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Chris Enns, Tim Smith, and Adam Clark have a great podcast called the Intellectual Radio Program. I was recently listening to episode 8 on SSKTN.com. And right near the end, Chris has this beautifully honest moment, where he describes the frustration I think a lot of us feel when it comes to building our own products:
How long do you hold on to something you’ve built?
Show Notes
Chris Enns, Tim Smith, and Adam Clark have a great podcast called the Intellectual Radio Program. I was recently listening to episode 8 on SSKTN.com. And right near the end, Chris has this beautifully honest moment, where he describes the frustration I think a lot of us feel when it comes to building our own products:
How long do you hold on to something you’ve built?
His co-host, Adam Clark pipes in, and brings up the topic we’re going to discuss today:
It all depends on your goals.
Goals. This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. On Product People we focus a lot on tactics, and the processes people used to launch products (whether it’s a web app, an ebook, or downloadable software). But as I’ve reviewed a lot of these episodes, there’s this trend that keeps coming up: successful product people set goals.
I have to admit, I’m a little burnt out on goals. The other day I found a list of goals I’d written in a college. I think there were about 25 items on the list. Some goals I’d met, other goals I hadn’t; but that’s not the point. I think for a lot of us, setting goals reminds us of that 10 year year plan a lot of us wrote in school – it was kind of a bucket list.
But the goals that successful entrepreneurs set are different. And we’re going to discuss those in this episode with advice from people like Patio11, DHH, Spencer Fry, Dan Norris, and John Saddington.
Show notes
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Hey, it's time for another episode of Product People. This episode features advice from Patty eleven, John Saddington, Spencer Fry, Dan Norris, and David Hanamyar Hansen. And it also features some cameos by Tim Smith, Adam Clark, and Chris Enns on their intellectual radio program. But before we get to the show, I've got to thank my great sponsors. Are you creating an application that needs charts or dashboard?
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Speaker 1:You can find that at productpeople.tv/goals. The great podcast called the Intellectual Radio Program. It's hosted by Chris Enns, Tim Smith, and Adam Clark. And I was recently listening to episode eight on ssktn.com. And right near the end, Chris has this beautifully honest moment where he describes the frustration.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of us feel when it comes to building our own products.
Speaker 2:What happens then when you that's that's great and that sounds awesome. But then let's say you do something and, and two people show up and you've put three months of, you know, or six months or how put enough effort into it that you feel like it's a good thing that you did, a quality thing, not just a throw up a domain and was like, well, nobody came to my website with the 2010 WordPress theme and a couple blog posts. Right? But, like, a thing you built. Right?
Speaker 2:How long do you keep kicking that horse for one, but then also, you know, in the interim, you're waiting for the the if you build it, they will come crowd to catch up to that. How long do you sort of hang on to that? And and you always hear the success stories. Right? And then you don't see the years of waiting and hard work that it took to get to that point.
Speaker 1:His cohost, Adam Clark, pipes in and brings up the topic we're going to discuss today.
Speaker 3:I think it completely depends on what your goal is for a project. So when your goal is to make an income from it, then it matters how many people show up because, you know, you gotta make money from it.
Speaker 1:Goals. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. On Product People, we focus on tactics, the processes people use to launch products, whether it's a web app, an e book, or downloadable software. But as I've reviewed a lot of these episodes, there's this trend that keeps coming up: successful people set goals. And I have to admit, I'm a little burnt out on goals.
Speaker 1:The other day I found a list of goals I'd written in college. I think there were about 25 items on the list. Some goals I'd met, other goals I hadn't, but that's not the point. I think for a lot of us, setting goals reminds us of that ten year plan we wrote in school. It It was kind of a bucket list.
Speaker 1:But the goals that successful entrepreneurs set are different. And we're going to get to those in this episode. We're going hear from people like Patty eleven, DHH, and John Saddington. But before we do, I wanna play you some more of that previous conversation. Here's where Tim Smith comes in.
Speaker 4:I I feel like like the conversation could be so much more productive if we, like, nailed down what project do you feel like this about? Is it SSKTN or is it something else that you're working on that you feel like hasn't gotten the
Speaker 5:attention that you want it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So whether like SSKTN certainly is one of those things where it's been really successful and has been going well, way better than it used to, but it still isn't anywhere near doing any sort of, like, paying bills or even covering costs. Right? And so, that's one of those things where it's like, long do you keep pushing against the putting the quote unquote great thing that you love and you're passionate about out there and keep keep at it versus, like, putting my efforts elsewhere where it'd be more useful, generate more money, etcetera. Right?
