Almost two years ago, I encountered a problem I was compelled to solve:
I had so many creative ideas floating around in voice memos, notes, and my head, but I lacked structure and feedback to turn those into finished products and unleash them on the world.
So I participated in a Techstars ideation challenge and left with two co-founders who were also experiencing the same creative futility and isolation.
We focused our target demographic on writers and prototyped a solution to help writers receive feedback and validation from trusted sources, but in an anonymized format.
The idea was solid. Our execution fizzled. I had to convince my friends to participate in our user studies and ultimately we lost momentum and moved onto other projects.
I’ve been reminded of our experiment as a new participant in my ~real life~ friend Dickie Bush’s online #Ship30for30 community that supports writers in shipping atomic essays, like this one, every day for a full month.
It’s only Day 1, but I already have valuable takeaways from using this “competing” product to my own:
- Getting a critical mass of people interested in an idea > the quality of the idea
- It’s easier to assemble those people by leveraging existing free tools than by building your own tools
- People value ideas more when they’re paying for them (and yes you should get your friends to pay too)
- …But only if the value you’re providing aligns with their motivations… they they’ll come back for more!
