You know how in TV shows, when one major problem gets solved, another one just as big (sometimes bigger) shows up?
Well, that about sums up my week.
Within a few days, I went from wondering whether my outreach was working, to getting a client meeting, to feeling dejected about my product, to finding a reason to keep building it.
Safe to say, it was not boring.
Product building whiplash
So, before I decided to build this product, I did all my research. I asked around, looked on the internet and got AI to do some searching for me. Maybe it was just the excitement, but I was convinced there was a real gap.
I mean, even as I started building it and looked for role models on how to price, structure and sell it, I still could not find a direct competitor.
It wasn’t like I was trying to revolutionize the industry. This was a small market gap. Still, it took some effort to make. I’m about six weeks in with about 10 hours per week and it’s not quite ready for deployment yet.
But then, I found a competitor.
All that research and asking AI didn’t even bring this up. On the surface, it did exactly what I wanted my product to do.
I started laughing. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or angry. On one hand, I was sick of working on it. Ten hours a week for six weeks and nothing to show for it yet? Damn. I wanted it off my plate, and a direct competitor gave me an excuse to stop. On the other hand, it was something I believed in, and stopping meant throwing all that work down the drain.
So, I did what I thought was the best thing, I took a break. I went to the gym, had some lunch, talked vented to a few friends and complained to Claude. I worked on some other stuff before finally coming back to look at it again.
What do I do now? Have I really lost the advantage?
I took a breath and gave the competitor a spin.
About two hours of serious testing later, I realised it was a different product. It looked the same, but functioned differently and served a different market. It’s not entirely different but it was different enough that mine could still exist.
Slowly, as I realised this, I felt annoyed but excited that it wasn’t over. I wasn’t out of the fight yet.
And instead of trying to build this from my head, I had a pretty close role model. I had something to reference and learn from.
So, within a single day, I killed and revived my product.
First in-person client meeting
I’ve had plenty of client meetings before, so I am pretty used to them. But for better or worse, they have all been online.
This week I had my first in-person meeting. I walked into someone else’s office and sat in their meeting room. Even when I had a corporate job, I’d only done this maybe twice in my life. And that was pre-Covid, before video calls were the norm.
It felt......strange, to say the least.
I wasn’t that nervous, but it felt like a job interview. Taking the lift up, asking to meet the person and saying the words:
“Hi, I’m here for a meeting.”
It’s a bit like being in someone’s home. You are welcome there, but you are still very aware that it isn’t your space. Which I think made me more self-conscious than I expected. I had to walk in, sit down and represent the business in front of actual people.
Which made the business feel oddly real.
Alright, that was week 6.
Plenty of lessons from it all, gotta keep going.
Onward to week 7.
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Resources on Computational Design: https://www.codedshapes.com/p/scripository