Build fast - fail fast but core vision is missing
Hi,
After attending several accelerator and mentorship programs I'm now well educated about building fast and failing fast as well. My idea has several core visions unfortunately most of my mentors deviate from these and focus on the part that can be monetized early in the game, they say it's a form of validation.
My original idea is a sort of collaboration + community platform and I plan to monetize it by having a marketplace for both service and product. But the existing doctrine points to the marketplace.
Now I have this dilemma of whether I would build the product from scratch with my vision (my background is engineering) or build part of it as suggested (marketplace) using open-source platforms like WordPress/WooCommerce (yep there is a marketplace plugin/theme as well as a multi-vendor theme) but it lacks the collaboration part. Also, it's a pain stitching the modules from different 3rd party plugins as it poses security and update issues. With the latter case, I feel like I'm losing my vision and thus my motivation as well.
I'm really new to product development so any advice is appreciated.
I guess the question is, what is your goal? If you're primary goal is to make money, then your mentors are probably correct. The best way to make money is to get to something that people may pay for (the marketplace) as quickly as possible and try to validate whether people would actually pay for it. That is where "fail fast" comes in.
Of course, if you're more interested in building this collaboration + community platform and want to start there, you can definitely do that. You'll just need to keep in mind that it may take a long time to build your vision (because product development is difficult and time consuming - hence the recommendation to patch together off the shelf tools), and once you do - even if you get people to join the community - you'll still have no idea if you can get people to pay in the marketplace.
Whatever you choose to do, I can assure you that you'll learn a lot.
If you do go with the marketplace first, I think it's a good idea to use as many existing tools as possible and think of it as a prototype. Once you've validated that people will pay, it would probably be a good idea to re-implement your vision to make it easier to maintain.
All of that is true, especially that I'm currently working alone on my idea. I'm not even sure if people would sign up if in case I manage to pull it off. I guess this idea is too grand to be developed alone.