It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Dec 2016 to be exact, and I was sharing one of our company’s core values before calling for a hiatus. We’ve clearly taken a while with our hiatus and a lot has changed with us and with the company. Jack Veiga and I have operated Made In Alpha in Singapore for a little south of 2 years and have been in business for a little bit more time. We’ve made a ton of mistakes that we could write a playbook, we’ve celebrated our little successes, we’ve had to make difficult decisions, we’ve been humbled continuously and we’ve learnt how to soldier on.
We’ve learnt so much the last 2 years about how to build systems and processes and how that benefits the company. How to manage people and how to let them go. How to define your boundaries with clients. How perfection can kill profit. How it’s okay to grow at your own pace. How important cash flow is and how compounding small wins everyday becomes a big win when you look back. And while we’ve learnt so much working for clients, we did feel that there’s more to learn outside working for clients. What this meant for us was that we wanted to start building stuff for us instead of just building things for other people. We’ve been talking about this for a while but never really executed it. We would have freedom to build what we want and this means that our learning curve won’t be limited to what clients would pay for. This was our passion anyway and we started noticing other people who went down this path too — they call themselves makers or indie hackers. They’re a breed that looked like us. Their tenets resonated with us and in any case, sharpening our knives would directly benefit client projects that we work on.
Fast forward to the start of this year and we’ve decided to set some time aside for us to work on our own projects. We had some principles listed out if we were to build something:
- Be passionate about what you’re building. This would allow us to be our biggest user and easily recognise the pain points other users would have.
- Build fast, ship quickly and acquire real feedback. The best validation you can get for your digital product is by launching it and seeing if anyone’s interested.
- Be transparent. It’s a good way to live life anyway.
- Monetize. Being profitable shouldn’t be a dirty word or a well kept secret. Just keep your users in mind i.e. don’t stick malicious ads around or sell your user’s privacy away.
- Launch many products. The only way to get good at launching is by practicing launching. Also, it may be the 3rd or 6th or 11th product that takes off. Don’t get married to your products.
With that in mind and some prompting by Jack Veiga to do something for the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) world after incessant rambling about all the UFC fights I just caught over the weekend, I finally found the first product to work on. It was a product I wanted built for myself. As a UFC fan, I find myself settling for a basic wikipedia table to check out the fight cards, relying on a website called Sherdog whose design to check out fighter profiles is outdated, and Twitter for live fight results. There was no centralized place to go to with a straightforward user experience and a simple design. Point 1 re passion was checked.
It was now about point 2 and building fast. From inception to launch, I took around a month to put it out in the world. I wrote an initial Ruby script to scrape the data I needed off the internet and got the views up the same week. The great thing about running with the idea and breaking things along the way is that you keep the momentum up, which is incredibly important. Downside was that I had to spend the next 2 weeks and multiple pleas for help from Tiago Alves to redesign my script and optimize my database schema. It wasn’t scalable and wasn’t launch ready. UFC doesn’t always book fights in chronological order and so when a user navigated to an empty event, the website would throw out a 500 error. There was no point putting time in decorating a 500 page, it was a database design problem that started with my script and that deserved the time anyhow. So as much as prioritizing speed is important, there’s always a yin to a yang and that is making sure the foundation is good enough; not perfect, good enough. I believe I could’ve sped things up but there were a number of other variables out of my control that month. For example, some of my best mates from my UCL days were in town and seeing them once a year (if we’re lucky) compared to seeing them everyday in London meant that they get priority. (Christy Tse, Philipp Karl Helfried 😘)
So the Ruby script is fixed for an optimized database and the views were up. It was all about launching now. I launched on Reddit and Product hunt. The latter was super quiet. As much as launching on PH has almost become a rites of passage for makers like myself, it wasn’t where my users were. In fact, I found a lot more quality feedback and interested users on random Reddit threads. In the spirit of openness, I’m not going to leave out the bad bits, I got my fair share of hate and downvotes too but you just gotta brush it off and identify what the reason for that is. If it’s because people think it’s spammy, then you know the copywriting and framing needs to improve. If it’s genuine feedback that your product is shit then move on to the next. If it’s trolls or haters just taking the piss then remember that it’s easy to talk shit behind a keyboard than to take a risk. The difference, however, is that risk you’re taking could very well put a Porsche in your garage.
Getting feedback and communicating with users, I have to say, was invaluable. Some comments like these were really encouraging which helped with the motivation.
While some were just.. ouch.. even though you take your time to try and explain your rationale, you come to realise that some people didn’t comment to listen.
Other comments, like I mentioned before, give you an indication your copy needs to improve.
Then there are DMs that make you feel a little better and that it’s worth it after all.
Lastly, there were some were really constructive ones, which just confirms you should get your product out asap..
☝🏼this discussion helped bring the ‘no spoiler’ feature to UFC Card. It was something that just made sense but I wouldn’t have thought of if I didn’t consult my users. That’s the value of talking to your users and getting them involved in the journey of creating your product.
On the note of openness and transparency, I’ve even publicised the project roadmap on the footer of the site for people to come check out what’s in the pipeline. They’re also able to vote on features they may want in order to help me gauge/prioritize on what to build next. Of course, there are going to a be a lot of suggestions that may not align with your vision so it’s up to the maker to discern the actual pain points and figure out how to solve it instead of blindly letting other people do the work for you.
Now, I’m at the point where I try to spread the word. I have chances to talk about it every 2 or 3 weeks during the build up to UFC fight nights. I’m hoping I’d be able to increase the impressions per month before I monetize it. I have a few monetization strategies in mind including ads and affiliate programs, but more recently I’ve been toying with the idea of pay-per-feature. I’ll need to spend more time on this but that would require more validation from users online. That would help me determine that I need to put in more time. Right now, I’m heeding advice from point 5 and I’m working on my second product. Pretty excited to share this with the world and more news from me soon. I’ll probably post most of my updates on Twitter before writing a post.
Twitter is also the best place to hit me up if you have any questions. I’ll be happy to answer any questions regarding the development of it (using Nokogiri as a web scraper and Rails to build the app), the philosophies I have or if you have any feedback for me re UFC Card. In a nutshell, you can talk to me about anything on Twitter.
Edit: I’ve stopped working on UFC Card and have since shut the project down.
If you wanna collaborate on a project: brian@toh.io
If you wanna chat on Twitter: @briantoh
Check out ufccard.com
