Lessons learned from 3 months of full-time entrepreneurship
About three months ago I left my job at a startup and started working on my own projects full-time. In the process I’ve learned a few lessons that I thought might be helpful to other coders or entrepreneurs setting out to do their own thing.
1. Coding isn’t the most important thing
As a developer it’s easy to assume that if you’re spending 12 hours a day coding that you’re making progress and doing the right thing. In my experience, this isn’t usually the case. Building the product itself is only part of the process, albeit an important one, but it’s at least as important to validate your idea and build relationships. Coding is expensive, even if you’re doing it yourself. The time required to build and ship a major product is substantial and when you’re an unemployed entrepreneur, time is your most valuable asset. So now I try to only build things I can finish in 2–4 hours. Then I get user feedback on it and repeat.
2. Join a co-working space
This is one of the things I regret most from my experience. Instead of joining a co-working space I worked out of my apartment and coffee shops. This is, on paper, the cheapest option. But when you factor in the time you spend searching for coffee shops, finding a seat, realizing this place doesn’t have Wi-Fi, or closes at 5pm, or the music is too loud to concentrate, the math is questionable. More importantly you miss out on networking opportunities and free coffee.
3. Validate your idea early on
This is pretty common advice to anyone who’s read up on how to launch a product, but it’s worth repeating. I spent several months building Codeblox and its reception was very lukewarm. It was a valuable experience for learning new tech (React/Redux) but a major misuse of time from a financial perspective. On the other hand, I spent 3 hours building RefundMe and its reception was very positive and earned me actual recurring users.
4. Relocate if you can
As a recent New York transplant I’ve been amazed at how easy it is to make connections here. I grew up and spent most of my life in Atlanta, which has a small but growing tech scene, but where spontaneous connections rarely happened. Speaking from experience, if you can get yourself to a major tech hub like New York City or San Francisco, do it. It’s incredibly helpful to be surrounded by people doing what you are and the serendipitous connections that happen are invaluable.
5. Say your idea out loud in one sentence
Tell someone your idea in no more than thirty seconds. If they don’t immediately understand and express interest in your product, you either aren’t explaining it well or — more likely — your product isn’t solving a real problem. Codeblox is a highly technical product for developers who, when they heard the idea, thought it was “cool” and “a neat idea”. In my experience, this isn’t what you’re going for. RefundMe is a dead-simple Chrome extension that reminds you to return items on Amazon before the 30-day return window is up. When I explain it to people they immediately understand the problem and the solution, and often say something like “I would use that”, “that would be so helpful” or even “I would be your biggest customer”. This is the reaction you want. Aim for useful, not cool.
6. Stop being creative
This sounds counter-intuitive but has helped me generate business ideas. I think it’s common to spent hours, days and weeks trying to come up with a brilliant idea no one else has thought of. Instead, try thinking of obvious problems and simple solutions. We all experience dozens of small problems everyday that often go unnoticed because if we dwelled on them life would be a huge nuisance. After launching Codeblox and realizing no one really wanted to use it, I looked around my apartment and asked myself “How hard can it be to just solve a problem?” Then I saw the pile of shoes from Amazon that had been lying on my floor waiting to be returned. I figured online returns are probably a pain for lots of people, so what can I build in 24 hours that will solve some part of that? This isn’t a sexy problem and the solution I came up isn’t clever or nice looking. As it turns out, none of this matters so long as you’re solving a problem for the user.
I could probably write a part 2 on this but I’ll stop here for now. Hopefully this is helpful and please leave comments with any questions/comments.
