How I arrived at my perfect business idea
Hey fellow makers!
This is a summary of my blog post, on how I got my winning startup idea:
It took 15 years to find my idea
It's nearly impossible to be successful out of the gate. There's too big of a learning curve to get everything right on your first go. But, your experience is cumulative, where each part of your journey makes the next part easier. Keep trying things out and learning. When you do find the right opportunity, you'll be able to nurture your idea into a successful business.
My journey timeline:
2003: built my first website
2006: graduated college, went after graphic design certificate
2007: made first money online by landing a web design client from Craigslist
2008: co-founded an online puzzle business
2009: quit, but gained first-hand business experience
2010: landed full-time job as web designer and graphic designer
-----------2011-2017: dreaming about entrepreneurial ideas
2017: moved and started web designer business (full-time)
2018: lightbulb goes off and I launched my first digital product
While most of my income is from being a self-employed web designer, I've earned $23.5K in revenue to date from my product. However, I'm working on the switch to full-time maker.
Key takeaways:
- Ideas are not tangible
- You can’t build every idea
- Build quick
- Ideas are fluid
- First-of-its-kind ideas are risky
The full story:
If you're interested in the details, you can read it on my blog post.
Loved the key takeaways. So much value in these few words🙏
Thank you Alex!
Great post, thanks for sharing and congrats on your success!
@Visiwig Very well put. Excellent blog post. This is why it's so hard to be a mentor trying to get people from zero to one.
We don't know what we don't know and we don't get it until we get it!
Thanks Justin. Agree. Its hard to learn about what we don't know. Reading might clue you in on what you're missing, but that advice might also not be relevant to your situation. That's where mentors come in, they should understand your context and they can help founders think about the right questions.
But its still on the founder to execute.
Loved the timeline breakdown! That is one successful digital product - congrats! Have the sales been consistent over time? What have you done to maintain growth?
We just launched on Product Hunt and am looking for strategies to maintain growth over the next few months.
I was getting decent traffic after launch, people shared my product because it had substantial freebies. I've tried replicating this, but with mixed success.
I added premium content, and sales trickled in, but I had really high churn, so I listened to customers and was able to improve churn. Overtime, sales have grown a bit more predictable, but slow because I'm not working on this fulltime yet.
SEO is working best for me, so I've been doubling down these last few months, but the results take time to be evident.
Super interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Curious about the pricing plan adoption breakdown. Which plan is more common in your case, monthly or yearly?
I used to get more monthly when the pricing was $5/mo $50/yr.
I made a few changes to incentivize the yearly plan ($8/mo $60/yr), and now its slightly more popular.
Thank you for sharing the story about your business. Sometimes the ideas need time to grow into really good things. When I was thinking about starting my first small business, it was really hard to choose. I had a wide range of ideas but small experience in the financial aspect. My friend suggested I approach the insolvency practitioners company before moving forward. So I found a good insolvency service. Here is the link https://www.antonybatty.com. In my opinion, the consultation with them saved me a lot of time and funds.