30 projects in 30 days

My (and probably your) problem

Hi! 👋 I’m Denis.

I’m a developer. And that’s the problem... I think as a developer...

I'm more than sure that you know a bunch of people like me. Or сhances are, you and I are very similar.

You can probably relate to one or more of these:

• I can spend weeks or even months pondering a brilliant project idea. And most often this is where it all ends...
• If I start to do something, then filled with enthusiasm I try to immediately create a "spaceship". An extremely complex project. Once I start, I understand how much work it will take and abandon it saying: “Nobody needs it anyway”.
• If I finish a project, then most often it turns out that no one needed it. The work was senseless.

These were my problems too.

That’s why I decided to participate in a “30 projects in 30 days” workshop recently.

What did we do

Within a month, we were creating 30 projects with a team of 10 non-professionals under the guidance of very cool product managers: Roman Gluck and Kirill Borzov.

It turned out that I, like most software developers, completely misrepresent the process of launching a project. The usual development path looks like this:

1. write a lot of code
2. spend a lot of time and effort
3. understand that nobody cares about it

I want to share with you how to create products correctly.

To be more precise, we learned how to create MVP projects. Usually, when we hear the word MVP in large IT companies, it means “work on a project for at least six months, only then release it to the market and see what happens”.

Let me warn you that if you follow this path for personal projects, you will find yourself in a wonderful world of frustration.

In fact, MVP should almost always look like this for personal projects: Choose one, the most important problem that your product solves, and implement only its solution on the knee. If it's too complex, it might be better to imitate it.

A very good example is Zappos. The guys were among the first to create an online shoe store. Subsequently, they were bought by Amazon for $ 1 billion.

It was not clear at the time whether they would buy shoes online? You can't measure it ... Instead of renting a warehouse, buying a mountain of shoes, and starting to sell, they did differently.

The guys just took pictures of shoes in a nearby shoe store and posted these photos on their website page. If someone ordered a pair, they would just cross the road and buy these shoes. So they validated the idea.

The goal of an MVP is not to make money, but to test your hypotheses. And, if they are wrong (and most likely they are), correct them.

We don't know anything until we test the idea.

When we were working on our MVPs, there were several “checkpoints” that we needed to pass. This is how the work on our 30 projects was organized:

1. To write a hypothesis
2. To study the competitors (If there are no competitors, your idea is likely bad)
3. To do customer interviews with the target audience
4. To create an MVP quickly and cheaply and test it on a small audience. It is advisable to use no-code solutions like Tilda, Wix, and so on. I know it hurts for an IT guy, but trust me, you will save a lot of time.
5. Only after that - launch

Hypothesis

Speaking of a hypothesis, all the hypotheses that we wrote had the following structure:

1. Description of the problem - a couple of simple sentences (Why is this relevant and who is suffering because of it?)
2. Useful action (Why do people need our solution and what problems of the audience will it solve?)

Example: “We help young people from Moldova who face the challenges of adulthood to find an answer to the question: how do other adults usually cope with these challenges?”

3. Competitors
4. Target audience

Example: “Russian-speaking young adults 17-25 years old from Moldova who live separately from their parents or want to move out. They are interested in issues related to home and everyday life, work, government services (medical and utilities)."

5. Advantage indicators (Why is our project more interesting than others, why do people choose us, and not another analog?)

It makes sense to write all this in a document or on a piece of paper. I also thought it is overkill at first, but believe me, it's very useful.

Target audience

Speaking of target audience... Narrow it down as much as you can. This will reduce the amount of work and will allow you to create a product that solves the problem VERY well, even if it is a narrow circle of people.

Rule of thumb: you need to narrow the audience so that, having found a person's profile on Facebook, you can immediately answer the question of whether he/she will like your product.

It is almost always easier to start up and compete, creating a project that a small audience of people likes a lot than that would be “just good” for everyone.

Customer interviews

Now to my favorite disappointment part. Interview! At this point, we find out that our idea sucks and why.

During the interview, our tasks are to find out:

• Is the problem real?
• How much does it hurt?
• How much does it cost?

Where to find people for interviews?

• You can post on social networks or thematic platforms, and look for people with similar problems.
• You can contact Influencers. They can tell and advise a lot of interesting and useful things.
• Clients of competitors (why not? Everything that works is good).
• People who comment on other people's posts about similar problems in social networks and forums.

How many interviews should you conduct?

There is no specific number, but there is a rule of thumb: If during the next interview you can easily predict the respondent's answers and do not receive new information, you can stop.

There is a great book on the subject called "The Mom Test".

Its main idea is that interviews should be conducted as if you were interviewing a project to your mom. Imagine you come to your mom and say: “I want to create a super cool mobile app with recipes for dogs” Mom will most likely say that the idea is bad because she loves you. You need to learn how to ask such questions so that you can even get useful information out of your mom.

Bad questions:

• What do you think about our idea?
• Do you like the product?
• Will you use our solution?
• Do you think our solution is needed by society, people, or companies?
• Would you buy a solution that performs task X?
• What features should your dream solution have?
• How much would you pay for X?

Good questions:

• What have you already tried to do?
• How do you solve the problem now?
• Describe the situation when was the last time you encountered this problem?
• What are the consequences of this situation?
• Why does this bother you?
• Please tell us in more detail what is the algorithm of your work?
• Who else should I talk to?

Our 30 projects

Well, now I want to tell with examples of our projects how we confirmed and refuted our hypotheses.

