Powers of Ten
A Lazy, Milestone-Driven Startup Methodology
Motivation
For many years now I’ve been tinkering away trying to build something great, dreaming of making lots of money and running my own company instead of working for the man.
Age has tempered my enthusiasm for success, replacing it with an enthusiasm for happiness. My personal goal for the next 10 years is to have fun building stuff, and to gradually retire.
Gradual Retirement
I can’t imagine reaching a point where, overnight, I cease going to work and start playing golf all day instead. Too much of what I do for fun overlaps with what I do for a living for that to be possible.
Here’s what retirement looks like from where I’m standing.
- Keep working, but work less. A reasonable goal to aim for I think is 25 hours a week for 40 weeks a year, leaving plenty of time for leisure and family and travelling and the other things retirees do.
- Replace work-related income with passive income. The point here is that income from work should gradually trend to zero, while passive income should gradually trend to at least what I’m earning now.
All this can take 10 years to achieve. That’s fine. That’s what I mean when I say gradual retirement. It’s not a sudden change.
What does “work” become under such an arrangement? Well, it’s still doing much the same sort of stuff, but without the distraction of having to turn that stuff into money. Which means autonomy and opportunity to help others. Which will make it even more satisfying.
Passive Income
When I said “passive income”, I bet you thought I was talking about investment. But I wasn’t. I really don’t like the idea of generating money through speculation. It’s not enjoyable to me, it can be ethically dubious, and having more money at the end isn’t enough of a reward in itself.
A friend asked whether I wanted to be part of an investment group he established. They buy foreclosed homes in the US and rent them out. They’re making lots of money, but they are profiting from the misfortune of others. Sure, it’s not their fault that people lost their homes. But even so…
Besides, there’s “hedonic adaptation”. The concept is quite simple. One’s level of happiness doesn’t change, at least not for long, as one acquires millions of dollars. All that extra money just enables a lifestyle that becomes a new baseline against which to measure yourself.
What happens next is that you miss the thrill of change, so you work harder to acquire even more. And the more you have, the more concerned you become about losing what you have, because stepping down the ladder just isn’t an option. Material wealth really is tremendously overrated.
I’m just not driven by the idea of making a billion dollars. If I did have all that money, I would live a pretty similar life as I do right now. I’d still eat the same food, drink the same drinks, enjoy the same movies, play the same games and read the same books. What would change is that I’d outsource the boring, time-consuming stuff, I’d stop trading stress and sleeplessness for pay, and I’d rest assured that my family will remain financially secure.
No, when I said “passive income” I was talking about building something of value. In the sense that other people will want to pay money for it. And that they’ll continue doing so with minimal extra effort on my behalf. The ideal scenario is to keep a regular monthly income ticking along with just a small amount of effort each month; just a few hours here and there.
Lean Startup? No Thanks.
The lean startup methodology is a really great template to follow if you’re driven to build a company and don’t mind making sacrifices along the way to attain financial success.
I don’t want to do that. It’s fun to attend Startup Weekend and to, well, speculate on what might have been, but I’m not the kind of person that can dive into a culture of hustle and growth and pivots and validated learning.
I don’t want to grope around in the dark, fumbling around to find the thing I should be making by shining the light of the build-measure-learn torch. No, I want to arrive at an idea through quiet contemplation. I want to build an elegant something for myself. And I then want to gradually generate money from what I create by aiming at milestones of increasing ambition.
Powers of Ten
In a nutshell, I’m proposing a simple methodology that is based around working to achieve each milestone, shown on the list below, without worrying too much about future milestones until they are in your sights. Just get as far as you can and have fun doing it.
My theory is that the amount of effort required to hit each milestone should feel about the same. You can “timebox” your attempts, knowing when to bow out and start a new project from scratch. The trick is to not abandon a project once started until you’ve proven to yourself that you’re unable to hit the next milestone with reasonable effort. Simple.
Note that I assume below that a “paying customer” is someone who has signed up for a $5/mo subscription. Our goal here is to do fun work which is then used to generate passive income, so we need a source of ongoing revenue without the need to expend effort on continual growth.
The core idea is to follow this process, slowly, over a long period of time, building up a catalogue of projects, each of which maxed out at a certain milestone. And, hopefully, to gradually retire in the process.
Milestones
Each milestone has a rewarding payoff, emboldened in the text. If Medium would allow me to, I’d number them -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4.
- Find something worth building. Prove you’re capable of making it. Decide why your something will be better. Describe it in 1000 words. Post it somewhere public. And feel the excitement.
- Build the something for yourself. Perhaps it solves a problem you have? Limit your work to 100 hours. Doesn’t matter if nobody else ever knows about it, because, hey, you solved your problem.
- Get 10 other people to use your something. Perhaps they have the same problem? Just be altruistic at this stage, and bask in the glow of positive feedback from your small community of early adopters.
- Convert just 1 of these people to a paying customer, providing that they are a complete stranger and aren’t giving you sympathy money. Great! You now get to have a free coffee on the first day of each month.
- You’ve proven that people will pay for what you made, but you’ve only explored a minuscule fraction of the global market. Reach 10 paying customers, and have them pay your monthly mobile bill.
- You see where this is going, right? Next step is 100 paying customers. By now you’re probably shifting from making to marketing. And you’ve covered your monthly coffee, lunch and beer budget.
- Hitting 1000 paying customers is huge, transforming this project from hobbyist-with-benefits to a serious contender for supplanting your day job. And you’ve covered your mortgage repayments.
- Congratulations! At 10000 paying customers you are now the proud founder of a bona-fide startup success story. Apart from all of the previous benefits combined, you can now comfortably retire.
Theory to Practice
So that’s the Powers of Ten (PoT) methodology. It’s an introspective,
slow-paced, fun, lifestyle-driven approach to achieving gradual retirement by creating something of value by aiming for milestones of increasing orders of magnitude. An antidote to the Silicon Valley mindset.
It’s like the slow food movement, but for software projects.
PoT assumes that moving from doing nothing to letting the world know what you plan to create, by writing an essay right here on Medium perhaps, is about the same amount of effort as building that thing, which is about as hard as getting the first ten users of that thing, and so on. It requires that you don’t even think about how to get 10000 paying customers until you already have 1000 paying customers. Just focus on the fun and the now.
That’s all very easy to write down, but it ain’t worth a damn until it’s put into practice. Which is precisely what I plan to do. Starting this weekend I’ll be working towards achieving milestone PoT-3. I’ll see you back here soon with a 1000-word post. Wish me luck!
