Product Speedrun - Building 6 products in 12 weeks
I’m going to build a product every 2 weeks for the next 12 weeks, starting June 1st.
why? #
You know how, when you resume workouts after a long gap you had to do full-body lightweight exercises for a week before you start your routine?
I’ve built several projects over the years, but I’ve always had a problem of abandoning it midway. Also, I haven’t started a product since 2020 when I started working on RosterBird.
Given that I was working full-time all that time and I’ve found serious sideprojects difficult, I’ve limited my time only to RosterBird when it has begun to grow.
Therefore, I’ve become quite a bit rusty in my shipping skills.
I will be switching to building Indie-products full-time starting in June and I think this exercise will serve helpful in getting back up to speed.
This is in principle similar to 12 Startups in 12 months challenge many have done before me. But I’m not sure to call this a “Startup” or “Business”, more like products with the potential to become a business on their own.
Also, many of the successful outcomes of this challenge have reached their peak at around 6-7 projects. So, I’ve kept the challenge to 6 as well and not 12.
why 2 weeks? #
The reasons are pretty much the same as what was said for the 12 startups challenge. It acts as a forcing function to limit the features to be built, forces you to think on value terms and solves a big problem I have, shipping the products.
Being a consultant for the better part of the last decade, I’ve built several projects from the ground up in a short time. These are things like internal services or microservices, but the gist is the same. Bootstrapping a project, especially with many of the tools these days, are easier than ever. That’s why I shrunk the original 4 weeks into 2 weeks.
Also, I lack patience and tend to get distracted by the next idea, so 2 weeks will be a good constraint.
All that said and done, I also want to keep an option open for potentially revisiting any ideas that have traction later and allocate some time if necessary. All in all, the goal is not just to churn products like a script, but to extract a viable business out of it.
criterias #
I don’t have an issue with generating ideas. Like many, I have abundant of them collected over the last 10 or so years. At last count, the list was at 85. But the issue is at picking the valuable ones out of it, as I have noted down all kinds of absurd or ambitious things over there. For example, I have noted down some ideas like the one below from 2013,
or like this one.
Unsurprisingly, the list needs rigorous filtering before it can be qualified to be worked on. As such, I’m keeping this set of constraints for the ideas.
- Must be useful
- Revenue viable
- Solving problems I’m familiar with or tools I would use
And along with this, something that can be built in 2 weeks, but I’m not keeping that as a hard constraint yet.
conclusion #
So yeah, that is it. I’m doing this for the first time so not sure how the updates or how the progress is going to be. I’m not sure if daily updates will be possible, so I’ll start with a weekly summary and adapt later.
please write to me with your thoughts!