It’s possible that your startup will fail because you didn’t iterate on the product fast enough, but so what? My guess is you will still have leveled up your dev skills at a rate comparable to self-study. The main bad outcome will be if you get discouraged by this failure and don’t feel motivated enough to do another startup. That’s why I suggest trying to create a success spiral. Try to pick a project where you can’t really fail. You’re just creating a nice little tool for yourself to use or something like that. Something that will look cool on your resume. Real world users are gravy. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, PM me and maybe I can help.
Having a lot of traction is a good problem to have. It’s something people work really hard to achieve. It’s not something you usually achieve by accident. If you really want to avoid getting traction, just focus on developing your product and don’t do any marketing. If you really have more interest than you can handle, talk to an angel, get some funding, and hire some solid programmers to work with.
My first ever web development project was a website that would generate random plots for Michael Crichton novels. I was inspired by this web page. I knew next to nothing about web development at this point. Someone submitted my app to reddit—you can see the discussion here. My second app was a website for students to buy and sell used textbooks. I taught myself a different framework to make that site, and I was still a novice web developer, but I still got it done before the end of the spring quarter. I plastered my college campus with advertisements and got hundreds of textbooks listed. That was a huge confidence boost. I felt motivated to tackle anything at that point. The next thing I chose was a project I wasn’t passionate about in a “red ocean” full of competitors who went to crazy lengths to get customer attention. My skills as a web developer didn’t give me a strong comparative advantage here. I didn’t have a good theory of what motivated my users, and the task of promoting the heck out of my site didn’t appeal to me. I’ve tried to start a few companies since then. I almost always end up teaching myself new technologies for new projects, but I never feel like technology is the bottleneck. I left MealSquares recently. (It was always more Romeo’s project than mine—he’s still working on it and I wish him the best of luck.) I’m not planning to start another company any time soon; I’m a little burnt out on startups. If I start another one, it will probably be something where I feel motivated to build the thing even if no one ever uses it.
It’s possible that your startup will fail because you didn’t iterate on the product fast enough, but so what? My guess is you will still have leveled up your dev skills at a rate comparable to self-study. The main bad outcome will be if you get discouraged by this failure and don’t feel motivated enough to do another startup. That’s why I suggest trying to create a success spiral. Try to pick a project where you can’t really fail. You’re just creating a nice little tool for yourself to use or something like that. Something that will look cool on your resume. Real world users are gravy. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, PM me and maybe I can help.
Having a lot of traction is a good problem to have. It’s something people work really hard to achieve. It’s not something you usually achieve by accident. If you really want to avoid getting traction, just focus on developing your product and don’t do any marketing. If you really have more interest than you can handle, talk to an angel, get some funding, and hire some solid programmers to work with.
My first ever web development project was a website that would generate random plots for Michael Crichton novels. I was inspired by this web page. I knew next to nothing about web development at this point. Someone submitted my app to reddit—you can see the discussion here. My second app was a website for students to buy and sell used textbooks. I taught myself a different framework to make that site, and I was still a novice web developer, but I still got it done before the end of the spring quarter. I plastered my college campus with advertisements and got hundreds of textbooks listed. That was a huge confidence boost. I felt motivated to tackle anything at that point. The next thing I chose was a project I wasn’t passionate about in a “red ocean” full of competitors who went to crazy lengths to get customer attention. My skills as a web developer didn’t give me a strong comparative advantage here. I didn’t have a good theory of what motivated my users, and the task of promoting the heck out of my site didn’t appeal to me. I’ve tried to start a few companies since then. I almost always end up teaching myself new technologies for new projects, but I never feel like technology is the bottleneck. I left MealSquares recently. (It was always more Romeo’s project than mine—he’s still working on it and I wish him the best of luck.) I’m not planning to start another company any time soon; I’m a little burnt out on startups. If I start another one, it will probably be something where I feel motivated to build the thing even if no one ever uses it.