1. The Design Challenge

One of the projects where I was the leader was The Design Challenge.

The bottom line: within 30 days, every day a person receives design tasks, which he will perform and share the results.

As a developer, I immediately started thinking about a "spaceship". "In a few days off, I can create a platform with challenges, where people will subscribe and be able to upload their work ..."

Stop ... And where is the guarantee that they will generally subscribe to this idea? And if not, then a lot of work will be done in vain ...

As a result, we made a simple landing page without code using a website builder and created a newsletter using MailChimp. And the participants simply post their work on Instagram with a specific #hashtag.

Initially, the hypothesis was that our target audience is English-speaking novice designers who lack the motivation to build a portfolio.

Having studied the competitors, we realized that there are many large players among the English-speaking ones. But for the Russian-speaking, things are better for us. We changed direction.

To test this hypothesis, I found the group of the author of the graphic design course on Facebook. She periodically runs challenges. Participants publish their works in the comments.

I started spamming commentators. Found out that, yes, our audience is beginners. But no one experiences problems with motivation. On the contrary! Everyone wants to try their hand, show themselves, improve their skills, and collect a portfolio.

Based on this, we changed our hypothesis and added useful resources for designers to the list.

2. Mindless activities

And here is an example of another of our projects.

One of the organizers had a problem. He listens to audiobooks a lot but does not know what to do with himself, without being distracted from the content. He cannot just sit on the couch. We wanted to create a website with a list of such mindless activities.

After conducting an interview, we realized that it is better to bury the idea. Yes, people can't just sit around listening to podcasts and audiobooks. But almost everyone listens to them on the way to work, or doing household chores. Do people need advice about this? Hardly...

3. How to find a good therapist in Moldova

One of our projects is the article “how to find a good psychologist in Moldova”

This is a sad project because according to the survey results, we learned that people have no idea what a psychotherapy session is, and they think that they should go to a psychologist only when the situation is catastrophic.

For this project, we interviewed not only target audiences but also influencers. Several active media psychologists were interviewed.

I agreed with one of the Moldovan media to post the article on their site. Many people have shared this article, which I consider a success. And I am more than sure that this is due to the fact that we have studied the problems of the audience.

4. Weducer Cups

The experience of the project on the sale of cups for coffee was very interesting for me.

First of all, we looked in Google's tools that, on average, about 700 people are looking for thermal cups in Moldova per month. If we get to the first position in the search results, then we can get about 300 visits per month. The average conversion for e-commerce in Moldova is somewhere between 0.5 - 1.5%. That is, we would have 3 customers a month. Not much :(

But we did not despair and decided that we would create a landing page and advertise it in social networks.

And so, at the interview stage, we found out a very important thing: Almost no one buys thermal cups for themselves. But almost everyone has them. Why? Because it's a gift!

We have modified the proposal based on this.

I want to overview the rest of our projects

5. A website that helps you choose the perfect set of organizer tools for yourself.

6. Site for men on personal care.

This was an interesting moment when the team was looking for a useful action for the hypothesis. This is not a clean face and well-groomed hair. This is the attention of the girls.

7. We collected useful Facebook groups for all occasions.

8. A website that helps children find an up-to-date profession in Moldova and where they can study.

The cool insight that I caught here: on this project I was a designer. On previous projects, I mentally blamed the rest of the team for the extra work, but here, I wasted a lot of time on extra beauty. Did the product become healthier from it? Hardly...

9. Chatbot that helps to learn more about waste sorting in Moldova.

10. Instagram page about 100 things that must be done in Moldova before dying.

11. Facebook page about our 30 projects.

12. Chatbot for the selection of games for gatherings.

13. Chatbot for wine selection in Moldovan shops.

14. Eco-Friendly Starter pack — a website with information for those who care about the environment, but don't know how to start being Eco Friendly.

15. Waste collection challenge for Moldovan IT companies.

16. A guide on how to buy American shares for citizens of Moldova.

17. Website - a collection of 50+ books for product managers.

18. A website with tests "which pet is right for you".

19. YouTube channel “How to adult in Moldova”.

20. Smart Home Ideas and Guides Website.

21-30. Personal websites.

And then we started cheating. There was not enough time. Therefore, I will honestly say that in order to finish off all 30 everyone made a website about themselves.

Key takeaways:

I want to share the main conclusions that I made for myself this month.

• First and foremost - benefit forward! We very often do unnecessary nonsense, satisfying only ourselves.
• If we doubt whether we need to do something, we return to the hypothesis and see if this solves our problem and whether it is suitable for our target audience.
• You need to learn to work asynchronously. Meetings are evil. Organizing multiple people is quite difficult. Most of the problems can be solved in the chat.
• Stop thinking as a developer: "first build a "spaceship", and then check if someone needs it".
• Validated learning is your goal.
• You know nothing until you test.
• If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
• You should try to make products according to the “progressive jpeg method” - “Do not polish and optimize individual parts, but outline the whole picture”.
• Only one-hundredth percent of the work matters. If you do 99% and don't release it, it's pointless work.
• You almost always need to target a narrow audience first. Solve one problem, but make people fall in love with your product.
• Try to find the real value of your product.

And the last thing

For us, the project participants, many webinars were held with product managers from different companies. The local community, in principle, followed our initiative. And they all told one common thing.

A successful project is 100 attempts and 1000 failures. And that's okay. But if you can withstand it, then you will definitely be successful.