Speaker 2:Maybe even bring me more happiness. Who knows? But then also the discussion of, like, what Adam was talking about with, you know, having this thing that you wanna do and not sure whether it would really work and, sort of half heartedly building it and never really throwing yourself into it all the way.
Speaker 3:It's it's the goals. It's all the goals. If your goal is to make money with SSKTN and not be your income and it's not happening, then at some point, you probably do pull the trigger and focus on something else.
Speaker 2:This is we're done.
Speaker 1:Such a good conversation. I think anyone who's ever worked on their own thing, their own product and have hoped that they could make money from it have felt that way, the same way that Chris feels. Like, is this gaining traction? Am I going to, you know, is it ever going to become kind of fully realized? Am I going to earn a living from this?
Speaker 1:How long do I keep pushing up against this thing? So the first thing I noticed is that successful product people set limits. They give themselves time limits for their projects. And here's a good example from Patio 11:
Speaker 5:A few weeks later, I was thinking, what can I possibly do for a business that I can actually do when I'm employed and I could execute in a reasonable amount of time because I don't want to have this like get a few weeks into this and then lose interest? And that is within my very limited skills as programmer. I thought, well, that bingo thing. I know I can program it because I did version zero point zero of it in under a day. And if out of the list of maybe 200 people in Central Japan, 60 of them were moved enough to write me about it, then there must be a market for this.
Speaker 5:That's right. So I spent and I told my plan to my father and said, Alright, here's the plan. I'm going to make this bingo thing. I'm going to put it on the website. I'm going to sell it over PayPal and I'm going to drive traffic to it with AdWords and search engine optimization, which is this thing I've been reading about for a year and a half, but haven't ever done.
Speaker 5:My father says, You should just come back to America and get a good job. I'm like, No, no, this will work. I'm going to invest one video game worth of money in it. So $60 and I will start selling it a week from now. And my dad, who has been in business for fifteen years by himself, is thinking $60 of capital, one week to time to market, this is absolutely crazy.
Speaker 5:Not gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So a week later, I do indeed launch and with a website created in Notepad, a logo that was created by a buddy of mine at the incubator and the world's second worst Java swing app that does Bingo cartridge. And I built it and nobody came. I thought, well, okay, what's the plan for marketing it? I don't know anything about marketing, but I do know that search engine thing I've been reading about for a year. If I fill a hole in the internet, then Google will have to send me people.
Speaker 5:So since I've been dealing with English teachers, I know there's this thing that English teachers care about called the Dulcite words. It's a list of about 200 words grouped up into five grade levels created by an English pedagogist in the 1930s that says, You should basically know these words on seeing them. They weren't on the internet anywhere, so I went down to the library, grabbed a book, copied out the list of the Dolp sight words into a per grade list and put it on my website and then said, Hey, if you are looking for Dulp Sightwords, you probably want to have a routine activity with your kids. Why don't you play Dulp Sightwords Bingo, which you can conveniently create with this Bingo card creator? Here is the download link to the free trial.
Speaker 5:And so got that done about a week into the business and a week later I had a you've got money email from PayPal, my first sale.
Speaker 1:So Patio11 gave himself a week to build it and a week to market it before he had his first sale. John Saddington uses this concept of time boxing as well. He described it in our interview like this:
Speaker 6:You know and I take that philosophy on all my side projects. They have a beginning date and they have an end date. So when I experiment and build my application and here's probably a very kind of pragmatist look at it. I say I'm going to try this for six months and if
Speaker 1:it's
Speaker 6:shit then you move on. If I can achieve a certain level of metrics within those six months I call that a success. It might not be financial, it might just be a product, it might just be kind of a marketing play, it might just be brand awareness, I don't know but I declare that and say this is what I'm going after. Then I can relieve myself of those applications and those side projects without a lot of emotional baggage. When I first created like a World of Warcraft dating website which was kind of like the soup back then 2000 I guess '8.
Speaker 6:Know eHarmy was really picking up. Plenty of fish had just like opened up and said you know it was like one guy and like two part time sis admins for making like 30,000,000 a month or something and it was just it was blowing up so I was just like well I was a senior engineer at Dell at the time and I was building their enterprise app and I was like well I'm just gonna try this and for six months I'm gonna build a kind of a social network dating website and if it's six months it sucks I'm gonna close it but in six months if it reaches x amount of interest or users and maybe even some revenue then I'm gonna start looking for a buyer because I'm not interest like and my legacy doesn't need to be about World of Warcraft and dating. Yeah. So for for me to be very so clear in my own head and even in my heart then when I get to that six month period I can make very clear decisions about where the project should go.
