I'm launching 6 products in 6 months
As y'all know, these challenges aren't new, but I've decided to get involved because I think it will help get me out of a creative rut.
My main project, Page Flows, is going reasonably well, but it only requires a day or two a week of attention. On the other days, I've been looking for new opportunities and have made some mistakes in the process.
The first mistake is a classic Indie Hacker mistake of working on a product for way too long without getting it in front of potential customers.
Another challenge I've been struggling with recently is over analysing every strategy or idea. Essentially, both these issues mean I've spent a lot of time and made very little progress.
My hope is this challenge will help me get out of my creative rut, and ideally, will lead to great conversations with interesting people.
If you want to read more about my criteria etc, I wrote about more about this here: https://rocketgems.com/2020/01/09/6-products-in-6-months.html
I know quite a few people have done similar challenges before. If you're one of them, I'd love to hear about how it went for you.
As someone who has similar tendencies, I would actually consider a different approach.
The primary quantifiable goal you are giving yourself is launching 6 products. This reinforces the focus on shipping, and thereby, product building, which we all know and love to death.
Instead, consider making your quantifiable goal selling 6 products. This could mean getting X paying customers for each product. X can honestly just equal 1 since most of the effort at the start goes into getting your first paying customer.
Both approaches will prevent analysis paralysis and help you get out of your creative rut. But I think the second approach will ensure you talk and sell to potential customers, which, if you are anything like me, is the thing I need to keep reminding myself over and over again.
Hmmm this is interesting. How would you go about selling 6 products in 6 months? Like getting pre-sales? Or selling products that other people have built (affiliate?).
Have you thought about trying this yourself?
I don't have time to try it anytime soon because I want to double down on my main project this year.
But I suppose it would depend on the product idea. Some ideas are conducive to pre-sales (ex. courses, ebooks) where all that is needed is a landing page and the rest of the time could be spent getting pre-sales. Other ideas would need some MVP.
Also, while getting paying customers is nice, you could relax this a bit more and just assess demand for a product (ex. number of email signups). This is what Justin Mares did: setup a landing page for a concept, invested some $ running ads to gauge demand, and then built it out. Good way to learn ads too.
I don't think your two "mistakes" are mistakes.
.. I more commonly see the inverse: people build only a landing page or really shitty MVP, and then throw it in front of small group people, who don't give it love, which then leads to prematurely abandoning the idea. But in reality, when you are just starting out you don't fully understand the problem you are solving, you don't know your customers, you don't know how to talk to them, and your product is barely working. So it's no great surprise that your MVP is not successful.
.. 95% of ideas can be killed off as "too-unlikely-to-succeed-compared-to-rewards" if you spend some time analyzing. Thinking and analyzing your ideas before you start executing is the highest ROI time.
If you'd do the exact opposite that you are planning on doing, I'd bet you'd have 10X higher probability of success -- i.e. first spend 1 month carefully analyzing all ideas, then executing 5 months on the most promising idea.
I've spent way more than a month analysing ideas and never really got anywhere, but I do agree, what I'm trying here probably isn't optimal for success.
I mainly want to get out of my analysis-paralysis rut, and spending months analysing ideas probably won't help me with that.
Well, if that is the case, how about a middle ground:
.. Enough of analysis, it ain't getting better.
.. But Instead of committing to building 6 half-arsed products in 6 months, build the 1 most promising idea for 6 months.
The concept of throwing ideas to the wall and seeing what sticks is derived from pasta. When pasta is cooked al-dente it sticks to the wall. If you throw almost completely uncooked pasta to the wall, it is almost certain that it won't stick, no matter how many different kinds of pasta you throw.
I guess I can try that after picking the most promising of the 6 ideas, assuming I have any conviction behind any of them. I'm in no rush :-)
Good luck with that 👍
I'm currently trying something similar, 12 projects in 12 months.
I have quite a few ideas for the next months. The main advance of this method is that you are forced to launch by the end of the month, so you're focusing on that, whats really important.
Thanks! It sounds like you're getting on well so far. Anywhere I can follow your progress?
Currently I don't have a blog or something similar. But you can check out twitter or my profile here from time to time.