Milestone 1: Soft Launched Ion Alpha!

I wanted to document this as it may encourage others finding it hard to ship to just ship something. I have today soft launched a new side project on Twitter with nothing but a profile page and a bio. Not even a particularly refined idea.

For background, I am in the process of selling my last side project (15 months in) and have been fishing for new things to build. The last project was a research platform and I am planning to continue down this path. Now I have no primary project I've jumped back into a long, evolving list of ideas I had while working.

Last night I decided to register a domain for one the ideas I kept returning to.

Today I created a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/ionalpha_) and spent half the day following and replying to people's tweets. I picked up a couple of followers. I received a whole bunch of automated DMs after follows.

Replied to the automated DMs (often asked what I was building). Got responses and valuable feedback(!)

I spent $50 buying a few images off istock, used one as my main profile picture and another as the header background.

Wrote and rewrote a simple bio (wip).

That's it. A few comments and DMs on Twitter can serve as a soft launch. Nobody has a clue. It's not near to being "ready" by many people's standards. It's intentionally vague, I do see an automated tracking element at the core as I would like to build more research tools. Not even a days work. And yet I am 1000% ahead of where I was yesterday!

Most importantly, I now have something I can point to and build upon.

The plan is to now refine the idea while seeking feedback and experiment and soft launch different ideas until something promising comes along. The business model will likely be subscription (membership) and (heavily discounted for members) SaaS, though open to other options. Also thinking of opening up LTDs once I've committed to the essential structure and features of the whole thing and built a beta.

Appreciate any thoughts or feedback. And I hope it encourages a few others to ship something, if even it's just a Twitter profile!