Speaker 1:Probably one of my problems is that I don't say you know, I'll try things, but I won't have a start and end date and I won't have any kind of idea, like you said. So in six months, what do I expect to happen? What's going to be what's the benchmark that I have to hit? And I think that's actually really good advice to say, let's put a time box around this and say, where are we going to be? And if we're not there, then let's move on.
Speaker 1:Okay. But what does this look like in practice? David Hanenmeyer Hansen of thirty seven Signals has this great story about him setting this goal for car racing to reach the twenty four hours of Le Mans in France. And he talks about his process in achieving that goal and then he applies it to business.
Speaker 7:And throughout the whole thing I had this dream in mind that I wanted to go to the twenty four hours of Loma. To me that's always been the just the greatest motor racing event in the world and I had plenty of role model in the Danish driver Tom Christensen who has now won Le Mans nine times, way more than any other driver in the history of Le Mans motor race and the very long history of the Le Mans motor race has ever won the race. So, that provided the motivation to have that as an end goal. So, by the time I got serious about racing, I just basically plotted out a path. How do I get from where I am now to being at the grid at Le Mans?
Speaker 7:And that entailed going through a number of different series and climbing up through the classes and climbing up through the cars and so forth. I think that that part for me is certainly transferable. I set out sort of once I got into something, for example, with Rails. Once I knew that there was something there, once I knew that I was having so much more fun making web applications with Ruby on Rails than I ever had with PHP or Java or any the other tools that I've been making, I kind of set out that like other people should be part of that. They should share that.
Speaker 7:So, I took that seriously. I took it seriously that I wanted to basically spread the wealth of what is the wonders of the Ruby programming language to as many people as I possibly could And I think that's very similar to sort of climbing that ladder system. It's like first it's just get a few early adopters and you get other people involved and interested in helping building the framework and so forth and then you roll it one step at a time from there. Get two and one and you do good marketing side for it and you do some promotion with videos and so forth and that's all part of that ladder. And as it goes to business it's kind of the same thing that once we knew we had something with Basecamp, sort of charting a path of always having some goal in mind, oh we want to get to this, we want to get to so and so many customers, we want to, we have this vision for the product that we want to get to, it's quite similar.
Speaker 1:So we have a couple of principles here now. John Saddington says give yourself a time limit, time box it, say okay in six months this is what I want to achieve David Hanamar Hansen talks about setting the goal and then working your way backwards, deciding what is the ladder I need to climb to achieve that goal. But what about Chris's earlier question about throwing in the towel? When do you know it's the right time to throw in the towel? Here's Spencer Fry of Uncover's take on that.
Speaker 8:Know, throwing in the towel is something that I don't like doing. That's one of the reasons why I choose the Bootstrap because I feel like if I did have investors and I did raise a million dollars, you know, pre product market fit, then you basically have to throw in the towel a lot sooner because you raise for twelve to eighteen months and if the product's not going how it should go, then you kind of have to give up. But the nice thing about bootstrapping is with enough TLC and enough time, you can kind of tend to overcome the challenges of user growth. And you can sort of figure it out eventually if you stick with it. So, yeah, I don't really like throwing in the towel, personally.
Speaker 1:Have you had some projects that you've started that you've decided to not continue?
Speaker 8:I have had some small things. Think so uncover actually is interesting because the uncover from 2012 was we kind of we sold it, but for like a couple thousand dollars. It was kind of like a thing we were planning on shutting down and a buddy was like, I'll take it. But we had started as like a hiring app because both Mike, my co friend and I wanted to do something in the HR space and we wanted to focus around kind of the employees. And while I was learning to code in 2012, I learned to code while building like a higher tracking software.
Speaker 1:But,
Speaker 8:you know, we kind of, by the 2012, I think we had a few dozen customers, but ultimately I was way more enthusiastic about current employees rather than employees that were or people that were applying to be an employee. So that was something that I ended up shutting down. And I think it was more because I wasn't passionate about it and it was more of like a learning exercise to learn to code rather than kind of like what I saw was a business opportunity.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, Dan Norris of Informly learned the hard way what happens when you don't throw in the towel soon enough. So like you said in part one, you basically gave yourself a year to build this other product called Informly. You're running out of time. You're at the end of the year. You're thinking, I, I have got to make something work.
