Dreams, everyone has them right? Big house, successful business, financial freedom. So far everything sounds great, but how the hell am I supposed to get to that point? To be honest, I don’t have a clue—but, I’m trying to figure it out. First, let’s descend from the clouds and get back on the ground for at least a few minutes.
Personally, I don’t really care about having a huge house where I don’t even use half the rooms. I’m looking to succeed because I think that I can and because I like a challenge. Sometimes it’s better to keep things simple, there is nothing wrong with that. I’m not expecting to going to go viral. No idea is worth one million dollars, and just being the idea guy won’t get me into the same realms as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark ‘The Zuck’ Zuckerberg, or our very own ‘less heroic ironman’, Elon Musk. Nor do I particularly want to be. It’s time to stop reading about how people built their businesses, stop watching the productivity gurus on YouTube, and actually start being productive.
Let’s take some time to evaluate what we have so far, and then maybe you, the reader, can do the same. Once we know where we are, we can start building out a roadmap for the future, but until then, trying to make a plan is just as likely to lead to walking circles.
We’ve got an idea, it’s nothing ground breaking, but I think it’s decent enough to get some traction. When we share our idea with people I’m not looking for some grand reaction. Instead I’m hoping for a simple answer to a simple question. We wan’t the person receiving the pitch to say one thing: “I would use that.” I think that’s the true definition of a good idea. I’ve seen plenty of great ideas that got nowhere, and that’s just as a 25 year old, 3 years out of my undergrad. So there’s an idea, but so what? If I’ve learned one thing from studying industrial design, you could say it’s that ideas are irrelevant; what really matters is execution. That’s not to say that if you execute a terrible idea perfectly that everything will go wonderfully; rather that even if your idea is one in a million, there are 7.8 Billion people on this planet. With that many people around, then for that one in one million idea there are roughly 7,800 other people out there right now with the same exact idea. That’s a lot of competition, so how do we to come up with a better business plan and succeed when they may fail. The first thing has to be to start.
For me that means a few things, which we will get to in a moment, but it also means that once you start you are at least ahead of most of those nearly eight thousand people.
Alright, with our feet firmly planted on the ground let’s figure out where we are, and what we need to do to get somewhere. Then we can worry about the roadmap.
For starters we have an idea, it’s nothing legendary, but it’s good enough. In our case it’s an idea for a mobile app / service for connecting you with the people that you care most about, be it friends or family. We aren’t worried about introductions, or finding new people, we are focused on simply connecting people that already know each other. How do we want to connect people? In person, without a screen in front of them to take pictures or chat via video—no need to have a social feed piping pictures of peoples’ pets onto our phones.
What do we need in order to execute on this idea?
Well, we need to be able to develop mobile apps, and a backend structure to support the apps. There will be design work to be done for the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX), branding and graphics, a company name. For each of those there are skills that will need to be utilized. In my case I have experience in product design and development which will help, however my coding background is much weaker. At the start of this project I had about a years worth of experience in python—a great programming language, but not what’s needed to write an iOS app, or an android app. Writing algorithms and scripts to help at the office are both much simpler tasks than developing an application for production. We’ll need to learn the frameworks, and languages that are used for app development, or find a cofounder that can fill in the gaps. In the meantime, I’ve been working through educating myself on both the languages and the frameworks. Google has a great set of courses for app development on their developer website. It’s certainly not a bad place to start, we can use this to help us figure out all the things that we don't realize we don’t know yet.