kienan

I’ve built more things for the web than I can remember (luckily, no one else can either). If your goal is to one day launch something of your own, small go-nowhere projects are the best way to cut your teeth. A few notes on the lessons you’ll learn.

1. Learning to launch/quit/fire

Especially if you’re working with others, you’ll quickly learn that weeks or months without launch is a huge red flag. You’re supposed to be building something small. The first time a deadline’s missed, time to make changes. If you’re still not able to launch, stop fooling yourself — get rid of people, or pull the plug.

2. Customer Acquisition

Building something that people will pay for is pretty tough. Small projects are a wonderful way to test whether you’re actually as good at making money as you think you are. That particular muscle gets stronger with each consecutive project, but I know of no other way to develop a sense for how to do this. 

I’ve launched projects with exactly zero customers and others with nearly zero customers. Pingwire and Factotum eventually had customers in the thousands. Each time, it gets easier to build something that might leapfrog the last. 

3. You’ve launched. Now what?

Post-launch is really damn tough and you should be putting yourself in the post-launch position as much as possible. Sometimes having no gameplan works, most times it doesn’t. All the blog posts or mixergy interviews in the world aren’t going to help you when you’re caught in the headlights and the clock is ticking.

Courseboss was a dud with no gameplan and no traffic. We bent over backwards to drive traffic to Zontik Games. Pingwire was built in the middle of the night and its traffic took down twitpic the next morning (and several times after that). 

[via allang]

(via mikehudack)