Building Your Own Products is Really Damn Scary

Tech startups are wildly exciting. There’s no other way to put it. We constantly hear about the latest tech companies exploding with growth, with users, and dollars raised. And it’s hard to ignore these tech-behemoths all around us. But even more exciting than the next Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, is the growing trend of micro-enterprise.

Increasingly, small groups of individuals, hell even solo individuals, are able to come up with an idea, execute on that idea, and achieve financial freedom from that idea. If you’re like myself and have begun building upon your own ideas, or have toyed with the idea of starting your own venture, you don’t have to worry about being a hundred person company. Starting “small” and staying “lean” is now championed amongst the startup community. So in the words of a million others, “Just get started…”

And the natural response to that is:

“But Getting Started is Really Damn Scary”

As exciting as startups are, it’s scary to go out on your own to build your own products. And I don’t mean that in a hypothetical sense. I literally mean that as of writing this, there are certain fears that I feel about building my own product (which, I’m building right now full-time). I’m tremendously afraid of the unknowns:

What’s my current financial runway for this product?

Will my ideas/product be of real value to others?

How will I gain traction?

What in the hell is minimal enough to be a Minimum Viable Product and yet still be a product?

…

The unknowns and the questions and the fears are endless. They’re exhilarating, but they still have a way of hanging around and throwing a lot of self-doubt into the picture.

So in a startup world where the central theme is to just, “go build something,” I’ve found a lot of comfort and wisdom in the community of builders out there. A huge inspiration has been Josh Long and Drew Wilson’s book Execute. Their basic premise is that we need to build up as much momentum as we can by starting small and consistently building off of mini-successes along the way. Both Josh and Drew give great insights into their workflow and processes and it’s been an incredible shot-in-the-arm for me along the way.

Additionally, folks like Matt Goldman and Joelle Steiniger out of San Diego, the makers of HookFeed and Minimalytics, have openly written about “getting started” with their own products — the ups, downs, and lessons learned. Or take Joel Gascoigne and his company Buffer — both of whom regularly blog about overcoming initial startup fears, roadblocks, and obstacles. The tech startup community is literally bubbling with people that have been there before. And it’s that last point that has really begun to sink in…

Building Your Own Products Is Not New, Novel, or Revolutionary

I don’t say that to be off-putting or cynical. It’s just absolutely true. And it’s a beautiful thing. The thought of “going out on my own” to build my own products has been scary because of the slew of aforementioned fears and unknowns. But when you look at the countless others in the industry creating their own products, they too have experienced those same unknowns. And they too have succeeded in spite of them. That’s a really comforting thought. To realize that those that you admire and look up to have experienced the same set of fears and have come out on top, is mighty inspiring.

Building our own products is scary. It’s incredibly fun, exciting, and worth every penny, but it’s scary. Yet there’s comfort in knowing that you aren’t alone. Others have experienced those same initial worries and have been successful with their own products and ventures. And thankfully for all of us, there is an endless supply of information and inspiration within the community.

Our fears are often well-founded, but they shouldn’t be viewed as the deciding factors in our pursuit to build our own products. Rather, let’s look at them like checklist items. Go out in the community and find others that have been there before. Listen to the community, find ways to overcome a fear of yours, and then cross it off the list. Pretty soon we’ll find ourselves with fewer and fewer checklist items and more and more of the product that we’ve always wanted to build.

If you’ve been wanting to start a project of your own, or are in the middle of doing so, let me know what you’re working on!

Let’s chat on twitter : @rossSpeak

And if you’ve found some inspiration from this post, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d tweet and share it below.