I’m Going to Launch 12 Startups in 12 Months
Finally, it’s the right time for me to launch multiple products over a short period of time. I’m going to challenge myself and build 12 startups in 12 months, started from Oct 1, 2018. I’ll describe the reasons behind the challenge, the process, and progress of the journey, and share my ideas, products, and numbers I’ll launch.
Why I’m doing the challenge?
I’m going to take a risk, spend my time on developing products which I’m not sure if they’ll become successful startups. But I can’t sit and wait for the one big idea which is going to make me a billionaire. Even if I don’t make any of the 12 startups an unicorn, inthe end, I become more experienced, learned lots of new things and had a better day to day life.
In this section, I’ll share the inspiration behind this challenge and describe why I’m going to do this challenge.
Inspiration
As far as I know, levels.io was the first one who did 12 startups in 12 months back in 2014 with inspiration form “180 websites in 180 days” project. I saw his results a couple months ago and impressed by the numbers he achieved by bootstrapping the startups.
I googled and find out that the number of people who attempted to follow 12in12 is increasing; @swlkr , @yongfook , @heymehdi , Shan Han, @wisochris to name few. Some of them started a couple years ago and left the challenge in the middle, maybe after launching 3 products, and some of them are new (like me) and started it like a couple months earlier.
Start
I’ve been keeping an idea journal for some years, but never implemented any of product except for a couple of them. I always procrastinated the implementation due to perfectionism reasons or fear of failure.
I thought it doesn’t worth to spend lots of time developing a startup while you’re not sure if you can get traction or not. And I’m right. From one hand, you should not spend lot’s of time developing an idea while you don’t know if it fits into the market. And from the other hand, you can’t kill your ideas just because you don’t know the outcome.
So I’m going to start implementing an MVP of my ideas, launching them to the public, marketing for a while, and decide to quit or bootstrap the product before the expiry date of its domain name.
Productivity
I’ve been a freelancer for a long time and a theme developer on ThemeForest for the past few years. Recently, I figured out I don’t like my current position. I’m not motivated anymore, I don’t get up early and I don’t work hard till midnight. I used to be such a person. I always wanted to make something big. I actually made TheSaaS to be the landing page of my products!
I already started my challenge a couple weeks ago and I can see improvements in my productivity. I’m goal-oriented now, I’m motivated and waking up early, I write down my daily to-dos and I work harder to accomplish them. This challenge helps me to be a better version of myself.
Learning
It’s going to be a long and new experience for me. I need to learn new things and apply them to real products. From idea generation and validation to product design and development; from launching and marketing to generating leads and growth. All of them are topics that I haven’t explored very well yet. So it’s time to expand my skills set.
Connection
I’ve never been active in social media because I was underestimating the value it can bring on the table. But I have to admit that most of the early adopters are among your followers and connections. A challenge like 12in12 have potentials to grow my network and connections.
I’ve recently started a personal Twitter account at @hosshams. Would love to connect with other makers and bootstrappers.
How is the process?
Now you know what’s my reasons for doing this challenge. Let’s see how I’m going to execute this plan and what is the process I’m going to undertake.
Timeline
I’m not going to launch one product per month because some ideas require less time to make, and some others need months of development. So I’m going to start by developing small ideas in the first 6 months, and more time-consuming products in the second 6 months.
Here’s the schedule I try to stick to:
- 4 startups in 2 months; one product each 15 days
- 3 startups in 2 months; one product each 20 days
- 2 startups in 2 months; one product each 30 days
- 2 startups in 3 months; one product each 45 days
- 1 startup in 3 months; one product in 90 days
So the first 7 products might be small and premature at first, but I’ll continuously develop them over time if they look promising. But the last 5 are my best bets.
Numbers
I’m going to share the numbers from each and every product I launch during this challenge. The numbers should be around revenue, expenses, number of users, traffic, etc. Probably it’s going to be a monthly report for each product, but I’ll try to share some weekly stats as well.
Hopefully, those numbers can give you some insight and help you to be prepared for what you can expect from your future startup.
Progress
I’ll share my progress, news, and numbers on Twitter. You can expect to see tweets regards the products I launch, how I do marketing for each product, what are the results of launch in terms of the number of visitors, conversions, payments, expenses, etc. I’ll do my best to provide weekly and monthly reports from the earlier numbers so you can see how I proceed.
Also, I try to write a post on medium for each product a few weeks after the launch day to write about the intention, tools and my exceptions of the product and summarize the results I got.
What I’m going to make?
I don’t have the complete list of products I’m going to make right now, but I should define selection criteria. Also, I should not have too much expectation from startups I launch in 15–20 days.
Products
I’m not sure yet! I don’t have the idea for all 12 products right now. It’s very hard to come up with an original idea nowadays, so I might try to develop a better version of existing startups.
I have some ideas for listing websites which have already implemented by several people. But still, I’m doing them because they are simple and a good starting point. Also, single page tools with one-time payment would be a decent option for the start as well.
From startup number 6 or 7, I’m going to be more serious about the future of the products I launch. That’s the time I need to develop products that actually solve a problem and have more chances to become successful. These startups might be a big brother version of the already launched products, a disruptive and simple version of a well-known problem, or one of my original ideas that requires more than 15–20 days to implement.
Expectation
I don’t expect all of the products to make money and be profitable. Some of them are meant to be a source of early adopters for future products. With that in mind, I know most of them if not all of them will fail. I’ll put my focus on making profitable startups from product #5, hopefully charging from day one and with a subscription model. I target for $3,000 MRR at the end of the year.
What I made
I update this section as soon as I launch a new startup. I’ll write a short description for the product and provide a link to the full description post on the medium as soon as I wrote one.
#1 — Landub
Landing Page Inspirations and Templates — https://landub.com
Launched on October 14, 2018
#2 — BareProduct
Discover transparent numbers from open startups — http://bareproduct.com
Launched on October 31, 2018
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