Time to build your own thing

In July 2015 I got laid off as a product manager from a startup company. I joined them when it was only 12 people and after 3 years, $20MM investments and 120 more employees I was shown the door. It happened pretty quickly and unexpectedly. One day you can be the main point of contact for customer success managers, developers, key stakeholders and sales. And all of a sudden, all 3 years of career seems like an illusion. When you work on the product you like with the people you like and someone can just make it disappear for you in a blink of an eye, it seems wrong. We should be able to stay in charge and in control of the things we like and things we do. This train of thoughts led me to the idea of not rushing into the job search right out of the gate, but rather stop and look around. Stop and think about ways to change the degree of control over my life and scale of decisions.

It was the time to do my own thing. Time to get rid of all the bosses, useless meetings, meaningless tasks and commute sameness. It was the time to take all the risks and full responsibility for my actions. It’s quite uncomfortable at first not having predictable paycheck and top management telling you what to do. And that was my motivation.

What if there is just you? Only you set the stage, pick the actors, write a play and pull the strings. Nowadays with a simple idea you can actually create something that can change lives of millions. This is fascinating to think about. It makes me feel grateful for living at the age of technology.

I would assume, you have some idea that you want to turn into product. First and foremost, ask yourself what is your incentive in building a product.

Is it something that your friends do to make money? Or you got sick of your boss and want to break free, travel the world and join the digital nomad community?

You may think that it’s about time to build your own thing. But do you know what it is? Or what could that be? How do you generate ideas for “your thing” and understand if those ideas are well-worth pursuing?

I had 33 ideas before I started working on something. Ideas are everywhere and they don’t worth a single dime. Everyone can have an idea, but it changes nothing until something is actually done behind it.

Here are some approaches to generate ideas, that I can recommend you from experience:

Make a list of personal and professional problems, frustrations. Imagine you have a magic wand. How would you solve them if you could do anything at all?
Make the list of the greatest ideas and find different market or context to apply them
Find popular apps and list the ways to modify them to make user experience more pleasant/compelling (so many apps are built around Instagram or Tinder etc.)
Look at the latest trends and develop the latest trendy ideas in the field
Observe. For example, look at the most popular IFTTT recipes to see the patterns of how people use the endless tools to solve problems

Here is a snippet of my idea list:

An app for meditation(like Nike for running)
“AdStage” for(vk.com, ok.ru, yandex.ru)
“Boost Media” for Russian market
Sleeping boxes in San Francisco
Show my co-workers how busy I’m at the moment not to be disturbed
An ability to record video with a music that plays in my headphones
To have categorized sets of rules: health, diet, exercise. Rules that are proven scientifically(with explanations) vs. wrong rules. Problem: to make a live experience better. Internet is full of fake rules, it’s hard to find the right ones and proven
An app for recommending best deals for miles!
Switching clothes: sick of that dress? Want to try something new? See what is hanging in your friends closet to swap
Your phone is dumb. An AI algorithm that would learn which notifications are important for you to see: text from wife, Uber message, boss etc.
Disney park has an app. Problem: not knowing where the wait time in line is shorter. Solution: show all rides indicating where the line length is below average for all the parks
A program that would write “hi” message to people on dating website that match defined criteria set
An app that alerts you if you entered a sketchy neighborhood

Later, I developed one of these ideas from the list above.

As you can see from the list, I use the combination of approaches. To get the initial list of ideas I set out to come up with 3 ideas a day. So that I have the list of approximately 100 ideas by the end of the month. Sometimes the dumbest or boldest ideas turn out to be the most successful products.

The idea by itself is nothing, that’s why it’s pointless trying to figure out if the idea is good or mediocre. Remember that the idea you choose to work on would be your “wife and 5 kids” and you’ll spend a lot of time with it. Whatever you select, make sure you like what this idea is about.

Here are some criteria for you to think about to determine if you like something or not:

When you do it, the time flies and it’s never enough
You would do it for free
It makes you feel good about yourself
Passion comes through activity, not just thinking. Just try it and observe

Once you have the idea you like, discuss it with a couple of friends and see what they think. Don’t hide your idea under the rug. Be ready that your idea will be reshaped by different opinions and market research insights. I’ll speak to that in the following article.

Let me know what you think about the article and share if you like it. Thanks.