Brainstorm
We have our goal. Make $3.5k this year. But how do I get there?
How did I achieve 'successful' things in the past? How did I deal with and get things done with lots of uncertainty?
Let's just brainstorm and chuck out some possible middle steps.
Sell cupcakes. Sell piano lessons. Sell paintings. Sell little games. Sell special edition 'creator's copy' games. Sell .... stuff.
Products grow from a kernel of an idea wrapping forward. They don't just drop into this world fully formed.
What about all the inefficiencies I encounter at work? Slowly reducing them one by one? Micro-posting all the improvements I do?
2020-02-23 4:31 pm
I just need to save a developer 15 hours of time accross a whole year to justify a $50 license.
Then for my little goal of 3.5k this year I just need to sell 70 licenses.
Then if that works, if I want to build up to making something like 50k, I just need to sell 1000 licenses over a year.
Anyway. 70 little licenses for my theoretical little product this year. Now, some stats I've seen from people sharing their email subscriber conversion ratio, is that they often get between a 5-10% conversion rate on it. It can be lower of course if their product or marketing is really bad, but I'm going to assume a not too positive yet still fairly optimistic 7% conversion rate.
That means I will also set a target of getting 1000 email subscribers onto a magical email list that doesn't exist yet this year.
2020-02-23 4:39 pm
Planning!
April 23rd Midnight or respectable time after that: First Launch!
That's exactly two months from now.
I'll launch to however many email subscribers I have then. Target: 75.
I'll assume a 10% conversion rate here, so the goal is to make 7 sales and $350 in revenue.
Is it worth making a trello board? I don't know. But let's not get caught up in organising the work over doing the work.
For a product schedule I say roughly 2 weeks to design the initial thrust of the product, the next week to bang out a prototype, the next two weeks to refine and finish it off, and the last three weeks to do final testing with some friends. Also as a project management buffer since making software always tends to run over a bit.
That's a good product schedule.
Now for the product design schedule.
While I'll keep refining it throughout its whole lifecycle, I'll start by planning the first three weeks for now when I'm working out what to build at all and drastically adjusting the product once I can actually try something.
First week:
Cast the net wide. Blog about useful tips I know already to increase my productivity. Share and read blogs that contain useful advice. Find a way to document my day over the week and work out what I'm spending a lot of grunt time on that I shouldn't need to be spending. Analyse my bash history and try to add useful aliases and command line tools. Try out some productivity tools I think might be helpful. Try some tools to help collect information about what I'm spending time on too. Do research on the internet looking for things that take up programmer's time and frustrate them that don't have good solutions yet.
Second week:
Narrow focus and begin refining product concept. Identify similar tools, analyse what doesn't work about them. Continue blogging useful small productivity tips I've learnt Continue analysing the data I've been collecting about what I've been spending my time on at work. Try writing small scripts or just using spreadsheets to help with tracking and getting stuff done easier.
Third week:
Start writing code! Start trying to use it at work See if my collegues want to try it once it starts working well enough See if I can start seeing any change in how I'm recording my time through use of the tool. (Although, "The Tool" TM could just be making it easier to record what I'm doing, but I still should start to see evidence that I've managed to make my day more productive).
2020-02-23 4:53 pm
I've decided I want my 'Product' to have a pet name for now.
I'm going to call it 'Freesia', since that's my favorite flower.
Once I have more of an idea around what it will be, I'll think of a name that fits it better and is easy to market. Or maybe I'll just stick with this name.
So, let's get started designing and building Freesia!
2020-02-23 4:53 pm