Hi, I’m Stefan.
If you’re reading this you probably know me personally, so you know that I’ve had an entrepreneurial itch since the pandemic started. Two and a half years later, I’ve built up enough courage to scratch that itch. I plan to spend the next phase of my life creating a software solution to a yet-to-be-defined problem.
What’s in this post:
- Building in public - why I’ll be sharing my progress step by step
- Generating startup ideas - how I’m approaching the first step in building a business
📢Building in public
What is building in public?
Building in public is about periodically and publicly sharing the progress of building a solution/product/company. It’s the opposite of building in stealth.
The kind of stuff people share varies (see lists of examples here and here). What I plan to share is:
- Learnings, insights and reflections on the solutions I’ll be building and on the process to get there
- Achievements, milestones, results… and failures
- Questions, struggles and ideas
Why build in public?
Every good thing has three reasons to back it up (aka, what is this solving?):
- Accountability: Working in an organization naturally gives you some structure: checking in with your boss, meeting deadlines, producing output that someone else needs as input. All this creates accountability that is missing when you go at it alone. Committing to share progress publicly is one way to create this kind of accountability, at least before customers
- Clarify thinking: Writing forces you to examine your thoughts from a distance. It’s easier to think about your thinking when you can read about it. When someone else might read these thoughts, the pressure is on to explain things clearly. (OK, bear with me, if this whole thing isn’t clear, I’m just starting 😅)
- Get feedback. No need to explain this one. Please share your feedback.
Bonus reason: One thing that helped me build up the courage to start something is reading about what & how others are building. Hopefully, what I write will pass some inspirations and learnings up the karma chain. Sharing is caring 💓.
My approach to building in public
What and when: It’s simple. I plan to share weekly updates on my progress. The first (this) update is on Building in public and Idea generation. The next few updates will be on problems I am exploring and how to decide on which problem to solve.
How and where: This blog is made using the paper-mod Hugo blog template and hosted on github pages. I’m using this as an opportunity for learning to hack together a website.
As I become less of a chicken, I might share these on twitter and linkedin.
Once I have more real stuff to show, I’ll join a builder community as well, to further solve for accountability, clearer thinking and feedback. Some examples are Pioneer, Megamaker, Makerlog, YC startupschool, Indie worldwide
💡Generating startup ideas
I’m starting out by making what the collective entrepreneurship wisdom of the internet says is a mistake 😱. I don’t have a clear idea of what to build yet. So I’m relying on what I know best: doing research, using that to structure an approach, then following that approach and iterating as I learn.
There are a few pieces of good advice on how to generate startup ideas. My key learning (and also one of the core principles of design thinking) is that success requires building a solution to an existing problem, rather than building a solution then finding a problem it can solve.
So the plan I came up with to generate ideas (find problems?) is:
- Oil up my idea machine by brainstorming daily based on prompts
- Inspired by this article from James Altucher
- I found/made a bunch of prompts (notion kanban here) based on the following articles
- Find some common promising themes between the ideas that keep coming up
- Do deeper research on the above, guided by the following questions:
- What are people complaining/asking about on the internet (reddit, quora, etc.)? This article has a promising approach: The Ultimate Guide to Unbundling Reddit
- What problems are people using spreadsheets to solve? I’ve been living in spreadsheets for the past few years…
- What problems do large businesses routinely spend a lot to solve (i.e. expensive legacy solutions, large teams)? Smaller businesses would need a cheap, automated solution, e.g. SaaS
Hopefully, that will create enough material to work with in the next phase - deciding what problem is worth solving for me (idea validation).
➡️Next steps
- Work on points 2 and 3 from above.
- Move the blog to github
- Write about the top 5 ideas I’m considering to moving to the next phase - validation
- Write about my approach to validation