Practicing what we preach — Why we’re building a new business. In public.
At Firmhouse we help our clients build businesses. We go from idea to a first version of the product together. A lot of what we’re doing revolves around discovering and testing new propositions and products. We’ve been doing that for eight years now. To put our process, methodologies, and tools to the test, the time has come to apply what we’ve been preaching to our own business. This is why we’re going to start a new business. And we invite you to join our journey. Because everything we’re going to do will be made public: From designing our first experiment to financial dashboards.
Doing this in public
One important decision we’ve made before starting this was to do it in public. We’ve seen great examples of individuals building their startup(s) completely in public. Several reasons why we believe this is beneficial:
Exposing yourself to the real world from day one
“Getting out of the building” is what every Lean Startup coach preaches. So do we. Yet, we don’t do it often enough. By doing this project in public and documenting our process along the way, we left the building already.
Being transparent and honest
Two of our core values at Firmhouse. Internally, everything we document and decide on is available for everyone to read. We believe creating a culture of trust and honesty is the best way to build great products.
Building an audience
So you’ve built that thing. It’s great. But who’s going to use it? Building an audience before building a startup is arguably the most important, yet underrated factor when starting up.
Creating accountability
We want to deliver on our promise. By going public, we commit ourselves to actually deliver.
Using our own products along the way
Over the last year, we developed our own set of tools. They’re built to get your business of the ground. Of course we test those tools often and talk to the people using them. But we need to improve when it comes to using them ourselves on a regular basis. We made some progress on that lately but we still felt we could push even further. At some point, we asked ourselves: “Hey, why not build a new business ourselves by only using our own tools?”. We see this as the ultimate test and one of the best ways of improving our products.
What to expect in the next three months
We’re going to run this project in our 20% adventure time. We gathered a team of 5 people, dedicating their 20% over the next three months to this project. We will experiment with various ways of documenting our process: From blog posts to audio to video. Don’t expect highly polished content. Expect raw and honest documentation.
Watch this space and follow @Firmhouse on Twitter to stay in the loop. We’re excited to build this together!
