People who do "12 projects a year" kind of challenge, why?

I think that builders and product people tend to polish products too much and release them way too late or even stop working on them without showing them to others. That said, in my opinion, the clue to this challenge is to build a mindset that "done is better than perfect" and get feedback quickly.
On the other hand, I remember that once I had a New Year's resolution to read 50 books in one year. I end up with my focus on that number not the actual content of the books so it is important to remember that 😉

I'm fairly certain all this is based on Levels.io's initial challenge, and I think there was a special combination of things that made it work for him that might make it challenging for others:

1. Maybe some other folks had been doing "build in public" challenges before, but he managed to get a lot of publicity off that particular thing alone – just that he was building an improbable 12 in public in succession.

2. He had a huge hit – right time / right place – with the digital nomad stuff, and a bunch of his products were a spinoff of that initial project.

3. Once his early project got traction, it was much easier for the next projects to get some publicity because they were coming from HIM, as a maker with a name and personality. But he has a blog post where he says that only one or two of his projects has ever made any money (and I think it was the earlier ones?). So I think the key here is you have to have a good initial splash and be able to make the story about yourself, as a maker, so that people are following YOU and what you're working on, rather than just stumbling on your projects. Then he subsequent project gets the benefit of your community snowballing, versus making like 10 things with no publicity and then making a splash on your 11th.

I think it's very useful for getting out of the rut of, "I need to validate my idea first", "Just looking for product-market fit", "Need a little more work in my MVP before putting it out there".

So in other words, having those kinds of constraints, forces you to move fast and get out of your own damn way.

That said, it's not for everyone. Very few people have the skillset and conditions to make it happen properly.

I recently listened to https://37signals.com/podcast/good-enough-is-fine/ and thought what DHH said at 17:03 was good

I think it’s one of those lovely parallels to writing, where kill your darlings is one of those key tenets of good editing, that you will delete lines that you like. Because if you take that line out, even if you really like that line, it’s a better paragraph. It’s a better page, it’s a better chapter, it’s a better book. .... And the whole product is better if you kill a substantial number of those darlings.

Doing 12 projects forces you to "kill your darlings" with features and ideas. It may also force you to kill entire "darling" projects sooner than you otherwise would have. 12 really small projects could be less work than one or two big projects with all the "darling" bells and whistles you dream of. The goal of 12 in a year seems a bit extreme to me, but then again I don't have a successful product yet.

I used to advocate against it. It's not a magical path to guaranteed success rather if people keep on that track will increase their chances of success. Aiming to start 12 projects is a way to find that one project that works.

One downside, it is no longer exciting for the audience to hear. It used to be a productivity and marketing hack. Now it's only a productivity hack where you have to push yourself without the perks of interested eyes.

Mathematically, in six months. If you spare an hour per project, it's 6 hours per day. Good luck finding time to build the 7th one.

I take that it's more for fun and get into the practice of building rather than actually building something profitable.

I'm building 12 startups in 12 months to increase my chances of hitting onto a profitable idea. I figure if I only build what's fun for me, I'll spend 4 months on something technically challenging, rather than something that people actually want to pay for.
Doing a challenge like this will force me to abandon projects, even if they're good ideas or fun to work on, if they're not profitable.

TLDR: THere are lots of reasons, but it really comes down to not being able to answer your comment below with any real certainty.

"I would rather find one project that works and double down on it."

I think your comment here is part of the reason many do 12x12 exercises: What one project would you focus on? Why that project? Is that project the one that will be successful? How do you know?

Basically, one reason to do 12x12 challenges is because you can't possibly know beforehand which one project will be the successful one - if any. You might like one better. You might hope one will be more than the others. But you can't know.

So the goal from this stand point is to put one out at a time, not spend too much time on any one (hence the "1-month per project" constraint) and at the end of each month see if the current project has any traction. Once you've put a few dud projects into the world, you know if a project has traction or not. If you hit on one that does, then you double down on it.

Finishing the challenge is not the goal - typically . Blowing through ideas - any and all ideas - to get to one that is valid and profitable is the goal. And since you don't know which one will be, you run through all of them. Maybe you DO get lucky on that first project, but most likey you'll hit something on project 8, 9 , or even 35.

A second reason people do a 12x12 challenge is to train that "launch muscle". Many of us (myself included) fall flat long before we launch even the simplest MVP. So by doing a 12x12 it's like doing reps at the gym. But instead of training our legs or biceps, we are training the ability to just launch something usable to the world.

