Personal experience of combining core work and developing your own product
Among the novice Internet entrepreneurs often argue about the possibility of combining the main work and creating your own product. Some say that a steady income is relaxing, and the need to be in the workplace makes it difficult to concentrate, others argue that at the initial stage this will give more time and opportunity to start. Under the cut, I tried to describe my feelings and thoughts on this matter.
As an introduction
Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that everything written about business cannot be taken as given. The authors omit the seemingly unimportant factors, and sometimes they are not even aware of some of them. Instructions “how to build a business” do not exist - any article, including this one, must be designed to your own situation, trying to extract at least some useful experience.
A little bit about yourself
I am 28 years old, married, without children. Originally from Latvia, about a year ago my wife and I moved to the very south of Spain, to the city of Malaga. He has 10 years of experience behind his back, started with web developers, then worked on telecom systems for a long time, and for the last 3-4 years - system analysis. And although I can not boast of a high level of knowledge in programming, there is a certain technical “background”, as well as an excellent understanding of the design and creation of systems.
')
How it all began
About six months ago, while on vacation at home, I met with an old friend, part-time former colleague. It was a party, we were not completely sober, in any case, the idea of ​​a joint side project was absolutely justified. So that you understand, my friend is a very experienced developer who is able to do (as far as my imagination is enough) anything. In general, here it is, a fresh team of two people - one is more for the grocery part, the second is well versed in any technical details, both have enough ideas and a desire to create their own product.
We decided to start by creating a simple digest of technology products, much like ProductHunt. We created a simple (and ugly) design and wrote minimal functionality. We decided to abandon the use of ready-made frameworks and templates and developed everything from scratch. After about two weeks, the first version of the digest was ready to launch. The main part of the development took place on the weekend, sometimes it turned out to do something and in the evenings after work. We didn’t really bother with building the “right” process, we didn’t even have a repository. Skype was enough not to edit the same file at the same time, Trello for maintaining the task list.
To live a working day was difficult. We bombed each other with letters with new ideas, functionality and thoughts, randomly jumping in our skulls. Sleep in the evening was a problem. Everyone starting a project knows what I'm talking about.
The next couple of months went to study the materials on marketing, in which we had zero experience. Since it was too early to spend money on the promotion of the project, basically we just gained knowledge for the future. I learned how important it is to be able to write articles. This does not seem to be such a difficult task, but in fact it takes a lot of time. Nevertheless, the ability to create interesting content will bring incomparably more benefits than any advertising.
We continued to work on the functionality and every day did a new issue in the digest with a list of useful and neochen applications, libraries and resources. Visitors sent their products - about 1/5 of all entries were offered to us by readers.
Creating a platform for doing digests
At some point, I received a message on Reddit with a request to share the engine for doing the digest. The guy had a desire to do a weekly letter with a list of "long reads" - voluminous articles on various topics. Of course, we agreed, but the man disappeared after a while. However, this prompted the idea of ​​providing anyone with a simple and fast way of conducting a digest with the possibility of creating periodical issues, distribution and a certain social component.
We ordered the design and embarked on the necessary changes to turn our humble digest into a platform. At first, the task did not seem to be voluminous, but in reality, like all IT projects, it took more of the calculated time. We spent two days off weekends, evenings and even holidays in development. The lack of core work would certainly speed up the process and reduce the workload. However, such a regime will not kill you in a few weeks. Hard, but you get a feeling of satisfaction from work.
As a result, six months after the talk “let's do something,” we reached the point of creating a good product . Naturally, the number of ideas and additional functionality is only growing, but the MVP is up and running.
A few thoughts at last
What ultimately can I say about the main work and parallel work on my project? The load is high, sometimes quite hard. Of course, I want to spend much more time on my own business. However, I do not like unnecessary risks, and I could not just give up everything for the sake of the possibility of creating my own startup. I will give an analogy. Creating a business seems to me to jump from the roof of the barn. So, I am ready to make some efforts, and bring some hay to the place where I plan to land. I can still miss the mark, but it seems like jumping is no longer so scary.
I want to thank the administration of Megamind for the opportunity to create a company blog.
