I’m Going to Launch 12 Startups in 12 Months
Hi,
I'm going to start my entrepreneurship journey and launch 12 products in 12 months. I'm doing this almost as a full-time job and expect to get financial freedom from some of the startups at the end of the challenge. I know some other people have done this challenge before as their side-projects, some of them wasn't successful and left the challenge in the middle. I wrote a story on Medium: https://medium.com/@hos.shams/im-going-to-launch-12-startups-in-12-months-bc6346274f26
So let me know what you think. Any feedback or suggestions are highly appreciated.
Successful startups involve much more than just launching. A startup that pays you even a small amount of money requires much of your time, and doing 12 at a time would be suicide. If you're goal is financial freedom then you're much better off analyzing each of the problems you are trying to solve and moving forward with the one with the most opportunity.
That's right. I made my financial freedom by http://thetheme.io/ , but I need to make my next leap. The point is that I can't be confident about any of the ideas. I don't know which one gets traction. I saw lots of products on Product Hunt which ended up in shutting down in less than a year. I just want to get started, make and learn by mistakes. I'll launch an MVP and see the potentials. It's easiest and the best way to validate the market. It I couldn't find a market fit in a couple months, so I quit easily. It's like having 12 arrows to shoot. Hopefully, I'll learn from few first shoots and finally hit the target at some point.
This is exactly my point. Most products on Product Hunt, although awesome, rely solely on Product Hunt to make them money. Which is basically the strategy that you've outlined. AKA the "I'm going to try and get away with letting someone else bring me my customers" strategy.
You're leaving the success of your products up to merely luck. Success with a software product is built upon a mix of product and marketing. The product needs to be built, and the customers need to come.
This is not the easiest or the best way. It's the popular way with power users on Product Hunt. You're completely forgetting that these users have a following of people that they can sell their products to from their status on Product Hunt. They are doing marketing, it just doesn't look like it straight away.
The easiest way to find a pool of your potential customers and start helping them to see: 1) where the problems exist that you can solve, and 2) how much they are willing to have you solve them for. This approach just involves talking to people on forums or social channels.
AND THEN it's time to start coding.
I know all this because I've taken your approach with my saas and it nearly killed us.
One of the best replies/posts I have seen on IH in quite a while.
It seems everyone and their X “startups” build in as short a time period as possible are looking to play that PH lottery instead of doing the hard and challenging work it takes to build a real business.
How dare you! My 24 hour code sprint isn't a business?!?! But, I streamed it live!
💯
Thanks for description. You're right and I can't argue with that. Maybe I wouldn't started this journey if I had the right problem to solve in my head. But I'm optimist to find the problem somewhere in middle of this journey. I don't have to build all the 12 products if I find out that the product #5 has potential to become attract 100 paying customers or make $5,000 MRR after a year.
Seriously, you know what are you talking about. To be honest, I wanted to become one of the power users on PH by launching few products and get followers. After launching Landub and getting only 11 upvote, I figure out that it requires more time that I expected. Also, a same approach for Twitter. It's hard to grow followers organically.
Thanks for your advises. It was the feedback I got. I'll keep them in my mind.
Seems like you've done pretty well with Themeforest, so why not trying to expand your existing expertise rather than building twelve different products? In my experience, a good idea is one that is very niche, and I don't think you can find twelve of them that simply without been deep into a problem. I've seen this challenge before, but I personally think focusing on one thing is so much more effective.
Best of luck to you Hossein!
Actually, I'm not passionate about developing templates anymore. Also, with lots of template developers and website builders, revenue from themeforest is decreasing. It's the time for me to develop serious products.
I know focus is important, but I don't have a solid problem to solve right now. I just want to start making something. Maybe I find the one big idea 4 months later and I can stick to that one. Plans can change. But right now, this is the right thing to do for me.
I'm going to do something similar but i won't start a "challenge". I'm a freelance software developer and i'm gonna take 1 year without taking contract works (except for a few customers i like to support that shouldn't take me too much time) and during the year i'll try to launch as much as possible small projects: some should be Saas, some should be long-term-revenues project like ecommerce or affiliation.
Just today i launched the first one in "beta" which is a tool to track amazon prices directly into google sheets.
What i'm gonna say you is that 12 projects (i don't even like to call them startup since a startup IMO is a company) in your spare time may burn you out and this is the reason i'm suspending taking contract works, but i wish you all the best.
If you want you can follow my adventure on my blog, devamountain.com
That's great. Would definitely follow your updates. Do you tweet?
Great idea, would love to hear your numbers such as visitors and users.
You're right, they are not startup yet, they are simple products I guess. I just followed the other guys who named the challenge startups.