Speaker 1:I either go back and get a job or I'm going to make some sort of product or service work. You came up with this idea on the weekend. You posted in forums and asked people if was a good idea. They said it wasn't a good idea. You did it anyway.
Speaker 1:And how quick between the time you launched it and the first paying customer?
Speaker 9:Well, the same day. I mean, did a, I thought of it on Saturday. I came home and just bought a theme, put the site up and just tweeted it to see, like I didn't actually launch the product yet, but I had a buy now button up on the homepage. And then a day later I sent it out to my list. One thing I have built over the last year is a list of about 5,000 people, which is nice.
Speaker 9:And I sent it out to my list and I had signups straight away.
Speaker 1:So now let's say you're giving advice to someone else. And I mean, you're still early on, but you've had you do have experience in the sense that you were kind of aggressively pursuing this for a year. You built this product. You built a mailing list. You did all the content marketing.
Speaker 1:You did all that stuff. And so you've had that experience. And now in the last couple of weeks, you've got this new experience. So based on all of that, if someone came to you and said, you know, I'm thinking about this product. I want to try to validate it before I build it.
Speaker 1:What would you say to them?
Speaker 9:Regardless of what sort of product it is, go out and work out how to solve it for someone and get them to pay you for it. So I probably could have done this with Informally. I could have gone out and said, Look, you've got a whole bunch of complicated analytics, I'll come to your business one day a week and I'll pull it all together and I'll give you a report and you can pay me $50 or $500 or something. And that's a 100 X better than asking someone if the idea is good. So I think like incubators and coworking spaces have to have a rule where you can't get in there unless you've got a customer.
Speaker 9:And they say, Okay, I want to work there? Well, If you've got a customer, no. All right, we'll go get a customer, come back and then you can work here. Do the best practice and implement it. Stop talking about it and then decide based on what people's actions are.
Speaker 1:You know, well, reminds me of Derek Sivers has this great video called Start Now, No Funding Needed. And he kind of describes that exact process you just described, which is, if you have an idea for something, go to one person and see if you can convince them to pay you for it. And if they pay you for it and you can get another person to pay you for it and another person, keep doing that until it's so painful that you need to write software to automate those manual things that you're doing. In his book, Anything You Want, Derek Sivers also has a section called If It's Not a Hit, Switch. Here's an excerpt from that book:
Speaker 10:We've all heard about the importance of persistence, but I had misunderstood. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not persistently doing what's not working. We all have lots of ideas, creations, and projects. When you present one to the world and it's not a hit, don't keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing.
Speaker 1:So here's the pattern I'm seeing. We're going to build products that we wanna earn money from, we're going to need to get a lot of things right. Product market fit, pricing, we're gonna need to build it, etcetera. But overarching all of that is this need to set clear expectations. What is your goal for this project?
Speaker 1:And really, to be held accountable to that goal, we need to set a time limit. We need to say, In six months, if I don't have this amount of revenue, I'm going to move on. If it's not a hit, I'm going to switch. And to be honest this is something I'm working on myself. This is something I would like to put into practice.
Speaker 1:So I'm wondering I'd like to reach out to you. Do you currently set and track goals for your products? What have you tried that hasn't worked? What have you tried that has? I've set up a survey at productpeople.tvgoals.
Speaker 1:That's productpeople.tvgoals. And if I get enough responses, I'll share the results with the product people community on our newsletter. You can sign up, productpeople.tv slash newsletter. Thanks to all the people who have reached out via email and Twitter these past couple weeks and just thanked me for the show and encouraged me. That means a lot.
Speaker 1:You can get to me on Twitter MI Justin or you can follow the show on Twitter too. It's at ProductPeopleTV. If you really like a show and want to help us get it noticed, can give us a review on iTunes. It's as easy as going to iTunes, searching for Product People and then clicking five stars. And that helps other people discover the show as well, which in turn helps me to keep going.
Speaker 1:I also want to thank our sponsors sprint.ly, www.sprint.ly and fusioncharts.com. Go and thank them on Twitter as well FusionCharts Sprintly. And if you haven't gone and tried those things out yet, go and try them out. It really helps support the show and they are great products as well. That's all for this week.
Speaker 1:See you next week. Thanks for listening.