Over a few projects our MVPs will be slightly more polished, and we will be better at actually getting to launch. Even if these projects aren't profitable, we are training ourselves to focus and be efficient enough to go from start to finish quickly and not get bogged down by non-essential BS during the build. What is the problem? What is the most basic way to solve this problem? How can I get the solution in front of people in the quickest amount of time? How can I evaluate if others found it useful?

A third reason why many people do a 12x12 challenge is simply the sheer number of ideas we have. We can't possibly focus on building a great thing for all of them, but we can build 12 (or 24 or 70+) MVPs for each and hopefully find one or two will be profitable.

And I think the final and maybe the biggest reason - which coincidentally started with all of the 4 above combined - is that Pieter Levels popularized the idea of building 12 projects in 12 months several years ago with his blog and posts about the projects he was building before striking gold with NomadList and RemoteOk.

Pieter almost single-handedly (obviously he wasn't the only one, I am genralizing based on his popularity in the Remote Work, Indie Hacker, and Nomad community along with the work he did to promote it, Yong Fuk is another trailblazer in this) popularized remote work, indie-hacking and such with his candid posts about the topics and building tools to help people become digital nomads and remote workers long before COVID.

It is not exaggeration to say we would not be on this forum having this conversation if it was not for Pieter Levels making the decision to 1. start 12 projects to train his launch muscle, and 2. retitle his blog post from "12 PROJECTS in 12 Months" to "12 STARTUPS in 12 months". The sheer hubris of that post title garnered him almost instant press.

If it wasn't for his open documentation of his journey through those 7 months (he hit gold with NomadList before the 12 months were up and doubled then tripled down on it), @csallen would not have found his posts on HackerNews and would not have come up with the idea for IndieHackers as a site to help other wantrepreneurs.

Because of all of the above, many of us hope that by building a large number of things we can somehow emulate even a small amount of Pieter's success.

Also, for myself, as a sales person in a prior work life, I know EVERYTHING is a numbers game, and 100% agree with successful indiehackers like Pieter Levels, and @csallen when they warn not to shoot your shot on a single idea. Put alot out their, maybe one will hit it big.

Pieter Levels took this challenge which I wrote about. Practice yields results. Phil… https://abitgamey.substack.com/p/our-startup-in-7-steps

They do it to force themselves to not get attached to a single idea and validate many different ideas quickly. Of course, once you have something that works, it makes sense to put all your attention on it.

I'm of the same mindset but I think you answered your own question:

"I would rather find one project that works and double down on it."

I guess the idea is to make lots of MVPs, see what works, then double down on the winner.

If you plan for long term with a defined target market, how can you even focus on second one?

Depends I have mini projects within my main big project. Some of those mini ones don't do well and I know when to cut.

I think it depends on what your goal is. Do you want to have some fun side projects or learn something new? Then go for it.

Is your goal to build a startup? Then work on something you're passionate about and nurture traits like persistence and commitment.

Oh, I'm a huge fan of such challenges. There are so many arguments for taking them on! From committing to completing it and achieving success (which doesn't always come) there are a lot of ups and downs - no boredom. Plus, there is a huge amount of learning, new experiences and connections to be made. And if you can share it with the community? Perfect. And if one of the projects happens to be successful, perfect x2. From a business point of view, it would be more effective to work on one project, but who always follows common sense?

In my opinion is a bit out of scope, and feel that is more like create content than actually a business

Work out for some, as have seen an instant where someone push 12 products out in a y year and 2 became successful

But It will really be hand to survey an idea, develop the MPV, and market a product in a month before moving on to another.

This really a tedious journey

I've had the same question on my mind.

I can see the benefit of increasing your batting average may make it more likely you hit a home run while giving you the 'don't be precious' about a partiaulcar idea mindset.

The problem I see is, it's hard enough getting users onboard to get feedback on one product (marketing, product, building etc.), I can't for the life of me see how it would be possible to do this 12 times to produce something that people want to actually use in a highly competitive market.

I think a project every 3 months sounds more feasible, since it's hard to know when to stick or fold on a particular idea before its had chance to flesh out.

Would be interesting to hear from any one who has approached it both ways.

It's luck through motion, the more projects you do, the more area you touch, and the more likely you're going to validate a good idea.
At this point, I would just stop the challenge :)

While I prefer to just focus on 1 project at a time, I think it’s main benefits are:

• Forcing people to release things rather than focussing on perfecting one project
• Putting more projects out there and seeing which stick and make money