Idea Bakery
Turning writing into a joyous ritual
The first launch of Idea Bakery was a flop. The problem domain and solution were too narrow for anyone to be interested in and stick with long enough to form a habit. To add insult to injury I wasn't using it myself. It was supposed to be a scratch your own itch problem dammit!
After some thought, deliberation, and problem-solving, I've decided that the new pivot for Idea Bakery will be to assist creators and their audiences in collaborating to solve problems whilst working on them.
The previous version, on the other hand, prompted daily Twitter writing practice. By including Twitter here, I made the mistake of narrowing the field of innovation.
It might have worked, but I'm not convinced that continuing to work on it was the best course of action from a viability standpoint. It's also difficult to sell something that relies on intrinsic motivation to keep people using it, and I'm not comfortable with promoting something I wouldn't use myself.
So, here's a broad overview of the new problem Idea Bakery will be solving:
"Creativity is a collaborative exercise between the creator and the audience." — Marc Andreessen
In my opinion, the creator who is tasked with shaping the problem and designing the solution faces multiple challenges.
Collaboration in a remote and asynchronous environment where you don't have the benefit of collaborating on an asset in person is one of the main areas Idea Bakery is interested in solving.
The creator's audience for the collaboration is also divided into two groups:
- Includes team-mates or patrons who the creator values for feedback on strengthening the idea.
- Includes the end consumer of the creative asset.
Idea Bakery's immediate focus will be on creating an effective environment for facilitating the conversation between the creator and these two core groups of people.
Finally, I believe that this new pivot gives the creator a lot of power. From managing multiple projects to sending them to relevant individuals for feedback on various perspectives, analyzing feedback and having a private conversation with them to clarify any questions, and improving it by recycling the process until the creator — the creation — and the intended audience are a good fit & aligned on the problem to be solved.
I'm pretty excited about this new direction. Hoping to share more soon.
I announced the launch on Twitter & the visualize value community.
Here are some stats after launching on open-beta:
https://shavin.bearblog.dev/24-hours-after-open-beta/
I was a mixed bag of nervousness and excitement.
One big thing I learned coming from a consulting background was how good it is to have a digital asset on the internet.
We'd usually have to demo our process to clients that would take anywhere between 4 hours to a full working day. There's no promise of conversions. We'd have to spend time on proposals and going back-and-forth on negotiations.
But with idea bakery being a digital asset, I can serve as many interested customers as Heroku hobbyist dyno could hold, and concurrently!
Also, talking about it becomes easier because you have to just direct them to what you offer, and they can check it out + take it for a spin.
It's amazing!
After getting feedback for the closed beta version.
We went back to the drawing board and refined what we were trying to help people do.
Supply has to meet demand. The form has to follow function & context; otherwise, customers abandon your experience.
Before we start building anything, ideas are pitched. The pitch document includes the problem or motivation, the solution and how long we'll set to have it made.
The following blog post is me announcing what we will work on for the next three weeks.
https://shavin.bearblog.dev/update-on-idea-bakery-and-the-new-work-cycle/
I wanted to get this to a version that I was confident with.
It took an additional week to get there.
If you want to read about a mid-cycle development update here's one straight from our Basecamp project:
My service business was transitioning out of doing services.
https://shavin.bearblog.dev/ending-very-bad-wizards/
We were tired of validated ideas going to waste because the people we helped didn't have the power to execute.
We had just read Ryan Singer's Shape Up methodology, and we found ourselves being excited about building a product again.
To do this, we changed the overall vision of Very Bad Wizards to help creators & artists turn pro.
After several pitches for ideas, we had a decent pitch put together, but it wasn't for Idea Bakery.
We bet four weeks on building another product, but out of the four weeks, I spent 2 of them building Idea Bakery.
I was just starting to get used to learning Ruby on Rails, and I couldn't help but scratch this itch of building out what I'd thought of earlier for idea bakery.
It wasn't possible to do before because I was mainly a frontend developer and always feared the backend.
But using Ruby on Rails was like writing a book. It's in simple language, and I thoroughly enjoyed coding with it.
After two weeks, I pushed out a closed-beta version.
One thing that I learned about whilst doing the service business (we used the design sprint process) was building one-day prototypes with Figma.
We'd spend a day putting a concept together so that we could test it with real users the next day.
From the 1.5 years of running very bad wizards, I knew that the first version is always, in some way, wrong. And what mattered was to get either a very positive reaction or a very negative reaction from what you were trying to accomplish for the people who were going to use it.
You want to avoid a mediocre response, and it either means you don't have the right product or market yet.
I wanted to use this similar approach. The first version was embarrassing, saying the least, it didn't have all the bells and whistles from the pitch document, but it was interesting enough for some people to try.
Which is what I did. I reflected on the process and what the outcomes & learning were over here: https://shavin.bearblog.dev/reflection-on-launching-early/
Some of the concepts from the original idea weren't helpful and but I got some excellent feedback.
I'd then synthesized the findings (on the post link above) and shared them with my partner. We both took it seriously to build because it was still falling under the umbrella of what we were trying to help accomplish for creators & artists.
The month was April 2020, a day after my birthday. I had just signed up for the Visualise Value community.
I joined it because I thought Jack Butchers experience doing a service business was very similar to what we were doing at verybadwizards.io (my first company)
After joining, I noticed how other members were leveraging Twitter to share their ideas. So, I started to do the same. I curated my feed to people only sharing ideas and started to Tweet.
But I wasn't consistent. Ideas only came to me whilst I was working on something, and then if I got around to it, sometimes I'd get stuck, give up and then continue with my work.
Twitters a fantastic place to connect with like-minded people who could use what you've learned.
I knew I had to come up with a better process to write.
And that process is embedded inside Idea Bakery.
We follow the Shape Up methodology, and the first pitch is available here to read if you'd like:
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