As an introduction
Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that everything written about business cannot be taken as given. The authors omit the seemingly unimportant factors, and sometimes they are not even aware of some of them. Instructions “how to build a business” do not exist - any article, including this one, must be designed to your own situation, trying to extract at least some useful experience.
A little bit about yourself
I am 28 years old, married, without children. Originally from Latvia, about a year ago my wife and I moved to the very south of Spain, to the city of Malaga. He has 10 years of experience behind his back, started with web developers, then worked on telecom systems for a long time, and for the last 3-4 years - system analysis. And although I can not boast of a high level of knowledge in programming, there is a certain technical “background”, as well as an excellent understanding of the design and creation of systems.
')
How it all began
About six months ago, while on vacation at home, I met with an old friend, part-time former colleague. It was a party, we were not completely sober, in any case, the idea of ​​a joint side project was absolutely justified. So that you understand, my friend is a very experienced developer who is able to do (as far as my imagination is enough) anything. In general, here it is, a fresh team of two people - one is more for the grocery part, the second is well versed in any technical details, both have enough ideas and a desire to create their own product.
We decided to start by creating a simple digest of technology products, much like ProductHunt. We created a simple (and ugly) design and wrote minimal functionality. We decided to abandon the use of ready-made frameworks and templates and developed everything from scratch. After about two weeks, the first version of the digest was ready to launch. The main part of the development took place on the weekend, sometimes it turned out to do something and in the evenings after work. We didn’t really bother with building the “right” process, we didn’t even have a repository. Skype was enough not to edit the same file at the same time, Trello for maintaining the task list.
To live a working day was difficult. We bombed each other with letters with new ideas, functionality and thoughts, randomly jumping in our skulls. Sleep in the evening was a problem. Everyone starting a project knows what I'm talking about.
The next couple of months went to study the materials on marketing, in which we had zero experience. Since it was too early to spend money on the promotion of the project, basically we just gained knowledge for the future. I learned how important it is to be able to write articles. This does not seem to be such a difficult task, but in fact it takes a lot of time. Nevertheless, the ability to create interesting content will bring incomparably more benefits than any advertising.
We continued to work on the functionality and every day did a new issue in the digest with a list of useful and neochen applications, libraries and resources. Visitors sent their products - about 1/5 of all entries were offered to us by readers.
Creating a platform for doing digests
At some point, I received a message on Reddit with a request to share the engine for doing the digest. The guy had a desire to do a weekly letter with a list of "long reads" - voluminous articles on various topics. Of course, we agreed, but the man disappeared after a while. However, this prompted the idea of ​​providing anyone with a simple and fast way of conducting a digest with the possibility of creating periodical issues, distribution and a certain social component.
We ordered the design and embarked on the necessary changes to turn our humble digest into a platform. At first, the task did not seem to be voluminous, but in reality, like all IT projects, it took more of the calculated time. We spent two days off weekends, evenings and even holidays in development. The lack of core work would certainly speed up the process and reduce the workload. However, such a regime will not kill you in a few weeks. Hard, but you get a feeling of satisfaction from work.
As a result, six months after the talk “let's do something,” we reached the point of creating a good product . Naturally, the number of ideas and additional functionality is only growing, but the MVP is up and running.
A few thoughts at last
- Working as a team is much easier. Rather, I do not believe in the possibility of creating a quality product alone. You must be confident in your partner, ideally have experience working together and know each other for a long time. Any problem between the founders is absolutely critical for the project.
- Run whatever you want as quickly as possible. Start with a prototype with a terrible design and a pair of working buttons. Nothing motivates better than real users.
- You do not need to have a fully developed understanding of the final functionality of the product. You will still have a huge number of ideas and requests from users. However, the only way to get them is to start with a working minimum.
What ultimately can I say about the main work and parallel work on my project? The load is high, sometimes quite hard. Of course, I want to spend much more time on my own business. However, I do not like unnecessary risks, and I could not just give up everything for the sake of the possibility of creating my own startup. I will give an analogy. Creating a business seems to me to jump from the roof of the barn. So, I am ready to make some efforts, and bring some hay to the place where I plan to land. I can still miss the mark, but it seems like jumping is no longer so scary.
I want to thank the administration of Megamind for the opportunity to create a company blog.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/289778/
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