Doing 4 projects in 4 years vs doing 1 in 4 years ? Which is more reasonable ?
Hello
I was thinking that if i spent 4 years of my in life there 50/50 chance that it will win/loss, so I thought why I don't make 4 projects in 4 years to increase the % !
What do you think
Do 4 in:
1st - 1 week (just simple product). Ship it.
2nd - 1 months (more advanced)
3rd - 3 months.
4th - 6 months.
You can increase the workflow to let yourself adapt. Doing one startup in 4 years is VERY risky.
Your base assumption of 50/50 chance of success is incorrect. It's more like 20% chance of success, 80% chance of loss. Also I would say that going by the law of large numbers, you don't actually increase your chance of success, you just roll the dice more times. The odds of each individual project remain the same.
The other thing to do be said is... it takes great patience, focus and emotional stamina to build things for a long time. A lot of people don't finish or ship because they get 90% the way there then the last 10% which always takes 50% of the time required to complete they can't be bothered. Then at first building is fun, but it becomes a lot less fun and more stressful after you do it many many times hence the emotional stamina part.
Definitely don't spend 4 years building something. All the important learning that you can't get from blog posts, podcasts, books and stories happens after you ship. So if you want real data, ship stuff and it will come.
These generalized approached to launching a project/business are rather dangerous IMO. You shouldn't, and really can't, forcibly squeeze every single project into a fixed timeframe. The timeframe is determined by the the project, not the other way around. Forcibly limiting yourself to a fixed time window is like shooting yourself in the foot while running a 2/3's of a marathon.
Establish what you want to work on. Then, come up with realistic timeframes for your experiments. Whenever you're at the end of an experiment and can validate the assumption(s) being tested, then you can decide wether to move on to the next experiment or a new project.
Yeah, I know. We all know there's two or three success stories floating around of people doing 1 "startup" per month and hitting gold in month #2. These are exceptions, extreme outliers. Follow this approach and you'll most likely end up with 12 "failed ideas/startups". Great shit does not get build in 1, 2, 3 or 4 months. Train yourself to have an attention span that lasts longer and be able to commit to something you believe in. It will increase your changes of success drastically.
Come up with an idea you're passionate about and believe in and start by dedicating 6 months. Then re-evaluate. Even if you have not yet reached any serious traction at that point, it's still not a given that you should now abandon the project.
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When somebody spends a year building a product with no customers, they're doing it wrong.
This is simply the end result of a starter not applying the proper experimental approach and not achieving any learning whatsoever.
If you're in this to have a great time tinkering with stuff, learning how to code or just having fun, then the 1 week/month approach makes sense. However, if the aim is the build a real business, you will need a hell of a lot more time (wit the occasional exception, granted) than that. Minimal learning, validation, etc will typically take more time than 1 week or 1 month.
I still believe that timeboxing building a real business is a bad idea. However, that does per definition mean that certain assumptions can't be validated in a short period of time. You might have an idea; run an MVP testing the assumption that there are people who experience the problem you're trying to solve. If you validate that assumption, you move onto the next assumption (possibly related t market size or prices). If you can't validate the assumption, you might consider moving onto another project.
Sometimes, these MVP's can be done in a month, or less. Sometimes not. I'd suggest taking the time to run the experiment well, rather than saying "this has to be done in X days/weeks". If you're three days short of reaching the end point of your MVP and possibly validating your assumptions; does it make sense to say "Sorry man, time's up. Moving on to the next project"?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Exactly (One year is too long to invest in something 100% that isn't showing signs of traction earlier.)
This comment was deleted 7 years ago