I just read your whole journey since quitting google and it was very inspiring, thank you :) Glad to hear you still feel like it was the right choice.
I am now where you were 3 years ago: I just quit my well-paid SWE job without any concrete backup plan and all I have been dreaming of for years is being an entrepreneur.
It either happens now when I'm still young, or never, I figured.
However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling.
My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.
But after reading the paragraph about ideas[1] I am not sure anymore if this is a smart approach or not...
What do you think, what's the best thing to do to get to that initial spark?
Thanks for reading! Congrats on starting out on your own.
>However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling. My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.
That mostly sounds sensible to me.
I recommend thinking more about the "raise some interest" part. There's a common trap that indie founders frequently fall into (myself included) where you build an MVP but don't think about marketing it until you've already built it. And then you realize there's no plan for finding customers.
Once you build the MVP, how will you find customers? Can you skip to that part without even building the MVP?
One of the ideas I liked in the Jason Cohen video[0] I linked in the article how he built WP Engine. He wanted to build a product for WordPress consultants, so he just emailed consultants and offered to pay them their hourly rate if they'd jump on a call with him and answer questions about their pain points. He didn't have any demo to show them, but people took his calls because he was showing that he valued their time (most accepted the calls and declined the money).
So, I think building an MVP is great, but it's even better if you can talk to customers before you build anything and find out what problems you can solve for them. A great book for this is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, for which I've published my notes.[1]
> Once you build the MVP, how will you find customers? Can you skip to that part without even building the MVP?
It's not that I've never heard this before, but my excitement just gets in the way and wants to start building immediately :P
So it's good to hear this again, I really need to take this to heart...
Thanks!
However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling. My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.
But after reading the paragraph about ideas[1] I am not sure anymore if this is a smart approach or not... What do you think, what's the best thing to do to get to that initial spark?
[1]: https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/#pursuing-the-right...
(sry, non-native speaker)