I want to become a better product maker. This ‘Making of’ blog post is a vehicle for that learning.

Idea

On April 7th, 2015 Casey John Ellis (the founder of Bugcrowd, where I work) pinged me about an idea:

The idea required a limited number of features, and a simple design; it sounded like the perfect weekend project! After Chris Azar agreed to help as a Designer and Front-End Developer, we were ready to begin.

Scope

When pitched an idea, I scope out how to built it, with my focus on the minimal viable product functionality:

• A user should be able to…

Once moving into San Francisco, it becomes apparent that bicycle is the best mode of transportation. With minimal funds, I wanted to find a way to get one. So I choose the Bike Kitchen, a co-op with volunteers assisting others to build a bicycle using there collection of second hand parts.

I was able build my bicycle from second hand parts over the course of a few weeks. Yet since the first day I have had malfunctions (broken pedal, axel, de-railer, flat tires, etc).

Each time I go back to the Bike Kitchen, learn about the problem, ways to solve…

Short run (today — this month): Money > Happiness

If I paid you $10,000 to complete a miserable task that would take a few hours (clean up a dormitory’s bathrooms) would you take it?

Hell I would, and I bet many of you would too.

What happens if I’m willing to pay you the same amount to do it every day for a month?

I assume most would still go for it. What happens when its a year?

You see what I am getting at?

Long run (this year — forever): Money < Happiness

As stated above, there is a breaking point when an individual must focus on happiness more than cash. …

This past week I decided to stop working on my latest venture, MyManual* (2 years old), in which I did about everything wrong you could do when starting a business;

• Spent more time worrying about patenting the software before I had customers.
• Hired numerous friends, then couldn't pay their wages.
• Spent $9,000 developing an iOS app without validating product/market fit.
• Went through 3 developers in 1 year due to my poor technical management skills.
• Then spent 6 months developing the application myself without active customers.

and the list goes on…

“In order to survive got to learn to live with…

I often think of it as trying to accomplish a task knowing, that based on probability, you will fail.

As Chad Hurley discusses his early days starting YouTube he says,

“We didn't know what the hell we were doing…. we just kinda figured it out as we went along….if we really thought about it …. we wouldn't have built YouTube.”

By taking the problem and breaking it down to a bunch of smaller problems, people are able to work through tasks that at one time would have seemed insurmountable.

After learning how to program over the past 8 months, I…