
How I went from idea to product (with paying customers) in 7 days - AndyParkinson
http://blog.happyletter.net/post/64874094080/how-i-went-from-idea-to-product-with-paying-customers
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codegeek
Absolutely loved reading this. He actually describes the "how" process from
Day 1 to Day 7. These kind of posts always make me feel awesome and terrible
at the same time. Awesome that it is so possible to build something that
people actually want but terrible that people like me are still wondering
where to start. Damn I need to start talking to my Patrick Rhones.

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iambateman
Great post. Did you do this in tandem with a full time job?

Also did you just stumble on the guy's request? Or were you looking.

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AndyParkinson
I'm glad you liked it!

I have a "day job". I run another company with a dozen employees. I love
creating things, too. I'm like a construction foreman that loves what he does
so much that he builds birdhouses on the weekends. Most of the work was done
in the morning, over the weekend or at night while watching MasterChef on Hulu
with my wife.

I've been following Patrick Rhone for years. He was begging for a letter.ly
replacement for a while. Each time he asked, I always thought it was
fascinating that no one was taking him up on it.

I built HappyLetter for the fun and sport of it. I saw it as an opportunity to
practice some things I need to do more often and better, like writing,
sharing, teaching, being transparent, accepting constraints, accepting
perfection isn't always necessary, etc. I'm as proud of the HappyLetter blog
as I am the product. There are many hard-learned lessons buried in those
posts.

I've built many things like HappyLetter that never saw the light of day.
Blogging about it forced me to ship.

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amplification
I really like the idea of "writing through the product dev process". So often
I get stuck and the act of "talking it out" helps - I think writing a
blog/journal would be even better.

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AndyParkinson
Live-blogging was way more helpful to the development process than I ever
imagined it would be.

Even if you don't feel comfortable sharing everything in public, I'd keep a
private journal and write through any issues that are stopping you from moving
forward.

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pouzy
Great way of thinking and building the product in a very lean fashion ! My
biggest issue would be : why would people pay to subscribe to a newsletter ?
Do you have specific use cases ? (I guess that letter.ly closed for a reason?)
I'm sure that spending a week to build it and see if people would use it is
one of the best ways to answer that question though. I'm just wondering what
you, as a developer, think.

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AndyParkinson
I think I answered that here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600121)

There are people out there who love the bloggers/writers they follow and will
support them. A newsletter is a great way to trade exclusive access for money.

The kind of newsletters that publishers will use HappyLetter for aren't the
marketingy kind you're used to. These publishers probably won't have a
different product to sell where a newsletter is part of a lead scoring or
funnel process. To them, the newsletter is the product.

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dmyler
Really curious to hear how this works out. I don't recall ever seeing a paid
newsletter signup form; most authors/email list owners use email as a free
lead gen tool to sell something _else_ (a book, an online course, etc). It'll
be interesting to see if people will pay _for_ the email medium itself.

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AndyParkinson
So far after 8 hours, one of HappyLetter's customers has 13 subscribers.
They've only announced their letter on Twitter and ADN. Many of the Gruber-
inspired school of bloggers try to minimize ads and rely on direct support
from their readers. I think newsletters are a (classy) way that their readers
can support them.

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dmyler
"Many of the Gruber-inspired school of bloggers try to minimize ads and rely
on direct support from their readers."

That's awesome. I hope it gets traction. I guess we'll see as you move forward
;)

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jsb
I've been following Andy's blog since the beginning - amazing to see the
progress in just 7 days!

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johnmurch
Way to JFDI and get a product not just out the door - but have paying
customers!

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dpolaske
Nice work man! It's fun going from idea to customers so quickly. We did the
same thing in 10 days.

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sensecall
Wow, impressive! Will be interested to see how things progress.

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benmarks
Why a monkey icon? Hard for me to not relate to MailChimp.

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AndyParkinson
That'll change. Someone is building out the identity right now. But I have a
thing for monkeys. Don't judge.

