I love this concept and advice: focus on and take down the hard stuff first!
The concern I have is that dealing with hard stuff could lead to frustration and demotivation which could stall progress or even kill the initiative, whereas starting with the easy stuff provides encouragement and sense of progress that is necessary to the sustenance of the initiative. How do you decide or is there a way to balance?
Everyone is different, but in general if you struggle to do the hard things first you'll avoid them later too. Tackling them up front ensures they must get done.
Most new projects start with a lot of excitement and energy, which means that you shouldn't have to worry about frustration and demotivation for a while. The frustration comes later, hopefully after you've done some of the hard things. Then you have the fun/easy things to look forward to, instead of dreading the hard things. It makes it easier to keep the project going, especially since you know it's worth it.
I had previously assumed that the fastest process to success was to just create a Minimum Viable Product, gather feedback from customers, and rapidly iterate on this cycle of improvements. However, after reading this article, I understand that it isn’t as simple as that. As someone with an engineering background, the statement that ‘many people will tell themselves they are just building a prototype even after they have spent 6 months on it already!’ is a truly sobering reminder for me.
Thanks Kenji, I wrote this to help spread that message. While I respect parts of the "Lean Startup" methodology, it largely hasn't worked in practice. What does work is tackling the hard parts and seeing if it's worth doing the rest.
Sound advice, and timely too for a stage of an idea that I'm currently thinking about. I was made redundant a couple of months ago from a Head of Software Engineering role - the market is really bad at the moment and I'm struggling to find a new role, so I'm thinking of starting a company to package up the things I do as a service. First step is experimenting with a newsletter and from there to test the appetite of market as I work with some ideas about presenting services as packages. I can worry about delivery once I get the first customer.
It is a hard market right now, and I'm sorry to hear you were caught up in it. I love your idea of packaging up what you do as a service, there seems to be a big market for these things right now!
And I'm glad the post was helpful, my hope was to save people/teams many months/years of wasting their effort. Let me know how your experiments go!
I love this concept and advice: focus on and take down the hard stuff first!
The concern I have is that dealing with hard stuff could lead to frustration and demotivation which could stall progress or even kill the initiative, whereas starting with the easy stuff provides encouragement and sense of progress that is necessary to the sustenance of the initiative. How do you decide or is there a way to balance?
Everyone is different, but in general if you struggle to do the hard things first you'll avoid them later too. Tackling them up front ensures they must get done.
Most new projects start with a lot of excitement and energy, which means that you shouldn't have to worry about frustration and demotivation for a while. The frustration comes later, hopefully after you've done some of the hard things. Then you have the fun/easy things to look forward to, instead of dreading the hard things. It makes it easier to keep the project going, especially since you know it's worth it.
But, YMMV!
> Start a newsletter
I see what you are doing!
I had previously assumed that the fastest process to success was to just create a Minimum Viable Product, gather feedback from customers, and rapidly iterate on this cycle of improvements. However, after reading this article, I understand that it isn’t as simple as that. As someone with an engineering background, the statement that ‘many people will tell themselves they are just building a prototype even after they have spent 6 months on it already!’ is a truly sobering reminder for me.
Thanks Kenji, I wrote this to help spread that message. While I respect parts of the "Lean Startup" methodology, it largely hasn't worked in practice. What does work is tackling the hard parts and seeing if it's worth doing the rest.
Sound advice, and timely too for a stage of an idea that I'm currently thinking about. I was made redundant a couple of months ago from a Head of Software Engineering role - the market is really bad at the moment and I'm struggling to find a new role, so I'm thinking of starting a company to package up the things I do as a service. First step is experimenting with a newsletter and from there to test the appetite of market as I work with some ideas about presenting services as packages. I can worry about delivery once I get the first customer.
It is a hard market right now, and I'm sorry to hear you were caught up in it. I love your idea of packaging up what you do as a service, there seems to be a big market for these things right now!
And I'm glad the post was helpful, my hope was to save people/teams many months/years of wasting their effort. Let me know how your experiments go!