Building a Company on A budget
When most people see the tip of the iceberg.
Just like you, I have had many ideas. Only a few became products and only a few of those made it to market. Just like you, I try to be the Google smart creative, the 10x engineer [great analysis by Malte Ubl], the intra-preneur. Today I want to share how far along I’ve come to building my next product — without doing (almost) any of the engineering while having a very hard job, and a small budget. The bottom line is that you cannot believe you will make any progress if you can’t automate every processes in your company: the product needs no day-to-day management, every marketing effort needs an exponential impact — see my strategy on linkedIn: 24K comments on a post. Converting prospects to actual sales needs to be seamless. That all sounds nice, doesn’t it?
In 2011, I launched my first publicly available website Talk About Web. It’s an old-school interactive programming tutorial. I understood right then that creating content on a part-time basis requires too much time. And therefore, this simple website is powered by a markup language that I have built in order for anybody to create an interactive page faster. An example of a page built with the language can be seen here, at the bottom you can enjoy a preview of your page.
Between 2011 and 2015, I’ve built many products which never made it to market. I built a dashboard to rate classes for college named acadly.com. I built an app to do short term rentals of swimming pools named Pooler. I built a photo sharing app based on your location named TapTapGo, so you can share your moments with friends. All were potentially good ideas. However, none of them could ever take off. And the reason is that they all needed day-to-day management. I needed to find more classes to enter in acadly, creating a swimming pool marketplace without investment is difficult, and finally TapTapGo needed just too much development.
In 2016, I launched an app named Ampee with a friend, Connor Doherty. Ampee allows you to listen to all your favorite articles from the web. We also have the ability to create radios from aggregating similar articles. It’s available on the app store only. Ampee was special, everything could indeed be automated — and we did that. What we missed was marketing the app.
I have now spend the past four months learning how to build video games. A video game satisfy all three conditions. It is a piece of software that doesn’t require any attention once launched — Fire and Forget doesn’t go hand to hand with user retention but we’ll go with that for now. Any marketing can go viral because it’s very visual, and people have been very responsive to it (my first LinkedIn buzz). Thanks to in-app purchases in iOS, or Android, the transition from customer to sales is quite seamless if your product is good.
Here is a link to my landing page if you wish to keep track of my progress. I will upload screenshots, and gameplay videos soon.
#LetTheNextOneBeBetter!
One of my favorite book: Rework by David Heinemeir Hanson & Jason Fried
