I came across an article by Aaron Iba about the use of logical deductions in puzzles. He came to the realization that the fastest puzzle solvers solved the puzzle by making guesses. They didn’t reason carefully about every single step.
I found some of the best monorail solvers and observed them. They would:
- Start by guessing random paths and just drawing whatever comes to mind.
- Fix mistakes.
- Repeat.
- If things ever look hopelessly messed up, then press the CLEAR button and start over.
You can apply this to, well, almost everything in life. I’ve been taught my entire life to make careful decisions. In grade school math I was told to go slow and check my work so there are no mistakes. I was told to take my time to make a careful decision on what college to go to. When I got a corporate job, everyone took so damn long to make decisions about what to build.
Now that I reflect back, any situation where I just jumped right in performed better than taking my sweet time. This is especially true for startups.
Taking a long time to understand customers versus building fast and iterate
At my first startup I took way too long doing customer discovery, going to meetups and talking about ideas. For the first 2 or 3 months I spent 75% of my time talking to potential customers about their problems based on an idea. I slowly narrowed down the problem into a product I thought could solve it. And I did discover a real pain that people were willing to pay to get rid of, but it took a really long time.
For the second startup I didn’t feel like talking to customers for 3 months again before having a product to show. I took 2 weeks to build a beta in Rails and launched it. Funded startups tried it and gave me direct feedback about its usefulness. This time it only took 2 weeks to validate my hypothesis!
Building the product first versus providing a service or growing the audience first
If you want to get into another level of jumping right in do you even need to build a product? Ben Ogle wrote about service-first products.
Explore only ideas that require no more tech than maybe a wordpress blog or simple website. Don’t think about the tech, think about how to make a service or community work in a tiny way. Provide your service 100% manually until you just can’t do it without more people or tech.
You can call Good Sense my third startup. It started off as just a blog about productivity, freelancing, user experience, customer development and marketing. I’ve been freelancing forever to continue doing startups. I wanted to share what I learned with other developers so they can make more money than they ever imagined.
My audience grew slowly, but it continued growing. Now I have thousands of email subscribers (You should totally sign up here). I’m excited to explore how to build a business out of this. And I’ve been providing the service first to quickly run experiments.
- Developers looking for work – They reach out to me through the blog looking for projects to work on. I personally introduce them to people who are looking for developers.
- Employers looking for developers – They email me looking for talented developers. I charge them money to put up job listings. The listing is posted manually on my blog instead of building the software to automate. Then I send it out to all my email subscribers.
- People who want to switch careers and learn to code - They come from law enforcement or accounting backgrounds. They’re non-technical founders. I taught them Rails in person and it’s been so rewarding. Now I’m writing the book and working on the pre-sales page of Learning How to Code Rails for Absolute Beginners.
The more experience I gain in starting a business from scratch the faster I get at validating them. All thanks to making educated guesses instead of slow careful decisions.
What guesses have you made for your startup and succeeded?
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