How do I get out of the "it wont work" zone?
Hello
I've been taking notes about some of the great posts here. I've been here a long time already and I still seem to be not able to move and build my ideas.
How do I get out of the notion that my idea won't work? What is the zero step before I start building it? Should I validate first? Or should I start building something and just see if it realy works?
Thank you.
You can try a bit different approach: build anything! Why? Even if your project don't attract any users, you will gain a lot of experience. It could be a good lesson for your future projects!
Completely agree. Imagine trying something new and complicated for the first time, and having the expectation that you have to ace it on the first try put upon you. That's really tough!
When getting into entrepreneurship, I heard the saying "you build your current product to learn what you should have built instead" and it has been a good companion ever since. Your first guess won't be the thing you will end up with. That's its job, but you have to give it your best shot anyway. You're building to learn.
Agreed. Our first product failed, but we learned so much from it that it was much much easier to get traction for our second project. One of the most valuable lessons was, that you should get something out and evolve it over time instead of building the "perfect" product. It doesn't have to be an MVP, but it should be polished and solve a real problem.
Others already mentioned asking yourself "why" you think it won't work. Find out if it's just lack of confidence or if it's your instinct telling you something that you don't consciously realize. We all have an inner critic, but sometimes the critic is right. So dig into that feeling.
Another thing you can do is to define what "works" means for you. If you set your bar low enough, you will never fail, but that's probably not what you want to do. You must set yourself a high enough goal that you will feel a sense of accomplishment when you achieve it. That could initially be making enough money from your app to be able to pay your rent or something else.
I have started dozens of projects. Most of them I don't even finish. Most of what I do finish doesn't work.
But I'm now really good and fast and efficient at starting a new project. I have a set of tools that I use and I know them very well. With every project I try something new or different and then take what's best and use it on the next project.
That's the beauty of software, you can just copy and paste and use the scraps to start something new.
Recognize you have a fear of success and understand why that would be. What happened during your childhood or past? And it can also just be a confidence thing, start with something small - like building a product that you use yourself. Like a chrome extension that stores something or does something for you. So you can at least get the sense of achievement to start snowballing
Thank you for the suggestion. I think I will start building an app that will be useful for me first.
Hey guys! thank you for all the comments. I will be posting an app soon. Hopefully it will work and will be useful to some people. Keep safe! :)
I can recommend you a book called The Lean Startup. Shortly, make MVP projects fast (within 7 or 14 or 30 days) with most required functions. If it won't work, make another one. Its like A/B tests
Validate that it indeed won't work.
Make a small landing page and share it around, if people react positivitely, it means there is something there.
You should validate your product regardless of it will work or not.
Have you tried this earlier? Can you share what exactly you did?
I have tried this in past, but this doesn't seems to work.
Why didn't it work? Tell me about your experience.
You must identify clear demand for a solution
Read the book - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick it'll give you strategies to identify demand
Good question.
It might help asking yourself: Why won’t it work?
If it’s because it’s solving a problem no one has, or if there’s no why to reach the people who do have the problem, then maybe hold off and think of other ideas.
If, instead, it’s because you think you don’t have the skills or the knowledge or the confidence or the luck, just go ahead and start. You’ll pick up all those things as you go.