Why I’m quitting the 12 projects in 12 months challenge

What was the challenge for again?

Let’s review again the point of the challenge. In a previous article , I pointed out a couple reasons for doing the challenge and the problems that it solves:

1) most entrepreneurs don’t do anything
2) most entrepreneurs ship too late or never ship.

*Bonus* After writing my initial article and doing a couple months of the challenge, I realized that its solves a very important 3rd problem: its gives new entrepreneurs a better sense of what traction looks like.

What does traction look like?

New founders that have not had the experience of putting products in front of customers often do not know what the initial stages of traction (I’m also going to refer to this as product-market fit but there are subtle differences) looks like.

Product market fit doesn’t feel like vague idle interest. It doesn’t feel like a glimmer of hope from some earlier conversation. It doesn’t feel like a trickle of people signing up. It really feels like everything in your business has gone totally haywire. There’s a big rush of adrenaline from customers starting to adopt it and ripping it out of your hands. It feels like the market is dragging you forward — Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment

Although it should be easy to tell, founders make the mistake all the time. Since the challenge forces you to ship many products, it will give you more data points for comparison. Some projects will feel like pushing a boulder up hill, but some (if you are lucky) will have you running after the boulder to keep up. In reality your startup will be somewhere in between. But with more data points, you’ll have a better idea if the product is really getting traction and whether or not to pursue it further.

Why quit the challenge?

A better way to look at a challenge is as a tool to help you put in some constraints to increase your chances of success. There is a time limit to the challenge so you are forced to get started. You are required to ship within a month so you will not spend a year working on your project before anyone sees it. This will give you more at bats, more experience, and more perspective to make the right decisions going forward.

But like any tool, it can help you or hurt you depending on circumstances. Lets look more at some reasons to quit the challenge.

1) You might want to go faster. The challenge gives you 1 month to ship. But sometimes your MVP might be just a signup page or a Balsamic mock-up. In this case you could probably do it in a couple weeks or even a few days. Thus the 1 month constraint is too long. As we know with Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time available for completion, so setting a limit might make something take longer than necessary.

2) You might want to focus more time on a single project. If your product is picking up traction, it may be more worthwhile to spend your time focusing on growing that product instead of exploring new opportunities for traction. It would have been costly for Peter Levels to continue with his challenge instead of switching to focus on NomadList full time.

What about me?

So that leaves me to where I am now. I’m not sure if I have real traction, but I sure have some signs of it with CustomJournal, my 3rd project.

While I was working on the next project I saw 5 sales of the app within a week. This was despite a relatively weak up sell offering. I know this isn’t much to go off of. But having customers that want to pay you despite the product not being polished is a good sign.

Also, I’ve been engaging with customers directly and they had some good things to say about it:

Customer review

Class App. Exactly what I always wanted. Just try it for a day but sooner or later I will get the pro version. I just entered the beta phase. I hope there are nice updates coming here. What I would find good would be […features…]. Big praise to the developer. Please continue to do so even if not many have downloaded the app yet.

Another customer review

Have long searched for an app that is individual for daily reports
Templates allowed. This distinguishes them from all diaries etc.
Hope very much that others like it, so more
development takes place […]

So a couple of sales and a couple good reviews. That’s good enough for me to dedicate more time on it. This along with the fact that I am traveling in Malaysia as well as doing startup school (yay for getting in by default due to glitch!) makes it better off for me to break from the challenge and refocus.

So yes, I have officially quit the challenge. At least for now.