50 Projects in 2018 … the start of a journey

I’ve been a professional software engineer by trade now for 10 years.
And while over the years I started several attempts at founding my own company, I never actually succeeded.

This by itself is not extra-ordinary, it is in fact the norm: Conventional Wisdom in startup land tells us that 9 out of 10 fail.
Depending on which statistic you trust (and how you ask!) the real numbers are indeed between 60% (Fortune) or 92% (see the top answer on Quora for this question, derived from the fascinating Startup Genome Report)).

I am pretty much aware of why I have failed so far. The top three reasons include:

• Thinking too big
• Scaling too fast
• Not a good fit with co-founders in terms of dedication and communication

Now I did better every time (about 4 tries), but I want to adress all of those issues this year. Here’s how I want to improve my approach:

Thinking too big

Earlier on I was focussing on the end goal for a given product, or at least where I wanted to be two years from now. Now ambition is helpful, but I let myself get distracted by my ambition and the constant disucssions with my co-founders on those goals and how we want to reach them.

This year instead of making another attempt at starting 1 business I want to start 50 businesses, one every week. While this may seem counter-intuitive at first, it’s really about focus on what I can actually achieve in a week, having a more-than-fulltime job as external consultant for [Digital/McKinsey]https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/how-we-help-clients), including travelling, with a family, and some time for myself.

For this purpose I want to actively limit my time budget, so my other commitments don’t suffer too much.

Scaling too fast

In earlier attempts I always started sketching out the next steps before I even completed the first. Partly that’s about focus, partly it’s about listening: listening what the customers actually value, want and need.

Since I will impose a limit on my time allocation, I need to be able to ask my customers (provided I find some ;-) ) and listen to them and only go on developing more features if it actually creates value.

Fit with co-founders

Not delving too much into why earlier projects failed in that regard, I will make an effort of kicking off all of my business just on my own.
While I value insights and will ask people for help and pointers, there is only one person that makes the call: me :-)

Interesting tidbit: One particular branch of game theory is voting theory, a field of mathematics that I greatly enjoyed and even centered my thesis around. There is a saying, based on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, that the only “fair” (by definition) voting system is the dictator’s vote.

What I will do very practically

• Every week is focussed on one new project or business, this will usually not be connected to any other project.
• I set myself a limit of 4 hours per week to release something meaningful.
• Meaningful means I will create something that is valuable by itself
• Valuable means someone is willing to pay for it
• This someone could be me, so projects that are useful for me (i.e. that I would be willing to pay for) are possible :-)

Failure

I do believe that the real truth to how we experience and treat failure lays somewhere in between the typical claims in startup world, that

1. failure in a business stigmatize to the point where you can’t begine something new,
2. failure is always good, you just need to learn from it

This effort is partly about me reducing my own personal fear of failure. With 50 businesses there is basically certainty that a large number or all of them will not be successful.

Success

It may be important to discuss how I define success in this context. My KPIs are simple:

• I want to find a paying customer for every one of those projects
• I want to spend not more than 2000 Euros for all of the projects
• I want to receive 2000 Euros in payments for all of the projects, rendering it a zero sum game

… and talk about it

I want to share my journey, my failures and my successes. I will also share my metrics and how I perform. That includes income and expenses, time allocations and how much time I actually spend on the tasks. I want to share with you how I plan and execute and want to discuss with you what actually works or doesn’t.

You can follow me on Medium, where I will talk about hilights. I will also post about specific, often more technical, challenges on my blog.

2018, it’s on!

Originally published at blog.50projects.de on January 7, 2018.