Actually, I make money from my premium templates http://thetheme.io/ . I'm going to stop developing new templates (excepts for a couple WP themes which is in progress) and only continue supporting them. It's a livable income and probably it supports me throughout the challenge year.
I don't tweet...at least not at the moment ;)
I must keep anything sustainable and social management is a time consuming process so maybe i may start using twitter since it should be less time consuming than other socials.
Keeping open data is something i'd like to do so probably i will. I may post a first beta days review article next week. Anyhow thank you for the encouragement, i'm sure you will do great things since you had been able to get a sustainable income from a business in a crowded context like themes marketplace.
Fair enough. I bookmarked your blog and will check it regularly.
My next product is a tweet-like website to share numbers such as revenue, active users, visitors, etc. from startups. You might want to take a look at it once launched and share some numbers if you'd like to.
Thanks. You're going to develop great products as well. You've been doing it for others, now you can make few products for yourself ;)
That's a cool idea, let me know when it's ready!
Just launched the alpha version: http://bareproduct.com/ :D Will add more features soon.
I don't have a twitter account :(
I think you should always allow people to register with simple email!
Wanted to code it fast. I'll add register by email later. Sorry about that.
Sure.
Good luck!
Thanks.
Not to spam this here, but I'm in the middle of building 24 products in 12 months. Just launched #13.
Wrote a blog post about the whole experience so far: https://www.westvesey.com/why-were-building-24-businesses-in-12-months/
This strategy has a lot of upside, I hope the negative comments above don't deter you from pursuing this!
Oh yeah, I read this blog post few weeks ago and your results was another reason to pursue this challenge. You're doing great. I wanted to link to your post but I couldn't remember your url or title to search. I'll follow you to stay updated with your results.
It's interesting to think about the way some people split out the idea of building multiple things:
And on and on... splitting up knowledge/work into manageable chunks that can be packaged for sale.
This time it's 1 person, 12 arrows. I might miss 10 of them, but I hope to see 2 of them on the target.
Create a mail list to share the updates. I'll be the first to sing up!
Good luck on this journey!
Thanks for the suggestion. I write updates in my Twitter account. Maybe I create a list later.
Do you need a software engineer?
No. The plan is to do that all by myself.
Good Luck then.
Do you have 12 special ideas to build or just you want to challenge yourself to build whatever? what is your goal of launching 12 products in 12 months ?
No, I don't have 12 special idea right now. My goal is to make few profitable startups in few years. I don't want to wait for the single big idea which requires months of development. I'm going to start small and implement bigger ideas later. With starting with small ideas I can make mistakes risk-free, learn from mistakes, learn marketing in practice, get some publicity, and have few early adopters for future ideas.
Hey Good Luck, I like this idea
I got it, it may hit the target in 12 attempts. but but how you will come up with your first idea? then the second one and so on ..
For the first one, it came from my need. I have some other ideas for things I need for myself or would liked to have in my life. My priority are those ideas. According to other people who did this challenge before me and even myself, you'll overwhelmed with lots of new ideas once you start making things.
Great! good luck.
Isn't this 12 products not startups? It's all one startup (you) with several products.
Yes, you're right. They're going to be products at time of launch, hopefully few of them turns into my startup. I just used the term "Startup" like the rest of people who do the challenge, but "Product" is the correct name for this situation.
I think if you are doing the challenge for a personal reason then go ahead, which will definitely waste a year of your life.
Usually, people launch a startup and plan for success, if you launch 12 startups in 12 months, that means you launch and plan for failures. Use your time wisely
I won't be sure before doing it. I'm not planning to have 12 successful products/startups, but I expect to have 3 at the end of year.
Do 12 landing pages in 12 days and save yourself a year of effort 😁
:)) Doesn't make enough money I'm afraid :D
Wouldn't it be better to spend 12 days testing 12 ideas, and then run with the 1-2 that work for 12 months. Rather than spending 12 months trying to figure out which ideas will work?
The point is that I don't have 12 ideas right now 😄
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Thanks for sharing your information. I read your post and comments. Great lessons was inside.
I'll launch products in several domains. My primary focus will be on startup/development/front-end . My secondary domain is personal growth/productivity. And maybe one product for stock traders.
I'm not going to flake out any time soon; unless one of the products shows potential for home run. I'll launch small-sized startups at first to build my product-launch-muscles. Also, it helps to grow my audience for future products.
Having an email list is a good idea, but I'm not sure if I need one right now. Because I'm not going to write too much and I guess Twitter would be enough.
I named a few people in my medium story. Here are they if you need to add them to your list: @yongfook , @HeyMehdi , @swlkr and also from comment here you can pick @andretti1977
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You're right. I know it's important and I saw some of other people on 12in12 have their email list. So I'll put it in my todo list and create a list soon. Thanks for reminding my mistake.
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