problem I can address with a product that is small enough for me to build within six weeks.
-
Seek awareness: Find an audience, provide value and see if the product can be attractive.
-
Build the product.
-
Sell: Win at least a few customers or users for the product.
-
Serve, learn, and improve: Serve the customers well, ask for feedback, and improve the experience.
My initial idea is to launch each product within about six weeks and then take about two weeks to focus on selling and learning before starting with the next product. I will report on my progress each Sunday and tell you: What has happened? What went well? What went not so well? What do I want to do next?
Your tips, suggestions, and critique are welcome. I hope to see you next this week.
From the chart, it seems that every subsequent product has allocated less time than the previous one.
At least the "idea to launch" part is the same, which does make sense assuming the ideas the almost equal in terms of cost of building.
But the "selling, serving, and learning" part is shrinking with each iteration. Is it because you expect that to become so much faster? Or is the chart simply cropped and you intend to "launch" 3 in 6 months?