From idea to product: how I started WorkFlawless
Hi everyone, I am the founder of WorkFlawless - a visual workflow and SOP management tool for scaling businesses.
I just created the tool profile here on Indie Hackers, which I love. I guess I've been shy to post about my experience. But then I realized, putting things down in writing and keeping a diary of how things go, with all the ups and downs, will surely help me... and if I can help or inspire others too, then it's two birds with one stone, isn't it?
So yeah guys, I want to start narrating my adventures building and running WorkFlawless, and I want to start from the beginning of course, which includes one of the most challenging things when starting something: getting the idea.
So I'll start this first post from the very beginning. If you guys like it, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments. That will motivate to write new posts with the rest of the story in the exact timeline in which every event happened.
The inception: how did I start WorkFlawless
I've always had a "maker" mindset, but where I always lacked was in finding the right idea. Somehow I had this obsession with finding "the idea that nobody else had before that will disrupt the market". Sure enough, anything I could think of was already there in some shape or form. I was hitting my head on the wall for a long, long time. We're talking about years... I was building learning projects and following courses just to keep me busy, but inside of me regret was building up.. "Why can't I have the right idea?", "Why I can't think of anything interesting?"
Then, after a conversation with a dear friend, it struck me. It was not about finding the unique idea nobody had though of... it was about finding a problem that people had, and solve it. Someone else will have thought about it before, but that's good... competition means there is a market willing to pay for a solution.
So I started thinking of problems and issues at my places of work. I went back with the mind to the beginning of my career up until present day.
I've been working as a digital marketing professional for over 12 years, in 3 different countries and 2 continents. It's been a hell of a ride, and still is!
As I jumped from company to company, and started landing more high-level, managerial roles, I kept seeing the same problem coming up over and over again: a company does well for some time, then a period of scaling comes. This is when chaos takes over: new team members, new service lines, new clients, new partners, you name it... My experience led me to realize that 99% of the time the reasons behind the chaos have to do in one way or another with processes:
Processes not documented at all (common with startups)
Documented processes, but with no standardized formats
Scattered process documentation in different places
Processes being outdated and not being followed
Entire processes getting lost when an employee leaves due to complete lack of documentation
... and I could continue!
After my last job, where I had a leadership role and where I saw how lack of processes can disrupt entire business lines and impact clients and therefore profit, I decided that I would try to fix this recurring issue.
I searched online for tools to solve this and help with process mapping and management. A few came up and I tried all of them. Some where better than the others but non did satisfy me. In general terms, most where overly complicated and tried to do a lot of different shiny things, which were impacting my experience, creating a big learning curve which I absolutely didn't want to undertake, and distracting my team and myself from what we needed: clear, mapped processes that everyone actually uses.
So that was my breaking point... and that's when WorkFlawless was born. I decided I would code the tool I wish I had found to solve the issue I had seen over and over again.
From the idea to the product
For the first couple of months, I spent time interviewing colleagues and friends I knew in other companies. I was asking them whether they had encountered any issues with processes at their company and what the wish they had to help them fix them. I was also very lucky to be close enough to my CEO so that I could investigate and discuss in depth some of the most pressing process-related issues in the company. After the interview rounds and having put together all the responses, I had a lot of cool ideas and features to think of, such as:
Onboarding new team members are often messy and don't follow any structure. Employees are left alone after the first week to "figure it out"
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are helpful, but adoption is low and it's a burden to create them and keep them updated
If documents are scattered everywhere with no ownership, no-one will use them
Around month 3 I started building the tool as a side project. I felt a rush of motivation, excitement, joy... I can't describe it. I started a coding frenzy, I was coming back from work and coding, coding on the weekends, I was so into the idea that I wouldn't stop. Finally I had the idea, what else could have gone wrong?
This is it for this post guys - did you like it? If you guys enjoyed it, I will post the second part soon where I'll tell you more about the setup I chose and the challenges I faced there.
