Ask IH: Anyone here tried 12 Startups in 12 Months, what was your experience like?

We've discussed this before, and have crowdsourced a list of the people who've done this (see link below).

In all honesty the dataset is thin: most people who start seem to flakeout early, so perhaps there is a survivor bias. The massive success of Levels is an outlier: though his protege @AndreyAzimov has been incredibly consistent.

A very interesting angle is when teams of people group together to do this. There are two teams doing this with very interesting results:

1.) WestVessey ( a team of 2 full time (and some other part-timers) have generated > $50,000, through maximising launches on one platform (product hunt). Still when you consider the salary of a skilled developer and marketer, they could have earned 6 times that working full time.

2.) @dinuka and colleagues have launched some very nice products: shutyourmouth API and have a hit with MakersKitchen (300+ users). Though from their last update, revenue to date has been limited.

So what does the data to-date suggest:

1.) Individuals get further if they know how to code apriori.

2.) Teams with mixed skills can be increadibly productive, and launch better quality products.

3.) You can make four digit revenue from launches, but this quickly dies down, without a consistent push.

If your aim to make money from those products in one year, the evidence suggests you'll loose out against a basic salary. Never forget the oppurtunity cost of what else you could have done with your time. The value of these challenges, as with the original Levels challenge, seems to be in finding that one thing to dedicate your time to.

sheet2site, shutyourmouth, or any of the west vessey products could be massive businesses in their own right. In the long run, there is no substitute to patiently building customers out.

Links:

https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/is-success-in-12-products-in-12-month-challenges-a-statistical-outlier-3da018c3bb

https://www.westvesey.com/why-were-building-24-businesses-in-12-months/

https://www.andreyazimov.com/

https://twitter.com/its_dinuka

I'm not sure what I think about the whole 12 Startups in 12 Months thing.

It seems pretty obvious to me that it isn't the best way to go about building a viable business.

But then that isn't always the goal - you might want to practice building, marketing, or simply 'completing something'. And if that's the case, 12 Startups might be a fun way of motivating yourself to do that.

If I were to do a '12 Things in 12 Months' Challenge with the goal of actually building a real business, I'd probably recommend to take month 1 to choose a problem you're really interested in solving, and then iterate products on a monthly basis (or bimonthly/quarterly if it's working well), starting with a really simple product (eg an ebook) and working your way up to a more complex software or hardware product as you grow your audience and understand the problem/customers better...

I tried 7 years, 14 products, in one startup. :) All failed. I did many "don't do things".

Slowness kills the product/startup, user interest. loss of money. I also think, it is practically not possible to have 12 products in a year. user growth happens slowly in initial time. may be 3 to 4 products a year?, I am doing "marketing code" 90% and product feature 10%,

and ended up with below strategy,

• building growth engine first with just one feature.

• Trying various ways to present to users

• with one company

• passion is the only driver

and got good traction so far.

Hey Alex, In general I think it's a good idea if you have a few ideas you want to try out, if you have lots of room for learning.

I think the 12 startups in 12 months is really a learning exercise. You build and ship and get into the habit of doing that. You aren't as focused on growing it to 100 users. It's more about your ability to ship and deliver. Work in tight deadlines and constraints.

Depending on the idea some can be done in a week or a month some could take 2 months.

Also throwing in some different tech stacks for some projects you can build out your skill sets. If nothing else it gives you some blog posts which could build an audience for something down the road and you have a proven track record of shipping projects.

If it's purely a competition with your friends that's fine, but I fail to see how it's possible to launch any kind of product in that kind of timeframe. Even making the marketing website would take a month, assuming you're not just rolling a template. The only viable strategy would be to make a bunch of wix websites pushing things with near to zero development time and concentrate on marketing. Even at that it just seems like a good way to throw away money.

I like the idea of forcing yourself to keep short deadlines and ship imperfect products, but I don't think throwing new products on market because "there might statically be at least one that will attract people" is viable. But it is fun and you would probably learn a lot of things

Hi @alexterenda

I'm not doing 12 Startups, though I think it's a fun idea.

But I actually did a small experiment a couple of months ago with how fast I could get an idea up and running (a very simple site that let you pay me $1 for a an autogenerated, jokey startup idea)

I only made $25 from that project - but what it did do for me was give me my next proper idea!

I realised that I felt pain while building out my cash-for-ideas site, and it gave me something to target.

The pain was the it's surprisingly hard to take payment online without rolling some server side code (or going fully into something like Shopify straight away, even if you're not building a retail website).

So I built Trolley - https://trolley.link - which I soft-launched 2 days ago. It lets you use Stripe to take payment without needing a server application, so you can just throw up a static HTML site with a payment button on it. It means you can start testing your idea and copy in minutes.

If you want to give it a go - or you just want a chat about bootstrapping startups in the UK (I'm in Yorkshire) - drop me a line

I'm considering this challenge also.

I think it's a great learning opportunity, I know when I did the freeCodeCamp curriculum there were quite a few projects and building an idea out from scratch within a short time frame really accelerated the learning process.

Obviously they were practice projects rather than startups, with no demand to make money or attract users, but I guess the whole point of the challenge will be to see which projects people find useful, and grow them from there.

I think I saw someone else in the community @yongfook has also started this challenge recently.

Good luck!

It's good for getting you in the habit of shipping and the habit of starting something, this means after a couple of iterations it becomes much easier to focus on the main idea itself and the act of releasing and all the process that comes with it becomes natural

@alexterenda Its a good idea and am on it right now,I just started with my first project of contentiskey.co. The goal is to identify one project that will have traction and focus on it among the 12 ideas as compared to working on two or three and all fail

Whats 12 startups in 12 month challenge?